Mass immigration in the age of AI is suicide. Frankly, labour market needs could have been met with time-limited and criteria-specific work permits and employment passes (a la Singapore) from day one. But today – in an age where machines are taking over jobs from humans – it is madness to allow an open door. True, many of the jobs which will be less touched by artificial intelligence will be blue collar jobs, social care and even some unskilled work.
But from the accountants to the taxi drivers, the machines are coming. Yet rather than leaning in on Britain’s superstar universities like Oxford and Cambridge – to get ahead in this game – the UK seems intent on keeping its borders open to all comers. In this context, a new police unit to monitor social media for anti-migrant disorder could be particularly worrisome.
While the Home Office denies this will be used to track speech – and fyi, the law already kicks in when free speech becomes hate speech – how do we know this isn’t about Orwellian style surveillance? Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has already warned: “This is the beginning of the state controlling free speech. It is sinister, dangerous and must be fought.”
While racism and violence are never ever appropriate responses, why can’t the Government put two and two together, and appreciate putting illegal immigrants up in luxury accommodation is hardly going to win hearts and minds with the hard-pressed taxpayers who must fund this?
To be clear, the fault lies less with the migrants pursuing their own self-interest than with the feckless governments who purport to govern Britain and the wider Western world. Honestly, the old left-wing case against mass migration should be employed once again: it is primarily a tool for fat cats to employ desperate folks on the cheap cloaked in a veil of virtue.
If the risk of depressing wages was bad enough in the 2000s, it is off the Richter Scale today. Just as Pakistani immigrants found they migrated to Bradford and Luton just in time for the mills and hat factories to shut down, what happens when computers drive cars, man ALL the checkouts and make your chai latte?
Heck, machines have already taken over financial trading. What happens when they can do the accounts, look up laws, manage money and perhaps even diagnose cancer? It won’t be long before writing articles is performed by Chat GPT as well (gulp!). So, let’s get real! The UK cannot afford to roll out the red carpet to the world – let alone the unskilled world – in an age of AI.
Immigration needs to be super-selective and time limited. Passports should be given out on the strictest of criteria, not merely based on timeserving. Paying taxes is not enough reason to grant citizenship.
If mass immigration was madness over the last few decades, it is beyond madness today. The UK must prepare its young for this brave new world, not pile yet more pressure on them. That pressure will be high enough.