UK Tories provoke immigration storm

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Cripes, from Bloomie:

If Prime Minister Theresa May gets her way on immigration, Victor Villar says he might just leave London.

The 31-year-old Mexican portfolio analytics consultant is among the many foreigners in the City who are reeling from the government’s proposal to force companies to reveal how many non-British workers they hire as a way to push them to put natives first.

…Home Secretary Amber Rudd this week proposed to punish banks and landlords who fail to make checks on foreigners doing business with them. It’s part of the government’s strategy to address public concerns about immigration that were laid bare by the U.K.’s vote to quit the European Union.

A YouGov poll on Wednesday of 5,875 adults found that 59 percent of people support those policies, showing that Rudd and May are in tune with voters. That is of little comfort to the swathes of foreign-born Londoners, many of whom have become naturalized British citizens. For some, there are parallels with pre-World War II Germany.

“I can’t help but flash on the 1930s and early 40s,” said Paula Levitan, an American lawyer at Bryan Cave who’s lived in London for 16 years and has acquired a British passport. “Are we going to have to wear badges on our arms?”

Australian pollies take note. Ignoring the losers of immigration policies threatens the very golden goose you champion. The backlash is global and it is out of Pandora’s Box. Australian needs a population plan to head this off now:

  • a return to historic levels of immigration (which is still high!);
  • comprehensive plans for addressing high immigration congestion areas;
  • a complete ban on foreign donations to political parties, and
  • proper policing of foreign buying in realty.
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There is no time to waste here. This is moving fast and the drivers are deepening:

  • no matter who wins the US election there will be more protectionism, though Trump will certainly be more immigration hawkish;
  • Brexit will accelerate in Q1;
  • there are almost certain to be more terror attacks in Europe and it faces huge political pressures to close its borders;
  • step one in Italexit threatens in December;
  • Fraxit threatens mid-2017 with National Front riding high in the polls;
  • even Angela Merkel is in trouble for the German election in later 2017;
  • Canada is moving to systematically bolster its defenses against Chinese capital flows that are triggering local alienation.

Get ahead of it, pollies. You can have a moderate and managed response now or an extreme and chaotic reaction later.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.