The UK's most up-to-date social housing and public sector news website
Rural communities 'struggling to cope with immigration'
Rural communities are struggling to cope with immigration, according to one of the Prince of Wales's official charities.
Education, housing, healthcare and policing have all come under increased pressure due to the "disproportionate impact" of immigration to rural areas.
They have witnessed a 186% rise in migrant workers since 2002.
Business in the Community (BitC), a charity of which the Prince is president, found that smaller communities lack the resources to cope with the rise in immigration.
The study, reported by The Daily Telegraph, said: "While migrants bring a number of benefits such as raising economic output and filling labour shortages and skill gaps, they also pose a number of
challenges - for example in relation to community cohesion and the provision of adequate housing and services.
"While many urban areas have a history punctuated by waves of immigration into the community, overseas migration into rural communities on the scale currently experienced is an unprecedented
phenomenon and one to which the local community is, in many cases, struggling to adapt."
The report was produced by the BitC migrant worker integration group, which includes Tesco, Asda, Marks & Spencer and HSBC. It was presented to Cohesion Minister Sadiq Khan.
Herefordshire, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire were highlighted as having particularly large concentrations of migrant workers.
BitC insisted that, despite the problems, migrant workers were good for Britain.
The charity issued a code of practice which it wants businesses to sign up to, pledging to improve working conditions for migrants.
Mr Khan said: "The Voluntary Code of Practice will ensure that employers are better informed when taking the responsibility to ensure migrant workers are smoothly integrated into local
communities.
"It is a framework that will help employers establish good work practice which can only be a good thing."
The charity added: "The labour shortages that migrants fill are socially constructed.
"As the rural working class has declined, UK workers have been reluctant to take on arduous, low-paid, insecure, and outdoor or "wet and cold" jobs, seeking alternative employment in towns or even
preferring to remain jobless."
The UK Border Agency spokesman said funding was being made available to deal with the pressures.
A spokesman said: "We know that migrants overall make a positive economic contribution.
"But they also use public services and we are helping local areas deal with the impact of migration.
"The Government has already provided significant extra resources to local authorities. And by regionalising we're bringing our staff closer to the communities that they serve.
"However we believe that with a relatively small amount of additional money we could alleviate some of the short term transitional pressures resulting from migration, which is why we have set up
the Migration Impact Fund.
"This fund will enable us to move quickly and responsively to alleviate some of the short-term transitional pressures.
"The fund is designed to assist local service providers in dealing with the short-term pressures of migration.
"All local service providers, including local authorities and the police, will be able to benefit from the fund."
COMMENTS
Ian Stewart
Commented 6 weeks ago
When agencies start with comments like "we know that migrants overall make a positive economic contribution..." then it's obvious they are going to be more involved in covering up the true situation than making any serious attempt to solve it. All they will in fact do is utter streams of politically correct platitudes, quote doctored statistics, ignore whatever they can't answer, and waste more millions of the taxpayers' money (which Brown will provide by borrowing, further increasing our already sky-high national debt).
We do NOT know anything of the kind. What we DO know is that AT BEST immigration (i.e. known, legal immigration) breaks even with regard to its economic effect; and that relies on us being able to believe this government's figures on the huge extra costs involved in administering and policing it, and the extra burden on health, education, transport, housing, loss of work opportunities for native Brits, lowering of wages, etc, etc.
To say nothing of the entirely negative effects of illegal immigration and bogus asylum seekers.
To say nothing either of the crime wave all types of immigration bring, whether it be terrorism, drugs, gang warfare, knife & gun crime, prostitution, street assaults, illegal cockle gatherers or drunken driving; the requirement to concrete over more & more of our once green land with living accommodation and all the additional infrastructure to cope with their teeming millions; and, most important of all, the threat to the cohesion of our once homogeneous country, by swamping the native population and destroying their culture and very identity through a form of ethnic cleansing.
And who is our 'Minister of Cohesion' (i.e. 'Minister of Forced Integration'? ) An Immigrant.
In such a situation, is it any wonder the BNP is garnering support like never before ?
JK
Commented 4 weeks ago
Mr Stewart
Thank you for your interesting, almost articulate, response to the article raising an important issue that needs positive, constructive debate.
It did surprise me to read that there is, indeed, such a thing as an 'illegal' cockle picker, and that there seems to be a moral equivalent regarding picking cockles and terrorism. And also, extremely shocked to read of the 'crime wave' that the 'teeming millions' bring with a view to 'destroy [our?] culture through...ethnic cleansing'. Wow! I'm pleased that you brought this to my attention. I wasn't aware of this, and am now in your debt as I can now identify the real problem 'we' are facing: Ignorance and racist, xenophobic, reactionary, bigoted, dangerous, spiteful, nasty, stupidity.
You seem to be hinting that immigrants are superfluous to the cultural and economic health of the UK. Well, the cockles you munch at the Margate, and the strawberries you eat at Wimbledon may well have been supplied with the hard, efficient and low paid work of people not born in the UK.
The ‘conflicts of interest’ between those who have an ‘entitled’ position (born in the UK) and those who are a perceived threat to this (the Other - immigrant) is something you need to be aware of as an obstructive, negative, dangerous and unsustainable position to hold. British born residents’ entitlements in this way are justified on a nationalism based on birthright, rather than residency. The exclusionist chauvinism demonstrated is a perspective I would urge you to reflect on and alter. Being born in a country does not give you a magical right to treat those not born in the same country as lesser human beings. They are not machines you can use to pick your cockles, clean your supermarkets, entertain you on the television, engage in important scientific research, help run your government, only to switch off and dispose of when you decide you've eaten enough cockles and you're bored of Saturday night TV now. You do not have the right to do this.
Immigration does not equal ethnic cleansing - this is a disgraceful and offensive use of something as terrifyingly real and destructive as ethnic cleansing. I was born in the UK, as was, I assume, yourself. I do not have the same ethnicity as you; I do not seem to hold the same notion of national identity as you. This, it seems, is problematic for you views. National identity is not based on a natural sense being born out of a historic notion of a static 'Britishness' (or Englishness - depending on you preference I suppose) but is a learned, fluid, imagined and renegotiated entity, an identification that is progressing along with cultural changes, and, yes, people not born in the UK have an input into this development, just as, sadly, you do.
I will not lower myself to get into a debate about ‘numbers’, but suffice to say, your notion of 'millions' is one that is, at best, misguided. I would like to have a proper debate with you on this issue. The rural economy do need people not born in the UK, this is a fact. If you lobbied the government to close the borders, millions (yes, this is a true reflection) of people in the UK will suffer, economically and culturally. This, apart from a philosophical and moral abhorrence, would result in pain, confusion and inward naval gazing, producing a cultural and economic vacuum in which you can revel in. Zygmunt Bauman, a notable resident of the UK (but, sshhh, from Poland), may have been thinking of the views of people such as yourself when he wrote:
“Superfluous people are in a no-win situation. If they attempt to fall in line with currently lauded ways of life, they are immediately accused of sinful arrogance, false pretences and the cheek of claiming unearned bonuses – if not of criminal intent. If they openly resent and refuse to honour those ways which may be savoured by the haves but are more like poison for themselves, the have-nots, this is promptly taken as proof of what ‘public opinion’ (more correctly, its elected or self-appointed spokespersons) ‘told you all along’ – that the superfluous are not just an alien body, but a cancerous growth gnawing at the healthy tissues of society and sworn enemies of ‘our way of life’ and ‘what we stand for’.’’
And a notable French man (probably more respected by you as he didn't attempt to 'invade' or 'swamp' the UK and cause a ‘terrorist threat’ and subsequent ‘crime wave’ with a dash of ‘prostitution’ for good measure…), Jean-Paul Sartre, in 1948, wrote:
“The anti-Semite can conceive only of a type of primitive ownership of land based on a veritable magical rapport, in which the thing possessed and its possessor are united by a bond of mystical participation…It transfigures the proprietor and endows him with a special and concrete sensibility.”
I can only hope that you reflect on the two quotations above, if not my humble words.
Thank you
Dan
Please Login to comment
To comment you must be logged in. You can either Login or Register