4 ms·

It sounds perfectly reasonable. Barring exceptional circumstances, presumably the employer takes the decision to recruit externally for cost-cutting reasons; i

It sounds perfectly reasonable. Barring exceptional circumstances, presumably the employer takes the decision to recruit externally for cost-cutting reasons; it's important then that the hidden costs of healthcare etc are not passed on to the tax payer.

pjc50 5y ago
But both the employer and employee are tax payers! There's nothing uniquely expensive about taxpaying employees that happen to be born overseas. I'm guessing the prepaid contribution refers to the "NHS surcharge": https://www.freemovement.org.uk/what-is-the-immigration-health-surcharge/ https://www.freemovement.org.uk/what-is-the-immigration-heal... (while Americans are probably going "hey that looks cheap at £624 a year compared to my insurance", note that it's not insurance and you still have to pay it if you have private cover)
- harry8 5y ago
  Without commenting on the policy I think you're missing the maths. I can earn $x here or $(x - y) to be in the uk. In the UK I get healthcare on the NHS. I move. I quit / am fired / co goes (creatively?) broke. And I keep the healthcare on the NHS and have time to start a family before deportation etc. Think about large values of y or indeed kickbacks. Does the firm really want /me/? Or do they just want cash which they get by paying very low (or taking a fee from me) as I get an end run around the immigration system to get healthcare without making the contribution, queue jumping better qualified, harder working, more civic minded people with greater compassionate grounds for being accepted? As ever there's a continuum. "Clearly this person is legitimately... ...then the unexpected thing happened." ends up being harder and quite expensive to identify and enforce fairly and equitably with a public service doing so. I say nothing of the UK's policy here or its implementation as I'm ignorant. Assuming entrepreneurs won't spring up to arbitrage any system hole they can is naive. Immigration is super-emotive at the best of times especially arbitrarily unfair treatment and those who feel like they're losing from it (rightly or wrongly). That's the general case being made. Immigration policy is super hard and you kind of have to willfully fortify your compassion as well. More than 700 million people on this planet have no safe drinking water and would want to migrate to any wealthy country under almost any circumstance. Plenty are literally dying to do it. How can we not feel for them? Being compassionate reduces to deciding how many people your country can take easily, with effort, or the level in which society collapses. 700m immigrating in a year will probably achieve collapse. "What then must we do?" I haven't got a good answer or indeed a better one than fight corruption everywhere and anywhere under all circumstances.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > queue jumping There is no queue. I mean that: there is no requirement for cases to be processed in any kind of order, if at all, and nor is there a quota (except in the minds of Home Office managers). > I get an end run around the immigration system to get healthcare Hardly anyone does this, or at least there's no evidence of this. If you have money which you wish to trade for healthcare, there are usually better ways than bribing a firm to give you a fake job in the UK? > Plenty are literally dying to do it. See Afghanistan. It was, allegedly, important enough to invade and spend billions on, as well as a number of Westerner lives; however, it is also a policy preference that these people die rather than reach the UK, which puts a rather hard upper bound on what they should have expected from us. This is being played out in real time as the UK decides how many of the people who the Taliban will execute as our collaborators it should allow to be rescued. (asylum and the refugee system is technically separate from immigration in international law, but this is a distinction few people seem to care about. And this is also separate as nobody should realistically expect an Afghan translator for the British Army to find £650 to save their life) I wonder how many Afghans we could safely relocate to the Falklands?
    - harry8 5y ago
      > There is no queue. Any country that has a number of people who would like to immigrate of whom it will not accept all and will chose who to reject has a queue. How that queue is implemented, orderly, disorderly, corruptly, unjustly, ridiculously, incompetently or at various times all of the above. Some get in, some don't, it's a queue. It may not be a fantasy of an orderly queue where everyone is served in order in good time and without knowing about it, it does not surprise me to hear you say it is emphatically not that. Think of a priority queue if you must with priority being given by a random number generator tempered with both nonsense and corruption. You jump places in the queue by being designated higher priority. Have you jumped forward enough to be accepted and if not what can you do about it - this is the only question for those trying to get in. Who are you taking vs who are you rejecting? That's if you're already in. You can't take everyone. The world is a nasty place and this is one of the emotional sharp edge of it. You will reject people whose stories break your heart. You don't get a choice about that.
- antihero 5y ago
  I think the difference is that as a UK citizen, I have been paying into the social security and health system for my entire working life, as opposed to the brief time someone was here to work. Though it is kind of dumb.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    So you think 18 year olds shouldn't be allowed access to the NHS until they've worked for a year or paid a surcharge? (Obviously not, that's nonsense, but that's the conclusion that would follow from the false premise of predicating healthcare on length of payments. It's pensions that are dependent on payins of National Insurance.)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Wouldn't parents pay in for those 18 years?

pjc50 5y ago

But both the employer and employee are tax payers! There's nothing uniquely expensive about taxpaying employees that happen to be born overseas. I'm guessing the prepaid contribution refers to the "NHS surcharge": https://www.freemovement.org.uk/what-is-the-immigration-health-surcharge/ https://www.freemovement.org.uk/what-is-the-immigration-heal... (while Americans are probably going "hey that looks cheap at £624 a year compared to my insurance", note that it's not insurance and you still have to pay it if you have private cover)

harry8 5y ago
Without commenting on the policy I think you're missing the maths. I can earn $x here or $(x - y) to be in the uk. In the UK I get healthcare on the NHS. I move. I quit / am fired / co goes (creatively?) broke. And I keep the healthcare on the NHS and have time to start a family before deportation etc. Think about large values of y or indeed kickbacks. Does the firm really want /me/? Or do they just want cash which they get by paying very low (or taking a fee from me) as I get an end run around the immigration system to get healthcare without making the contribution, queue jumping better qualified, harder working, more civic minded people with greater compassionate grounds for being accepted? As ever there's a continuum. "Clearly this person is legitimately... ...then the unexpected thing happened." ends up being harder and quite expensive to identify and enforce fairly and equitably with a public service doing so. I say nothing of the UK's policy here or its implementation as I'm ignorant. Assuming entrepreneurs won't spring up to arbitrage any system hole they can is naive. Immigration is super-emotive at the best of times especially arbitrarily unfair treatment and those who feel like they're losing from it (rightly or wrongly). That's the general case being made. Immigration policy is super hard and you kind of have to willfully fortify your compassion as well. More than 700 million people on this planet have no safe drinking water and would want to migrate to any wealthy country under almost any circumstance. Plenty are literally dying to do it. How can we not feel for them? Being compassionate reduces to deciding how many people your country can take easily, with effort, or the level in which society collapses. 700m immigrating in a year will probably achieve collapse. "What then must we do?" I haven't got a good answer or indeed a better one than fight corruption everywhere and anywhere under all circumstances.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > queue jumping There is no queue. I mean that: there is no requirement for cases to be processed in any kind of order, if at all, and nor is there a quota (except in the minds of Home Office managers). > I get an end run around the immigration system to get healthcare Hardly anyone does this, or at least there's no evidence of this. If you have money which you wish to trade for healthcare, there are usually better ways than bribing a firm to give you a fake job in the UK? > Plenty are literally dying to do it. See Afghanistan. It was, allegedly, important enough to invade and spend billions on, as well as a number of Westerner lives; however, it is also a policy preference that these people die rather than reach the UK, which puts a rather hard upper bound on what they should have expected from us. This is being played out in real time as the UK decides how many of the people who the Taliban will execute as our collaborators it should allow to be rescued. (asylum and the refugee system is technically separate from immigration in international law, but this is a distinction few people seem to care about. And this is also separate as nobody should realistically expect an Afghan translator for the British Army to find £650 to save their life) I wonder how many Afghans we could safely relocate to the Falklands?
  - harry8 5y ago
    > There is no queue. Any country that has a number of people who would like to immigrate of whom it will not accept all and will chose who to reject has a queue. How that queue is implemented, orderly, disorderly, corruptly, unjustly, ridiculously, incompetently or at various times all of the above. Some get in, some don't, it's a queue. It may not be a fantasy of an orderly queue where everyone is served in order in good time and without knowing about it, it does not surprise me to hear you say it is emphatically not that. Think of a priority queue if you must with priority being given by a random number generator tempered with both nonsense and corruption. You jump places in the queue by being designated higher priority. Have you jumped forward enough to be accepted and if not what can you do about it - this is the only question for those trying to get in. Who are you taking vs who are you rejecting? That's if you're already in. You can't take everyone. The world is a nasty place and this is one of the emotional sharp edge of it. You will reject people whose stories break your heart. You don't get a choice about that.
antihero 5y ago
I think the difference is that as a UK citizen, I have been paying into the social security and health system for my entire working life, as opposed to the brief time someone was here to work. Though it is kind of dumb.
- pjc50 5y ago
  So you think 18 year olds shouldn't be allowed access to the NHS until they've worked for a year or paid a surcharge? (Obviously not, that's nonsense, but that's the conclusion that would follow from the false premise of predicating healthcare on length of payments. It's pensions that are dependent on payins of National Insurance.)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Wouldn't parents pay in for those 18 years?