I'm not denying that the UK has problems with the lack of housing in large swathes of the country. While the population growth rate in the UK is the highest it's been since the 1960s, the housing problems are mostly down to a lack of housebuilding, which in turn is partly down to a succession of well-intentioned but poorly thought out policies designed to make buying a house easier (killing off local authority built housing), and partly down to NIMBYism. Aside from this it is partly down to the fact that most voters are house owners, and any policy that actually caused a housing price crash would be devastating. And that the UK housing market is kind of like a ponzi-scheme in which all homeowners are complicit - as you alluded to.
Also it's worth mentioning that a lot of jobs involved in house building in the UK employ... shock horror... immigrants from the EU.
Also, I'm not defending the official Remain campaign, and certainly not the Tory Eurosceptics that the media and government colluded to make the spokespeople of the campaign.
Finally, I'm not mass labelling people as bigots, and don't intend to either. I'm calling them misguided at best and deluded at worst, but the bigot grouping, while it does exist and possibly was enough to swing the vote, is only a relatively small proportion of the overall voter base.
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(I'm talking normal freedom of movement not Shengan agreement style).
You were talking about the EU abandoning free movement. For most of the EU, that free movement exists through the Schengen agreement.
Visas are already enforced to monitor non-EU migrants, increasing the border forces labour force can be offset by charging x amount for a visa to those seeking them.
And therein lies the problem.
If there was such a necessity they could pay the higher wage they need to attract those that they need to within their own country or from another country and give them sponsorship for a work permit or whatever that country's equivalent is. Really, if they can't find the correct worker outside of this then a) they are offering too little for that labour b) there is an issue with that country's population and as with above, by solving this issue by allowing free movement, the country with the lower population/smaller labour market is not prompted to deal with their issues at home because they can fill the gaps with migrant labour.
What would actually happen is that the company would move out of the country if it possibly could. After all, what you're proposing would not only make them less competitive but also in many cases take several years to fill what could be a relatively short term vacancy. And a lot of countries that invest heavily in training staff find that a lot of them, once trained, then up sticks and move off to another company, thus wasting all that investment.
If the company can't move out of the company, either it would go out of business or true free trade does not or cannot (there are plenty of industries where the very notion of free trade is nonsense - think free trade in babysitting services, or shelf-stacking services, for instance) exist. In which case it just means the company has to put its prices up, thus making living more expensive for those in the country in question. In term causing people to demand higher wages and so forth.
And perhaps sometimes filling the gaps is done because it's the better solution?
Yet again, if they are being brought up in a poor environment, it's something their own country need to address, having other countries take them in means the country itself does not have to make any changes, effectively getting away with allowing such an environment to exist in said nation.
I really don't get this argument. The country in question may be unable to do so. Or have a voter base who ensure that the right decision for the country isn't politically acceptable. Like the UK does (see above for one example)
you missed my point about agreements between countries to allow citizens holding xyz passport being allowed to stay in a country for x amount of days without the need for a visa to get over this very problem.
It's true, and this reduces the problem. But that's it. It reduces the problem. It doesn't get rid of it. They still need to go through loopholes
People do this already and do so without free movement. The UK's overseas student intake is mostly made up of Asian students who pay a lot of fees to come here, and get a world class education. Again all without the EU.
True, despite the governments attempts to reduce this in order to appease those who see migration as a bad thing.
Free trade has existed before free movement
Where? Where does real free trade exist without free movement of people? Emphasis on the "real" part. We're not talking about trade deals opening up carefully selected markets, and often with strings attached. Nor are we talking the empire style situation where the freedom only goes in one direction, and is entirely at the whim of one of the countries concerned.
If you have any genuine examples I would actually be interested to know so I can look into them.
And when a country's labour market is too saturated?
Then people will stop going there to work as the work won't be there for them to take. Obviously?
Then of course, if things get worse (due, for example, to a sudden contraction of the labour market) then there becomes a net outflow of workers.
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I get frustrated with this argument way too quickly. Partly because I end up trying to address so many things at once that I end up not properly getting across my point for any of them. As is the case here. And yes, I know that's in no small part my fault.
