Apologies if this is slapdash but I wrote an epic and then lost it to an accidental click.

The majority of anti-immigration sentiment is racism leaking out through a loophole but that doesn't mean there aren't real issues.

I moved out of my parent's into a flat in toxteth. The area was poor and run down. My flat was shitty and damp. Over the road a derelict building was being renovated as flats and I wanted one. When it was finished it was immediately filled with Kosovars. The queue for the phonebox jumped from 0-2 minutes to 15-45 minutes. The wait to see a GP went up to 2 weeks.

Now I didn't hate these people, the impact on my life wasn't much and they were fleeing warzone ffs, but it was annoying.

It seems so.

That doesn't seem like an immigration problem, that seems like a more people in same area with resources not being scaled to match problem. People from Kosovo or Toxteth would have produced the same problem

In the case of the flats, if they had been open to locals then I might've been one of those locals. With the phone boxes, locals don't tend to spend quite so much time telling their family about how things are going with their new post code. With the doctor's waiting list, I think people coming from a wartorn country might have been putting off getting that ingrowing toenail seen to.

Like I said, I'm pro-immigration. I live in toxteth because I like cultural diversity. This is a minor event that I only mentioned this because it happened to me and it demonstrates how immigration can lead to a strain on public services and ill feeling towards immigrants. I never felt ill will toward immigrants btw.

Once when I was in the queue for the phone boxes, I heard two other people, most likely children of the wave of caribbean immigrants in the 50s, saying "I wish they'd go back to their own fucking country."

edit - It was a short term spike. It was all back to normal after a few months. But that doesn't make it any less annoying when you're puking, sweating and shivering and the nearest appointment is around the same time as you get better all by yourself.

I've been trying to say that poorly planned immigration leads to ill feeling which is capitalised on by the likes of UKIP.

100 new people moving into a postcode from anywhere might make an impact. I can compare when some 60s flats were demolished, and a housing estate was built where it stood, to the renovated old building filled with immigrants. The number of shouty, arsehole, kids increased 5x but there was no noticeable impact on the doctors or phone boxes. I imagine a lot of the families on the estate didn't change their doctor in the same week since their old one was still reachable.

Schools might've found it difficult with a bunch of kids that had not yet figured out the ways of toxteth but that's probably easier than teaching kids that can't speak english yet.

These are totally predictable and solvable problems. If immigration policy involved predicting and solving them then some of us probably wouldn't know how to pronounce Farage.

Arse?

The Tory solution seems to be cutting local authority budgets, because austerity is totally working guys, its not actually a load of ideological horseshit.

Kind of reflects those infographics in the election thread showing those least affected by immigration are the ones most against it.

https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/in-defence-of-diversity/

This should go here. Kenan malik is a fucking awesome writer.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-08/iranian-asylum-seekers-devastated-by-return-to-detention/6682210

Seriously fuck the Australian Government and "Opposition".

None of them having read it too.

The answer to 'what would be a better deal' is apparently 'a better deal'. Well fuck me, I'm surprised that no one else thought of that.

Never mind that this has pushed the timetable for them getting a bomb from 8 months to 8 years by their own maths.

Red flags ahoy in the second half of the article. Woah.

This is fun.

http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/what-happens-when-you-comment-on-daily-mail-articles-with-actual-nazi-propaganda--Zy4ccsnBEx

Towns all around the med are getting swamped by crowds of miserable humanity, it's terrible. Then they all get back on the cruise ship and fuck off, thankfully.

He was doing a bit about tourists.

I'd distribute people throughout the EU and look to start improving the lot of the countries in North Africa and the Middle East through various complicated long term projects.