Mass Migration / Immigration a 21st Century Capital Disease.

www.workers.org.uk/news/news_0114/poaching.html


Workers
Short-staffed? Try poaching



WORKERS, JAN 2014 ISSUE



The “free movement of labour” can throw up some bizarre examples of why this much-trumpeted EU policy is not only absurd, but also counterproductive. Take the NHS as an example. Because of the “austerity” measures being pursued by the government, thousands of nursing jobs have been culled.

It is no surprise, then, that winter, and the pressures upon the NHS that these cold months bring, has forced the government to accept that it has a severe shortage of staff!

Its remedy? Poach nurses from overseas. Entice staff from other countries (EU and beyond) to plug Britain’s shortages. Bring staff from countries that themselves are struggling with basic health needs. This government is turning the NHS clock back to the 1950s.

A more bizarre illustration of the free movement of labour is happening in Britain’s ambulance services. The London Ambulance Service, for example, was told to “save” £50 million over five years and shed some 900 posts. Posts that when taken out would have a crucial effect on the patient care given to Londoners.

It is now, finally, accepted that the London Ambulance Service is short of clinically trained staff. The remedy? Poach paramedics from the EU states, New Zealand and Australia. It is difficult to believe that those countries have a surplus of paramedics.

While paramedics are coming in, paramedics are also going out. There has been a major targeting of London paramedics by countries such as Abu Dhabi offering tax-free salaries in return for one- or two-year contracts. NHS-trained staff are using their clinical skills, not on British citizens, but elsewhere. Is that “free movement of labour” – or the import and export of paramedics as mere commodities?

Well-informed study of the effects of mass migration, 6 Jan 2014


This Will Podmore review is from: The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration (Hardcover)


David Goodhart is the director of the think tank DEMOS and the editor of Prospect. This book is about `why liberals should be less sceptical about the nation state and more sceptical about large-scale immigration'.

He sums up, "I have come to believe that public opinion is broadly right about the immigration story. Britain has had too much of it, too quickly, especially in recent years, and much of it, especially for the least well off, has not produced self-evident economic benefit." Since 1997, we have had more than 4 million immigrants. 1.5 million came from Eastern Europe between 2004 and 2008.

The Treasury sees immigration as `contributing to wage discipline on domestic workers'. As Goodhart points out, "Generally speaking, employers, big and small, and better-off people benefit from imported labour, which is often cheaper, relative to its quality, than the domestic equivalent. ... Immigrants themselves benefit, of course. But as a consequence of their arrival, low-skilled locals (often recent migrants themselves) face greater competition both in the labour market and in public services."

He observes, "poorer British citizens have paid some price in downward pressure on wages and greater competition for public services." Immigration has led to lower wages for the poorest 20 per cent. A 10 per cent rise in the proportion of immigrants working in semi-skilled and unskilled sectors like care homes, bars and shops led to a 5.2 per cent cut in overall pay there. He sums up, "all the main macro-economic studies show that, as a result of immigration, there has been no marked improvement in growth or incomes or employment for the vast majority of the resident population."

When the crisis started, the number of British-born workers fell by 800,000, while employment of those born outside Britain rose by 400,000. Non-British workers get most of the skilled jobs on large building sites. Industry insiders say that 70 per cent of the skilled workers on the Olympic sites were non-British: to qualify as a local worker, all you needed was a National Insurance number and a local address. There are fewer skilled British building workers than ten years ago.

People born outside Britain take a third of graduate jobs in London, reducing social mobility. British-born graduates get worse jobs when they have to compete with the world's best. The number of British postgraduate students has fallen to the smallest proportion of its own citizens of any comparable country, as foreign postgraduate numbers rose sharply, up 200 per cent since 1999.

Nor is migration good for the giving countries. More than 70 per cent of graduates from Guyana and Jamaica emigrate, as do 65 per cent from Morocco, 64 per cent from Tunisia, and 60 per cent from Gambia. The Philippines exports 85 per cent of its nurses. Malawi has lost more than half its nurses, leaving just 336 nurses for 12 million people: perinatal mortality there doubled from 1992 to 2000.

Goodhart observes, "allowing the best educated and most ambitious people from poor countries easy access to rich ones, whether as doctors or office cleaners, may seem generous but it makes it much harder for poor countries to catch up." On foreign care workers, he points out, "given that their own poorer countries probably have proportionately higher numbers of suffering and elderly people, one might ask why they have not stayed to look after them. Their absence from British care homes would not have led to their closure, rather governments and local authorities and private providers would have had to pay more and make the jobs more attractive to lure British citizens to work in them ..."

Goodhart notes `the anti-national ideology of the 1960s and 1970s', and argues that "Nations remain the building blocks of international co-operation and only they can bring democratic legitimacy to global governance." "it has been through the claims of national citizenship, and the mutual sacrifices and commitments that it sometimes entails, that the great democratic and welfare advances of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were made." As the French socialist Jean Jaurès put it, "The point is not to destroy patriotism but to enlarge it."

There has been a steep decline in Britain of racist attitudes, beliefs and behaviour. In 1987, 5 per cent said they were very prejudiced, 34 per cent a little prejudiced and 60 per cent said not at all. By 2001, the figures were 2 per cent, 23 per cent and 73 per cent.

But, as Goodhart points out, "Liberal commentators find it very hard to accept that hostility to large scale immigration is not necessarily the same thing as dislike of foreigners." Self-righteous ultra-leftists wage a bidding war to prove themselves the most `anti-racist', viciously smearing of everyone else as racist. As he notes, "Gordon Brown, it should be recalled, didn't say British jobs for white British workers."

Goodhart points out, "Thanks to immigrationism many people on the left abandon their normal suspicion of big business and embrace free market assumptions - echoed in the pro-mass-immigration Economist and Wall Street Journal - about internationally competitive labour markets ..."

He states, "It is the immigrant who has freely chosen to join an already existing society and must carry the burden of any adaptation that is necessary for a fruitful life." Goodhart opposes what he calls separatist multiculturalism: "First, it is `ethnicist': it privileges minority identities over common citizenship, if the two conflict, and insists that ethnic and religious belonging are the most important thing about a person's individual and political identity. Second, it wants to positively promote and fund ethnic difference ... Third, separatist multiculturalism regards a core national culture as either non-existent or illegitimate and regards society as a kind of federation of groups - a `community of communities', in the phrase of the Parekh report on multiculturalism of 2000 - and it therefore rejects the duty of integration."

Denmark, having accepted fairly high immigration in the 1980s and 1990s, has now reduced it. We too can and should reduce immigration, and focus on integrating those here by, for example, providing free English lessons for all who need them. Yet Tower Hamlets and Camden fund minority language lessons, even for people who cannot yet speak good English.

We should desegregate all schools, including faith schools. We should end subsidies for separation and explicitly promote mixed communities. No public housing estate should be more than 20 per cent minority, as in Stuttgart.

Romanian health system is in crisis as doctors leave for better working life

Thousands of doctors have left Romania in recent years, triggering a healthcare crisis that will worsen unless the government takes action to improve conditions for remaining doctors, says Vasile Astarastoae, head of the Romanian College of Physicians.



In an interview with the BMJ Astarastoae said that in 2013 the number of public hospital doctors fell to about 14 500, down from about 20 000 in 2011.



“Romanian doctors are deciding to leave and work abroad to be able to do their jobs as they learnt, to be respected, and to earn more money,” he said.

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Appointment of former OUMWA-DFA Usec. to WTO PrepCom on Trade Facilitation means harsher PH labor export policy – Migrante Int’l

Posted by admin on 2/07/14 




Malacanang file photo of Ambassador Esteban Conejos (R) getting Order of Lakandula award from President BS Aquino (L),
March 19, 2013. Photo courtesy of interaksyon.com


Global alliance of overseas Filipinos Migrante International criticized the appointment of former undersecretary of the Office of the Undersecretary for Migrant Workers’ Affairs (OUMWA) of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) Esteban Conejos, Jr. as Chairman of the WTO Preparatory Committee on Trade Facilitation.



Conejos was recently elected as chairman following consultations held by Amb. Sahid Bashir, chairman of the Dispute Settlement Body, and Amb. Mario Matus of Chile, former chairman of the WTO General Council. With the appointment, Conejos is now in charge of facilitating, coordinating and accelerating the implementation of the WTO’s much-opposed trade agreements.



For Migrante International, Conejos’ recent appointment as chair of the WTO PrepCom on Trade Facilitation spells the Philippines’ more persistent commitment to intensify its labor export policy, at the expense of the rights and welfare of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).



“Conejos’ exemplary slave-trading skill is undoubtedly the reason why he was appointed to the post. His track record in serving overseas Filipino workers during his term as OUMWA Usec. was marked by numerous complaints from OFWs in distress. In fact, it was the same track record that prevented him from winning the Deputy Director General post for the International Organization Migration (IOM) in 2010,” said Garry Martinez, Migrante International chairperson.



Martinez said that Conejos vied for the IOM position at the same time that Migrante International submitted its shadow report on the plight and conditions of Filipino migrant workers and the situation of Philippine migration to the United Nations. In the report, the group criticized Conejos’ leadership and the Philippine government’s onerous labor export program.



Despite this, Conejos was re-assigned by Pres. BS Aquino as undersecretary of the OUMWA when he took office in 2010. It was also Pres. Aquino who deployed Conejos to Geneva as Permanent Representative to the WTO. Pres. Aquino also conferred the Order of Lakandula to Conejos, the highest honors given by the government for officials in diplomatic positions.



He said that Conejos is “anti-migrant” and “rabidly pro-labor export”. “(These are) Characteristics that would make him perfect for the WTO post and detrimental to the already sorry plight of overseas Filipino workers all over the world. These are also the reasons why he continues to enjoy the confidence and full backing of Pres. BS Aquino.”



In December 2013, Migrante International joined other people’s organizations worldwide in protesting the agenda of the 9th WTO Ministerial Conference in Bali. “Precisely, one of the highlight programs we opposed then was the WTO’s negotiations for the Agreement on Trade Facilitation, the first multilateral trade agreement that was given a stamp pad since the WTO was established in 1995,” Martinez said.



He enumerated top five reasons why Filipino migrant workers are opposed to trade facilitation pacts within the WTO, namely, that the:



- WTO worsens forced migration of Filipino workers;



- WTO promotes the Philippines’ anti-migrant labor export policy;



- WTO tolerates human trafficking and coddles state-sponsored human trafficking;



- WTO “opens” labor markets but restricts migrants’ rights and mobility, and;



- There are alternatives to the WTO.



“Filipinos are being forced to migrate because of desperation. The economy’s lack of development resulting in job loss, low wages and lack of livelihood at home is the primary push factor. OFWs have borne witness to how insincere, insensitive and inept the WTO is in upholding and securing the protection and welfare of OFWs. Instead, it showcases a more blatant and unapologetic labor export policy that exploits OFWs’ cheap labor and foreign remittances.”



“And with Conejos’ recent appointment, OFWs now have more reason to call for the junking of the WTO,” said Martinez. ###