If the supply of cheap workers is restricted and the cost of employing people rises, firms will have a greater incentive to boost spending on new labour-saving equipment.
This feels very much like that talk about the magical technology that will make border checks unnecessary. Yes, in the economist dream world labour saving devices just appear if there is investment but in reality certain types of fruit are very delicate and hard to pick automatically and any kind of development there would certainly not be limited to just the UK and hospitality also has many tasks that are hard to automate.
It’s obviously a “glass half full“, “make lemonade” kind of story. I admire their effort to put on a brave face, though.
My main worry is that when there’s these kind of labor market shocks, not all fields are affected equally. Some jobs are just really hard to automate, and prices shoot up eg in health care hurting people that are often already vulnerable. With the NHS, costs won’t be passed on the users directly, but it will lead to staff shortages and increased waiting.
Still I look forward to the UK working out the kinks of all these technologies, so we can deploy them widely and at much lower cost globally…,
UK is importing record numbers of health and social care professionals. No one’s automating nurses and carers.
General practitioners, maybe. AI can diagnose skin cancer faster and far more efficiently already, and with cancer, early diagnosis is key.
Border checks are unnecessary, we didn’t do them before, they’re just non tariff protectionist barriers
Magical technology? Robotic fruit pickers are in development, I doubt they’ll be widely used. It’s easier just to automate the routine stuff to increase productivity. Fruit picking is a high skill job
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Opinion polls showed strong support among leave voters for an end to free movement and for Westminster to decide who should be allowed to enter the country for work.
The latest data shows that the four countries that secured the most work visas were India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and the Philippines, with about half plugging gaps in the health and social care sector.
Britain’s gain, inevitably, comes at the expense of poorer countries losing some of their brightest and best workers, even if they send a chunk of the money they earn home through remittances.
Some “red wall” Conservative MPs have called for much tougher immigration controls, including raising the minimum salary required for a skilled overseas worker to £38,000.
At the same time, though, the annual fee migrants pay to use the NHS has been raised from £624 to £1,035, and Rishi Sunak is making clear his reluctance to relax immigration rules to secure a bilateral trade deal with India.
Data from Oxford University’s migration observatory shows migrants from India and sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to be employed in high-skilled jobs and command higher salaries than those from eastern Europe.
The original article contains 955 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
