Coming over here, taking our jobs 2

Close to where I used to live in the UK lays the derelict remnants of a large village. One would be forgiven for thinking, on casual viewing, that this was an area hit by the Blitz that they just forgot to rebuild. Neither of the two local towns really wants to lay claim to it.

For the record, this was a village hit badly by the pit closures, of which there were several in very close proximity- a fact that it's occupants will never let themselves or anyone they speak to ever forget. Many have gone on public record to say how Thatcher destroyed their town, left them a future with no hope, no potential for ever working again, destined to a life surviving on state handouts.

What they never tell you, and what you would possibly therefore never know yourself without a local knowledge, is that this area has been the subject of some of the most prolific coalfield regeneration over the last twenty years-or-so that the county- possibly even the country- has ever seen. 

Huge businesses have sprung up in their droves, big brands being encouraged to relocate their warehousing or call centre operations thanks to incentivised rates and the area's proximity to major national motorways. House building has been rampant, to the point where a new village has been created in entirety. There is a nature reserve, a boating lake. Shops, restaurants, pubs, a hotel. All within a couple of miles at the most from the little inbred backwater at the centre of this story, some even within a few minutes walk.

So what they really mean, when the locals of this dystopian village cite their abandonment by the state to a life of destitution, is that they're too f*cking bone-idle to go and get a job. Far easier to blame one woman and events of thirty years ago as they stand in the Post Office queue waiting for their hand-outs than to actually get up and do a day's graft in one of the thousands of jobs that have been created literally on their doorstep. 

During my time in this area I had several friends of different origins- Romanian, Polish, Lithuanian, Bulgarian- many of whom worked for some of these local businesses, and worked hard- but never complained about it, and seemed to have a cheer about them commensurate with the person who goes out and does an honest days work for a days pay. A look rarely to be found on the faces of the locals. 
It's a stretch of the imagination to believe these people could travel from countries far-and-wide and discover jobs that somehow the locals didn't know existed right under their noses. 

Moving away slightly, I know of a fruit farm in Scotland that depends on migrant workers to pick their fruit. This isn't a company exploiting cheap foreign labour, this is a company paying handsomely for a fairly low-skilled job that even so can't employ a local workforce because they're either too lazy or too proud to do it. I'm quite sure this particular farm isn't an isolated example. 

So the often-cited "coming over here, taking our jobs", while evidently true to degrees, should perhaps be reworded to better reflect the reality of the situation:

"Coming over here, taking the jobs we're too lazy, proud or incompetent to do ourselves"