[TheOtherHobbes]

It's actually around 750,000, mostly third world, and around half of those are students.

Importing cheap foreign labour from the third world was always one of the goals of Brexit. This game gets played over and over - import cheap labour to keep wages down, lament about how the country is being invaded, and then blame immigrants for lack of investment, corporate profiteering, and other structural policy problems.

[mikhailfranco]

No, Brexit was about returning such decisions from Brussels to Westminster.

The UK may decide less immigration, or skill-weighted immigration, or lots more indiscriminate immigration - but the vote should be in the Mother of Parliaments, where else?

[GasVeteran]

Whether it is part of the "goals of brexit" or not, is kinda irrelevant. The point is that we cannot build more homes easily, even if we could that has issues with other infrastructure and utilities. The easiest way is to at least maybe try to decrease demand and reducing immigration would be an obvious way to help with that.

[ben_w]

Given whose muscle actually builds the houses (before I left the UK, the meme was all the builders were Polish), and what happened to the exchange rate (initially; it's harder to separate the increasing number of influences the more time passes), the UK could have build a lot more homes more easily in the EU than it can now it's out of the EU.

[GasVeteran]

Again, the utilities cannot be scaled as easily. There are problems with building houses right now because there just isn't enough supply in some areas of the nation grid. That isn't something being in the EU would magically fix.

[ben_w]

It's not magic, it's qualified workers already familiar with the necessary standards because the standards were (somewhat) unified by the EU specifically so that labour had an easier time moving.

That does also make utilities easier, but it's not magic… well, you could say it is but only in the sense of Penn and Teller: lots of effort that most people don't ever think of that already happened before the audience started watching.

[GasVeteran]

It is amazing when it comes to any topic that is constantly thorny people will constantly twist your words. When I say "magically solve", I specifically mean that it wouldn't have solved the issue. The issue would still exist in some capacity.

There was problems with houses becoming to expensive (there are multitude of reasons for this) while we were still in the EU. Part of this was also do with the monetary policy of central banks after the 2008. Part of this is there is a shortage of housing. There was problems with utilities well before we left the EU, because of mismanagement.

This is all a deflection anyway from the point that high levels of immigration increase demand. Unless you don't believe in supply and demand, which is basic economics. BTW I don't believe that immigration is the only reason there is high demand, there are others. But it certainly doesn't help that we have record numbers of people entering the UK.

[ben_w]

> This is all a deflection anyway from the point that high levels of immigration increase demand. Unless you don't believe in supply and demand, which is basic economics.

*Supply* and demand.

Immigrants supply, they don't just demand.

Immigrants (everywhere, not just to the UK) have a slightly higher supply-to-demand ratio than locals, owing to many of them not starting at age 0; likewise emigration tends to means supply going down faster than demand.

Berlin wall was there to keep people in.