Net-Zero Migration: UK as a Case-Study

Anti-immigration protests in the UK have rocked news feeds these past 2 weeks and don't show signs of abating. Australia, Japan, and other countries are following suit. A few months ago the UK updated their policy paper, titled Restoring control over the immigration system. It's a beast of a white paper that dives into reasons why net migration flows hit record highs in recent years, the declining quality of that immigration, and proposals on how to address.

I think we'll see many copy-cat proposals pop up in the next few years. Essentially, countries will propose net zero migration, at the same time shifting budgets towards re-tooling and re-shaping the existing workforce in an effort to upskill. This will, theoretically, stop the bleeding / pressure on existing infrastructure and social programs while addressing the underlying labor shortage that causes companies to hire from overseas.

While I commend the effort/thought that went into this white paper, the glaring hole punching through net zero migration is simply that countries are out of time. Demographic shifts in pretty much every OECD country indicate labor shortages on the order of 100s of thousands, and some countries millions, within the next decade. Is it feasible to plug labor gaps while up-skilling half the population and re-vamping critical social services at the same time?

For a while it seemed like the answer was AI -- the optimistic take being a radical boost in productivity could help close the labor gap. But LLM hype shows signs of dissipating with a potential bubble pop + recession completely destroying the timeline laid out in this paper.

I'm very curious to see the incentives and controls the government will offer to SMBs to convince them to invest in homegrown talent.