Quote ="JerryChicken"The "non-skilled" argument is misleading and is often confused with "poor grasp of the English language", they can't speak very good English so they must be thick.
I've written before about this but I'll give you two examples of my own experiences when working within two different client businesses...
1. Was in an agency when two people came to the reception desk, male and female partners, the male explained that they had literally got the bus straight from Hull to the agency to start the job that they had arranged via the phone from their home (I think they came from Poland), the male was offered a job in a factory as a picker, the female could speak very little English and was told she'd be working "in the fields" tomorrow. they both accepted these minimum wage jobs but the male then pointed out to the interviewer that his partner had a degree in engineering and was taking extra tuition to improve her English - a not uncommon experience according to the person in the agency that I was meeting with, she wasn't unskliied or thick, she just didn't have a working grasp of English - YET.
2. The next day I was at the client site where the woman had been offered the job "in the fields" and in the office that I was sat in was a young man in his late twenties speaking on the phone in an Eastern European language and making copious notes. The Lithuanian girl who I was training eventually explained that he was one of their veg prep guys, spent all day long picking out mis-shaped carrots from conveyor belts so that the supermarkets didn't reject them - they'd had an approach from a Russian business who wanted to deal with them and had asked around the workforce for anyone with good Russian skills, he stepped forward, was Polish but spoke excellent Russian as he'd studied it at University, later they found that he also had an engineering degree, he is now on their maintenance crew, he too wasn't thick or unskilled, just placed in a low skilled job by the agency.'"
A very close and dear friend of mine is Lithuanian. She came to this country 7 years ago with the intention of "working a few months and then going home with some money in my pocket". Her first job was picking strawberries and at the end of her first (72 hour) week, was given £55 for all her efforts. As the strawberry season wound down, she took a job order-picking in a warehouse, followed by any number of other mundane jobs. Somewhere along the way, she discovered an aptitude for writing code, now works for an IT solutions company, where she is considered their Java guru and is close to being awarded a BSc from the OU.
She now has absolutely no intention of returning to "her country" (she never calls it "home"icon_wink.gif, other than for a short break. From arriving here with no worthwhile qualifications, she is contributing to the economy and society in general but there are many who would have been happy to deny her entry and lose a valuable resource.
