There is a very intriguing debate that has been happening in the UK for the last 10 years:
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/06/22/ed-miliband-and-britains-anti-immigrant-backlash/
such an article is only a trickle in a vast sea of similar coverage over the years. My interest is not really the content of the above article itself as it is the context played out in the comments therein.
As an American, I can easily read the narrative in the UK, as it shares the same core sentiment as that in the US: basically "THEY TOOK ER JERBS!!!"; that immigrants lower wages at the benefit of 'corporations' (here referred to as the 'neoliberal elite') and lower the standard of living at the expense of 'indigenous Britons'.
I give you these quotes from the above article. Such quotes of identical nature are found time and time again in the comments sections of similar articles. I find very curious the logic of some of the commenters:
Immigration has been used by globalist corporations to set UK pay and conditions back years. So if you want a casualised , part time, agency based , low paid, welfare dependent workforce, then keep on supporting the type of immigration favoured by the Corporates and its puppets in the Lib/Lab/con parties The left has been played like a cheap fiddle on this issue by globalist capitalists. It is time to take the blinkers off; the emperor of mass immigration really has no clothes.
and
I don't think that the neo-liberal race to the bottom that is so evident, was helped by the eastern European workers taking on jobs willingly, for much less pay than these jobs normally demanded. It's seems quite obvious that these immigrants are used by employers to force wages down.
High low-skilled immigration is a right-wing economists dream. ... Many of us on the left are impoverished by our inability to accept basic facts here; a) low skilled immigration DOES force wages down, that is a plain as day. b) massive peaks and troughs of immigration causes upheaval - can't pretend something like hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving has no impact because it does
Jonesy I have been in more dole offices than thee, last time very few English speakers there. Now you said about them not claiming? Same with Housing benefits. 7 generations of my family fought for this **** hole country and I am technically homeless whilst Wladislaw gets preference.
Such sentiments range in the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS on every single article on this in the UK for at least a decade.
In many ways it parallels the debate in the United States, as in the UK there is an uncanny relationship between the mainstream political power structure called 'neoliberal' (Labour/Conservative) and opposition groups such as the BNP and the Socialists.
Of the latter, there is an even more uncanny convergence of ideas on more than one front that the two would be loath to admit but hard pressed to deny, the core of which is statist economics: their desire for State intervention and protectionism to limit immigration, create 'fair wages' and preserve cultural homogenity, a fact that says much about the inherent absurdity of the contention that there are clear differences between 'right and left'. The cultural aims may be different between BNP protectionists and Socialists but the machinery they wish to enlist in their agenda is the same.
There seems to be continuum from one end, the BNP supporter/mainstream working class Briton to the other end (itself a mini continuum; the most extreme of which are BNP-leaning chauvinists and bigots who are obsessed with a perceived threat to their idea of what Britain should be ethnically) of the multicultural posturing of the Socialists (who seem mostly made up of upper class intellectuals who desparately try to make inroads with the Labour leaning working class). Yet both take aim at the statist 'neoliberalism' of Blair and the Tories and both desire more statism and socialism as the savior, while ironically railing against the welfare state they so desire when it is used by immigrants taking advantage of it. Such cognitive dissonance is remarkable.
What is the take here on this immigration debate as it pertains to the UK? I am aware in libertarian circles there is a sharp divide on those who find free immigration positive and those who consider it harmful if communities are unable to self-regulate the extent of the immigration, though I find that many on the former do not necessarily disagree with the latter's said proviso.
My take is, they have the means to live in UK? Let them live in the UK. It's not like they are not paying taxes like the british do, right?. To protect a group of people just because they were born in an arbitrary borderline is ridiculous. Nationalism is ridiculous.