The basic situation is there are real problems the liberal parties don’t have solutions for in either nation. The populist movement on the right criticizes those issues, and if they get enough support, they get elected. Then they find that governing is hard. They don’t solve the problems. They...
And the right often fails to implement extremely basic solutions such as shutting down immigration, which is objectively a single easy lever to pull: politics.stackexchange.com/questions/87870/…. Literally never been done in past 50 years despite all the bravado.
@preferred_anon it appears that it wasn’t a result of a deliberate anti immigrant policy but rather just a temporary lull due to external circumstances and high emigration of native French. Nobody came out in 1993 to say “that’s it, shut down all visas tomorrow”.
@JonathanReez - That's an action, granted, but it's not necessarily a solution to anything. Except, maybe, transmission of contagious diseases, but only if coupled with a nearly complete shutdown of incoming and outgoing travel.
@Obie2.0 its a very easy action and a very powerful one, especially if coupled with a ban on new permanent residencies and letting existing temporary residencies lapse. Any right wing party could've snapped their fingers and executed this on week 1 of their rule, especially in the UK where Parliament has absolute authority over every other branch of government. But nope, never been done. It would definitely solve the voters wish for less immigration. Heck, with the UK leaving the EU they could've even voided all the permanent residencies.
@JonathanReez - Aren't you some type of libertarian? Any party that implemented a shutdown on immigration would quickly learn that native-born citizens were quite capable of keeping up crime rates (in which immigrants are underrepresented in many countries anyway), but not capable of (immediately) filling all job vacancies. The results would not be positive except from the far-right perspective of sacrificing positive things in exchange for ethnic homogeneity.
@Obie2.0 I support the temporary immigration of workers in the style of Gulf nations - temporary contracts, no family allowed in. I also support granting citizenship to those who can master the local language at a C1 level and pass a "compatibility" test to prove that they're fully aligned with local values and are nice people.
@JonathanReez - It would be interesting to see how many native-born citizens would pass such a test, since most of them fail the existing citizenship tests based on knowledge. Do you really trust (insert your least favorite party here) to decide what national values should be?
@Obie2.0 every new immigrant should be better than the median citizen of the country, otherwise what's the point of granting them citizenship? If a test cannot be designed, the next best thing would be to not grant any permanent residencies or citizenships at all.
In any case I just find it extremely funny that nobody had the courage to just nix all immigration.
@JonathanReez From a conventional right-wing perspective, the point is to increase the labor supply in the country and allow for greater growth of industry.
From the conventional left-wing perspective, the idea is to compensate for inequities in the distribution of wealth between countries and provide refuge from humanitarian crises. Some libertarians and some more extreme left-wing people want open borders and support permanent residency and citizenship as an inadequate approximation to those goals.
I mean, it's not mere coincidence that very fewer governments have totally prevented immigration. Even the nastier far-right governments see the benefits of cheaper workers as long as they are "in their place."
It's really only the pure totalitarians who can't tolerate it, because total uniformity of thought requires any outside influences to be treated as a threat. E.g. immigration to North Korea is extremely restricted, nearly non-existent.
Discussion between Obie 2.0 and Jonat…