Can you imagine if US citizens had to get a visa to move from New York to California?
The UK is a really popular immigration destination (perhaps due to it being a rich English-speaking economy and the legacy of its colonial empire).
Let's say the British public is willing to accept a fixed amount of immigrants. The UK can easily fill this up with high-skilled immigrants (Masters/PhD’s in technical fields). Wouldn't that be better than accepting blue-collar workers from Eastern Europe? Are you ‘bigoted’ because I think a PhD from India would be better for the economy than a blue-collar worker from E-Europe?
It is high-time that the UK start re-engaging with its own commonwealth. This includes closer trade and immigration.
It doesn't work exactly like that. The "value" of a worker depends on the demand for workers in said field. Accepting a million people with PhDs in particle physics doesn't add much to the economy when there are hardly any job openings (you get 999700 physicist working lower-skilled jobs or on the dole). I don't know exactly how the situation in Briatin is right now, but I'm guessing that part of the reason why blue collar workers from Easter-EU come to work Britain, is because there has been demand for them.
That is true. But then, make a uniform standard and measure everyone fairly (whether from European Union or India).
Look at Australia's highly-skilled visa (189). They have a "Skilled Occupations List" that consists of jobs that are in demand (including non-university technical occupations).
There is no reason why this can't be implemented in the UK.
Not "ideologically", but in terms of money. Now, I am Poland, I have contributed to the EU budget with 3.526 billion eur [0], we have free movement of people, but no, you don't like my people because they are not master/phd? This was not our agreement. If you don't like the fact that people are free to come there, we can discuss about it. Further, if people go there, it means that the country needs such people. So, what are you UK complaining about? I am sorry, but: http://imgur.com/u9oqSWm
If such people come and work there for a very low salary, then the country may try to regulate itself by privileging its own citizens first - and this you CAN do. You CAN regulate your own country, it's not true that you can't. You simply don't have to make it impossible for people to come and work there, because this goes against European values - and it's also fair.
The truth is that it's easy to close borders instead of trying to solve conflicts: it takes less effort, and "move on". But this is short term thinking.
[0] http://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/member-countries/poland/...
* Workers can (in theory) move around the EU depending on the demand for them in the different regions.
* Lower bureaucratic cost.
Muhahahaha. EU is the largest and by definition most inefficient bureaucracy in the history of the world
Source: living there for 30-ish years.
It is not. Have you followed the debate? I'm sure there are plenty of Leave supporters that aren't, but a huge proportion of them have also expressed outright racist views.
> The UK can easily fill this up with high-skilled immigrants (Masters/PhD’s in technical fields). Wouldn't that be better than accepting blue-collar workers from Eastern Europe?
Not when a lot of the jobs that needs filling are blue-collar jobs.
> It is high-time that the UK start re-engaging with its own commonwealth. This includes closer trade and immigration.
About half the UKs immigration are from commonwealth countries, and a substantial proportion of trade. EU membership did not prevent that.
And noteworthy in this respect: The UK is accepting a lot of lower skilled labour immigration from these countries because of demand. I don't think it is likely that the immigration will drop much with Brexit, for the reason that it could already have been drastically tightened without touching EU immigration if there was any kind of genuine desire in government to limit immigration further.
So by that chain of logic, couldn't we say that because a huge proportion of muslims are for the punishment of homosexuals that we can generalize them as homophobic?
It is not as simple as replacing blue-collar workers with white-collar and expecting things to turn out awesome. The demand for blue-collar workers will remain. People in Britian will in the future get less for their money (this will also make it a less attractive destination for foreign educated professionals)
It also puts downward price pressure on wages of blue-collar workers!
Immigration should depend on jobs that are in demand. If construction jobs are in demand, I am sure that there would be thousands of people (from non-EU countries) willing to satisfy the demand.
They're still foreign workers.
The downward pressure on wages is fine - the polish guy says I'll work for half that, the British guy says OK I'll work for a bit less than the polish guy. The polish guy says I'll go cheaper, the British guy says that's no longer best for me, I can earn more by doing X instead. More work done, and now there's 2 taxpayers instead of just one.
Presumably the British guy went to another job, didn't just turn up their nose and say 'I'm not working for that! I'm claiming benefits / going to crime instead'
Does a blue collar worker from India deserve less of an opportunity than a blue collar worker from Eastern Europe?
You may answer no to this (i.e., believe in completely open borders). But I think that the general public will not accept this.
I agree, we are a long ways from the public accepting open borders. I just think its important to point out - as a society we have rejected racism, but we are blind to the fact that exclusionary nationalism is it's strict moral equivalent.
I would challenge anyone who disagrees to come up w/ an explanation why racism is immoral, that does not also apply to birthplace.
Is that so? I'm not sure it's true. I have a master in a technical field and given enough money I would be of course be willing to move to the UK, but my salary expectactions have just been raised a lot. I don't like being a second-class citizen, I don't like being paid in a devaluated currency and I don't like depending on my employer renewing my visa. What if I was considering opening an startup in London? It's not going to happen. If I'm going to require a visa why the UK instead of USA, Australia or Dubai? It's not the end of world of course, the UK will do fine, and the same will happen with the rest of the EU but in my eyes it has been an absurd decision. An economic recession is going to have much more impact on employment that inmigrants taking away jobs.
What we need to avoid is that people end up living off social services, and it's very difficult to know who ends up having a job, who ends up climbing the ropes and making something big out of themselves, and who just ends up lying in the gutter on the street. You definitely cannot tell this solely by education or origin - you'll only know when it happens.
Why should they have this power? To use the above example, New York doesn't. California doesn't. That causes some problems re: housing supply, but we've decided that freedom of movement is more important than agitating some locals.
Every other country in the EEA has free movement of people as a condition. So we'll just have to have the same rules but not get a voice in making them. We've just cut off our nose to spite our face.
E.g. consider car manufacturers. Substantial interests in the EU would love to have tariffs on imports of cars from the UK, and the manufacturers here generally are here to serve the EU market more than the UK and have little reason to remain here if they can shift manufacturing capacity elsewhere.
A lot of UK exports are "on behalf" of companies headquartered elsewhere that have used the UK as a beachhead into the EU. If the UK is outside, suddenly the benefit is drastically reduced for them.
hmm I'm struggling with this argument. So you have a trade deficit now - if UK companies (who presumably now contribute mostly to exports, not imports) move away, the trace deficit becomes larger, not smaller. Of course at some point this is really bad news for UK economy if it happens on a large scale, but it doesn't "erode the trade deficit". Maybe I understood you wrong.
Car manufacturers. You mainly mean Ford UK I assume (that's the only one I know of with a high volume)? Yes, I can see it hurting them. What I don't see is how this would be in the interest of the EU. Germany would be very much against it. France and Italy I'm not sure. The others (mostly non manufacturing countries without high stakes in the game) would most likely not want to have high taxes on one of the favourite brands.
> A lot of UK exports are "on behalf" of companies headquartered elsewhere that have used the UK as a beachhead into the EU.
Yes, I could imagine that, say for pharmaceutical companies, just not so much for the car market.
You're right of course. I blame lack of sleep - I was thinking the balance was the other way. I'll blame lack of sleep.
> You mainly mean Ford UK I assume (that's the only one I know of with a high volume)?
I don't know about volume. But e.g. Nissan employs 6700 people in Sunderland. The purpose of the plant is mainly to serve the EU market. Any kind of tariff on imports from the UK would make it attractive for them to move it elsewhere.
> What I don't see is how this would be in the interest of the EU. Germany would be very much against it.
It would be in the interest of many EU countries to make it attractive for those companies to move their plants to a country that will remain in the EU.
> The others (mostly non manufacturing countries without high stakes in the game) would most likely not want to have high taxes on one of the favourite brands.
It takes very little to block an agreement with the UK they don't like. And it wouldn't take long to see the main relieved by making some of those companies move manufacturing to EU countries.
That's categorically different. The US is united under one national identity, so the ties between states are much stronger. Whereas the EU consists of many different countries and cultures, and each one has a long history of nationalism and rivalry with neighbors.
EU: A mix of countries that don't share the language or the culture. Legislative body is not voted (Comission: bureaucrats in the literal sense of the word). The little bit of directly-voted part, European Parliament, has only limited power and is out of sight of the voters. There's no oversight, most people don't even have a chance to know what's cooking until it's the law and is too late to do anything about it.
US-like federation of EU is not possibly for the lack of common language alone. Without it, there's no oversight. Without oversight, you get the current EU.
All of which took about two hundred years to achieve. The starting point was a mix of languages, to the point it was not clear that English would become so dominant as it has become (and it's not clear it will remain so) and the majority of the adult population could not vote at all.
The EU is at the point of trying to "work around" the type of problems the US had under the Articles of Confederation. A lot of the cumbersome messy structure of the EU basically comes down to not wanting to make those mistakes (leading e.g. Congress to vote for measures only for states to just ignore them and refuse to fund stuff they were against, with Congress having no means of enforcing decisions). It took a lot of time and problems before the US went fully federal.
> US-like federation of EU is not possibly for the lack of common language alone.
By that argument, the existence of the US is an impossibility. The US did not have a common language when it was first created. There are still millions of Americans that speak little English, though the proportion is much greater now tha it used to be.
The EU being anti-democratic sounds like a case of "citation needed" for me. What major problems remain after the 2009 changes?
That said, I don't like it too. No real transparency or accountability is always bad. And I'm not saying the EU is perfect - far from it! - I'm just saying that where it's not perfect it is because it is a big compromise between people wanting a federation and people wanting to keep their power and an economic union.
How is that undemocratic?
How is that democratic?
The member states themselves (which sorry, democratically speaking means their citizens) want to keep the council more powerful than the parliament. Fixing the power disparity has always been hard, since the member state don't really want to give away their power to the EU.
Anyway, a "no" vote from the EP means a great deal, your information seems outdated to me. The EC can approve a law proposed by the commission alone only in a restricted subset of topics. Everything else is dealt with with the parliament and the council being on equal footing and acting as a bicameral democracy with equal chambers would when approving a law.
The alternative of the current system is to reduce the power the member states hold in the EU creating a real federation or US of Europe. Which for sure will not happen in the short term, and if the EU does not react correctly (and strongly) to this vote, probably never will.
How is that democratic?
As for the EP. 1. It is composed of amateur politicians. 2. They are effectively powerless. 3. They can easily be bought.
Until today that was likely to be London.
In general, I think that society is slowly moving towards less borders and more global cooperation. I would be surprised if in a thousand years there are still 200 individual countries and governments. This step seems like a wrinkle in that trend.
Right now the European economic powerhouses are strong enough to thouroughly destroy the continent (winners and loosers alike) and probably a good deal of the worldwide economy.
Whatever happens that fear must not become a reality.
Nobody knows the future status of the uk.
If we get good deals expect the markets to recover in a couple of years.
There are around 200 countries on Earth. Sorry, 200 countries and the UK, which is special, by natural right. So let's say that those 201 countries have to make an agreement to sell cars: that's something like 40200 agreements. And each country has to negotiate 200 agreements. To sell cars.
Have fun with that.
Probably. But the leavers don't want "basically similar terms". They want the trade benefits without "paying" with things like freedom of movement. The EU will never allow that, as if they let the UK pick and choose the part they like best, other countries will want special treatment too.
The best the UK can hope for in order to get the same access to the EU market as before, is something like the EEA, which means accepting all the things the leave campaigners have wanted to get rid of, and get no say whatsoever, similar to Norway.
In which case the UKs democratic deficit will have just widened even further.
Says who?
- We are going to be isolated - Our economy will crash - We will struggle to find high educated people - We will just disappear
Now, after almost 25 years we can't say we did the wrong thing, but hey, UK is not Switzerland, it's a totally different economy which different proportions.
I don't think this has to be considered totally bad, it's a sign something HAS to change, but now the brits have to work to make this happen in the very best way, it's an opportunity and a clear demonstration that the actual structure of the EU can't work on this way, this seems to be pretty clear.
Only time will say if the decision was good or not, but which side is going to end this decision is up to the britains, they have to work hard and do it now to make this be a good thing, rather the beginning of the end, starting with keeping Scotland in the UK.
---- begin quote ----
Economist here. This is what a recent poll of economists on this issue looks like [2], we have a pretty good idea of some of the things that come next and they are not good.
There are four major areas of concern;
• London is the financial center of the EU because the UK is both in the EU and is relatively friendly to financial services. Absent the UK having a regulatory treaty with the EU (which they can't without being part of the EU) financial services will be forced to move to the mainland. Even prior the vote there was work underway on this, the first movements will begin to occur in a couple of weeks. Several other sectors are similarly at risk.
• When the UK leaves it has no trade treaties with any other country in the world. This means all British goods will incur new or higher tariffs in all trading partner countries, British goods become more expensive when compared to comparable goods produced elsewhere. There is not a magic button here, it typically takes decades to either create new treaties or join an existing one.
• If the UK decides it wants access to the single market it also needs to adopt single market rules, effectively accepting all EU regulation but without having any voice in that regulation. That's assuming France & Germany don't just block UK access to the single market out of spite.
• The UK no longer has visa free access to EU states and the same is true of the EU to the UK. There are enormous numbers of British ex-pats who live on the continent and enormous numbers of non-UK EU citizens who live in the UK. Even if the UK & EU manage to push through a very hasty set of reforms allowing those who have lived there for n years to remain we are still talking about pretty significant labor displacement & disruption.
When every major central bank in the world have brought in extra staff and have prepared their emergency liquidity facilities you are going to have a bad day. I expect the pound to hit dollar equality tomorrow, its going to be the ERM disaster on steroids.
---- end quote ----
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4pkt3k/bbc_forec...
[2] http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-re...
The EU is arguably more democratic than the UK, and certainly it's very hard to show it's less so.
https://medium.com/im-trying-to-fact-check-brexit/fact-check...
This is in contrast to the EU, where 'legislative initiative', IMO the most important power, is held by the unelected body - the commission / executive branch.
The Parliament and even the people of Europe (via a petition) can ask the Commission to propose legislation, and in the case of the Parliament, it's widely considered that the Commission is compelled to do so.
See http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/bibliotheque/briefing/...
The Commission has only once ever in the history of the EU refused to produce legislative proposals after the Parliament asked them to do so, and the reason there was that existing laws already covered the case. So effectively the European Parliament has legislative initiative - it's just that the Commission is the group that drafts the detailed proposals, which are then debated and amended by the Parliament.
As far as I can tell, the Commission takes the role of the Civil Service in the UK parliament to a large extent.
(Also, I don't believe I argued in the article that the House Of Lords was the only part of the UK government. Obviously it is not.)
That's hardly the same thing as having the power to propose legislation on your own. All they are compelled to do is justify their refusal. Whether or not they have ever refused to do it in the past is also independent of who holds the actual power.
> (Also, I don't believe I argued in the article that the House Of Lords was the only part of the UK government. Obviously it is not.)
I didn't mean to imply that you did. My point is that the two roles seem to be reversed here, and that that is important. The EU parliament (democratic) holds roughly the power as the House of Lords (undemocratic), whereas the House of Commons (democratic) holds power equivalent to the European Commission (undemocratic). And that this makes the EU less of a democracy than the UK.
edit: Also I now have to buy my shit from France/Germany Amazon? (Or just have an English language Amazon for the continental Europe please...)
Maybe years down the road there will be some more bickering and trade wars. But I think immediately everyone will look for stability, at least within the economic realm.
Second the world exists out of more goods than champagne, cheese and cars... . I see you make a big deal about German cars but in the whole scheme of things that is really small. And I dare to ask if a lot of British people will be still able to buy those cars to begin with, as I see how the pound is falling fast.
And third you are dealing with the EU that exists out more countries than Germany and France. Yes, because of their size they have a big position but please let stop that intellectual dishonest narrative that all other countries are living under some-kind of French-German dictatorship where they don't have any saying.
In order to not get job losses, both have to cooperate
Occasionally you see someone sitting around reading the newspaper and drinking coffee, ready to jump into action should something go wrong. The times where the industry consisted of huge factories filled with blue collar workers assembling cars by hand is long over.
The industry has two years to focus on other markets to export to. There might be some impact but it won't be catastrophic or lead to massive job loss.
The UK is too big a trading partner of those countries for them to truly threaten any substantial denial of trade.
FWIW, there is a host of things where nothing will change, as most treaties don't get invalidated and the UK is still a member of the council of europe, EEA, EU customs union etc
I assumed this was on purpose so it could be acted upon as "become norway" rather than "become ukraine".
Trade deals cover "capital" and "goods", but usually not "people". So concretely speaking, labor costs will rise in the UK (due to a reduction of cheap workers immigrating from other EU countries to the UK) and the country will start experiencing a deficit of highly skilled workers¹ (due to educated workers not able to immigrate).
¹ Of all places, the HN community should be familiar with this issue, because it is often discussed in the context of the US ("startup visa", etc).
And Switzerland even has a deal with the EU that allows the exact same movement of people as if they were a member.
When politicians hear people say 'not democratic enough!', they think you mean 'more power to the EU parliament' (elected directly) and less to the European Commission (one member per member state, chosen by your own elected government), but that's not what they want, is it? What they really mean is they want it to be less democratic, because democracy makes it look like a state. So when people call it anti-democratic, what they really mean is they want to do away with the democratic elements altogether.
The EU made it possible to drive from the Baltic to the Algarve without having to ask permission, without armed border guards searching your luggage... seven times! It made flying from Belgium to Italy as easy and pain free as flying from Atlanta to Pensacola.
Why people reject the freedom to travel is beyond me. I loved every minute of it, while it lasted...
It's not just open borders or free trade. It's about removing barriers and red tape hindering free travel and trade. It's about making sure that the car you bought in Estonia isn't stopped at he border in Spain because of different safety regulations, ending your trip to the Algarve in tears. It's about not getting in trouble because the food you bought in France on the way back doesn't meet the regulations in Austria.
I'm old enough to remember the difference. You, I assume, are not. The EU has brought a massive amount of freedom. Actual freedom and freedom from red tape, but all people want to talk about is burocracy. This burocracy is working to straighten out the differences between countries that caused tons and tons red tape in the past. That's a lot of work, there were a lot of differences.
People keep talking about a waste of money. The total budget of the EU was 143 billion euro in 2014, roughly comparable to the government budget of Finland (5 million people). To put that in perspective, the total federal budget of the US is something in the order of 4 trillion. It's really a budget price for something of such a massive scope.
To the people trying to take this away: thanks a lot. Why they hate freedom, I'll never understand.
The 'undemocratic' element, I suppose, is that the elected parliament of the EU appears to me to be its weakest component. The commission and the council seem notably more powerful and are both unelected (except quite indirectly).
Now, I don't disagree with you that free travel, trade and relocation are good things. What I don't quite understand is why it was ever necessary to have a European Union in order to achieve that. It seems to me that this could have and should have been achieved without such a heavy-handed institution.
In what way has the EU influenced your every day life, other than the freedom to travel? Where is this European oppression people are suffering under? Is the EU police beating people up? European army soldiers marching down the street?
The only answer people can come up with, if you really press them, is that they don't like all these foreigners. It's a vicious cycle. Headlines about foreigners doing bad things sell papers, so every bad thing foreigners are involved in makes it to the headlines. And with so many of thousands of Poles and Romanians in the country, there will be a drunk driver, a brawl, an accident, an incident every day.
People and media whipping each other up in a frenzy.
I'd refer to it as heavy handed because of the regulatory burdens it imposes upon its member countries. It represents a super-government enacting laws and regulations that impact every citizen of the member country's with only an indirect accountability to the electorate.
Here is an instance of the EU going after Google:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/25/11490452/why-eu-antitrust-...
Whatever you think of this particular action, this is a broad power, imposed on behalf of all the members states. Similarly with the 'right to be forgotten' law. The power to implement these kinds of things is, in my view, 'heavy-handed' and overbroad if your goal is simply to facilitate free movement of people and goods. Why is the EU telling Google it has to forget people?
The reason, in my view, is that power naturally moves up the stack when there is another place for it to move up to. So, because the EU sits on top of its member nations, it will gradually acquire more and more power over time. This is not inherently good or bad, of course. It's just the way the world works. But it can be bad if that organization is insufficiently transparent and democratic, and it also can be bad if there is an economic heterogeneity to the composing countries.
This is particularly evident with the Euro (which I realize the UK does not use), but it can be true with other economic policies. But in the case of the Euro, you have countries like Greece that vastly overspent and totally screwed themselves with debt because of the cheap credit the Euro allowed them. Ordinarily in a situation like that, the offending country would simply print more of its own money, causing inflation and pain for its population - which would then shift the political discourse of that country toward fixing the inflation - achievable primarily through genuine economic reforms. But in Greece this didn't happen and doesn't seem likely to, and this is, in my view, because they don't control the currency. They can't inflate away their debts, so they are stuck, and the people of Greece blame the EU and the EU blames the people of Greece. But the truth is that they're both right - the structure of the EU prevents Greece from fixing the problem itself - but of course Greece is responsible for creating it in the first place.
Now, I realize the above is not the same as the UK and that the UK does not use the Euro. That is just a convenient example of what kinds of problems are entailed by having a sort of shadow economic government over and above the regular one. That there is a sort of impedance mismatch that precludes natural economic realignment because power is split up in an awkward and nonsensical way that promotes the interests of the larger body over the interests of its member entities, but does so in an incomplete, indirect way.
I guess what I am saying is that if you want a unified Europe you should have an actually unified Europe under a single government. But having this pseudo-government in charge of economic things and some other stuff, but then not other things will end up creating these barriers to natural economic fluctuations that will ultimately harm the entire continent.
You seem to think that the EU is made of sensible people. It's not. Indeed, Brussels is at the very root of the problem. The terms they'll offer will be humiliating.
I can assure you, that they'll be nothing that a UK gov can sign and we'll be displayed in a very, very public manner to make the Britons feel humiliated.
I mean, don't me wrong, removing trade barriers is probably good. But won't the UK just be able to pretty quickly renegotiate basically similar terms again anyway? Are their trading partners really going to stop trading with them or substantially alter their tariff schedules as a result of this?