The government should offer generous tax breaks to encourage prospective immigrants to move to Scotland, according to a Scottish National Party (SNP) report declaring mass migration-driven population growth a “top priority” for the country.
Published on Friday by the Sustainable Growth Commission, set up by the SNP government to assess the economics of independence, the report proposed a ‘Come to Scotland’ package of measures to increase immigration.
Designed to offset what it called the “UK Tory government’s hostile approach to migration”, the report recommends reducing the income tax paid by foreign workers and aiming to retain an additional 5,000 international students a year, including financial incentives to persuade them to stay in Scotland.
Other measures include massively lowering the financial bars to entry for so-called “entrepreneur” migrants and reducing the £10 million investment currently required by the United Kingdom for a permanent investor visa to just £75,000.
Commission chair Andrew Wilson said: “We have a great opportunity for Scotland to strike a completely different tone on a vitally important area of economic policy – how we attract talent to our country.
“Growing our working population and, through it, our economy, is perhaps the greatest national challenge we have – and is made even more urgent by Brexit and the threat it poses to our working age population.
“Scotland needs more migration to drive our economy forwards and we need to extend a friendly welcome to international talent,” claimed the former SNP MSP.
Fervently pro-open borders Scottish daily The National — dubbed ‘McPravda’ for its unwavering support for and ties to the SNP — lamented Saturday that Wilson had been “targeted by xenophobes” over the report.
“This morning, when I was tweeting, I had to block a few people. I’ve been getting quite a lot of abuse and it has been entirely around the area of immigration – sheer xenophobia,” he told the newspaper.
While the commission claims in its report that the proposals to open Scotland’s borders would boost living standards in the nation to a level “equal[ing] the best small countries in the world”, experts warn quality of life often suffers following mass migration-driven boosts to overall GDP.
Likening it to “Ponzi scheme”, former UN Population Division director Dr. Joseph Chamie has said that the strategy boosts corporate profits at the expense of the environment and citizens’ quality of life, as the profits from increased population size are privatised while the mounting costs of crime, healthcare, and schooling are socialised.
Writing in The Globalist, the demographer said: ‘Economic growth requires population growth’ is the basic message that Ponzi demography wants the public to swallow. No mention is made of the additional profits they reap and the extra costs the public bears.”
There does not appear to be any evidence that the Scottish public back the SNP’s pro-mass migration stance, with a poll in 2017 actually finding that support for cutting low-skill non-EU migration is actually slightly stronger in Scotland, 69 per cent, than in England, where it is 67 per cent.
Another poll found that just 24 per cent of Scots want a more liberal immigration regime than the rest of Britain, and almost two-thirds want to maintain uniform rules UK-wide after Brexit.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.