Immigration Will Not Dominate Future Elections
Who Will Find A Fix For AI Unemployment?
The Green Party is on the rise in the UK. In many constituencies it looks to be a straight fight between Green and Reform, as the traditional two-party system collapses.
Immigration is central to the argument. But immigration will not be the major issue come the next General Election, expected in 2029.
Neither will immigration be the big issue in the United States, when Trump is dethroned (if not earlier) in 2028.
Voter concerns were never truly about immigration, anyway. Aside from the core racist elements of society, we are actually living through what will be remembered as one of the most successful political misattributions in modern history.
Don’t Blame The Immigrants
The economic anxiety is real. People feel the pinch, their money isn’t going as far as it used to.
Wars and tariffs don’t help the situation, of course, but jobs are disappearing, too - and it’s not easy to walk into another one.
But politicians on the right have blamed these woes on immigration. And the message has stuck. This is yet another example of the left failing miserably to communicate the truth to the masses.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is offering employers cheaper, often more reliable solutions than employing humans. While wage stagnation continues for those in employment, as the cost of everything else continues to rise.
People feel like they are drowning. And they’re being told to blame immigrants, not the tech billionaires.
And many are.
In the United States, the 2024 election was fought substantially on immigration. In the United Kingdom, the 2024 election was fought largely on immigration, too. The parties that spoke most loudly about borders, control, and anxiety performed strongly.
This is not because voters are stupid. It is because the story being offered was coherent, emotionally resonant, and targeted a real wound - even if the diagnosis was wrong.
The politicians most aggressively offering immigration as the explanation for economic anxiety are, in many cases, the same politicians most closely allied with the architects of the displacement.
Elon Musk - whose companies have automated more jobs, disrupted more industries, and concentrated more economic power in fewer hands than almost any individual in history - spent significant resources supporting political movements, whose core message was that immigrants were the threat to working people’s livelihoods.
The single biggest issue for political leaders to address at the next elections, will be unemployment.
The jobs disappearing now are not the jobs the previous generation of automation stories prepared us for. We were told to worry about factory workers and lorry drivers.
The current wave is taking junior lawyers, insurance processors, financial analysts, radiographers, copywriters, customer service teams, and mid-level administrators.
It is taking jobs that required degrees, training and knowledge. It is taking jobs that people were told were safe, because they required human judgment.
The scale is significant and accelerating. A 2024 report from Goldman Sachs estimated that AI could automate tasks currently performed in 300 million full-time jobs globally.
McKinsey’s modelling suggests that between 400 million and 800 million workers globally may need to transition to new occupations by 2030.
Let’s look at the latest data around the world. The UK first - because it is possibly the most alarming.
Morgan Stanley research published in January 2026 found that UK companies reported net job losses of 8% over the past year due to AI — twice the global average and the highest rate among comparable economies.
A King’s College London study analysing millions of job postings and LinkedIn profiles from 2021 to 2025, found that firms whose workforces are highly exposed to AI reduced total employment by 4.5% on average, with junior positions falling by 5.8%.
Youth unemployment is particularly concerning. The most recent Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows the unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds at 15.8%, up from 14.6% the previous year, with 713,000 young people unemployed. That’s 70,000 more than the year before.
And we have barely started seeing the impact of AI on our lives.
Which makes predictions difficult. Nevertheless, the The Institute For Public Policy Research (IPPR) projects that up to 7.9 million jobs in the UK are at risk due to AI.
The National Foundation for Educational Research projects up to three million UK jobs could disappear by 2035 in declining occupations, including administrative, secretarial, customer service and machine operations.
Worryingly, 3.7 million UK workers already lack essential digital skills, says the Foundation, a figure projected to nearly double to seven million without serious intervention.
In the United States, in the first six months of 2025, 77,999 tech job losses were directly attributed to AI. Customer service employment declined by about 80,000 positions between 2022 and 2024.
Retail cashier roles face a 65% automation risk, with Walmart’s self-checkout expansion projected to replace up to 8,000 positions and Sam’s Club’s AI verification systems projected to eliminate 12,000 cashier roles.
You get the picture…
The US trucking industry is projected to lose 1.5 million professional driving jobs by 2030, with employment falling from 3.8 million in 2024 to approximately 2.3 million.
Manufacturing assembly line employment is projected to fall from 2.1 million in 2024 to one million by 2030.
AI guru, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, has stated that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.
In Europe and Central Asia, 39% of sectors dominated by women are highly exposed to AI, compared to 26% for men.
In emerging markets including China, India, and Brazil, about 47% of jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation - lower than the 60% figure for advanced economies but substantially higher than the 26% figure for low-income countries.
As for the robots taking over… South Korea has the highest robot density of any economy on earth - 1,000 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers.
The Green March Must Now Tackle AI
For green politics, the trend cannot be ignored. In fact, it has to be tackled head-on immediately. Recent encouraging successes will fizzle out in terms of importance, unless Zack Polanski and other green leaders can suggest a fix.
AI unemployment is the political issue the Greens are missing - and it will fall hardest on the communities currently voting Reform.
What makes the current moment even more dangerous is the curve. Previous waves of technological unemployment were gradual enough for labour markets to adapt. New jobs emerged in the spaces created by the old ones disappearing.
The current wave is operating on a different timescale. People are falling into the gap suddenly, without warning, in the middle of mortgages and school fees and the ordinary financial commitments of a life built on the assumption of continued employment.
For the Greens, geography matters too.
AI displacement is concentrated more in cities and their commuter zones, while the green jobs being created are focused in coastal areas, former industrial regions, and rural landscapes suitable for wind and solar infrastructure.
The Green movement has a window. The anxiety currently being expressed as anti-immigration sentiment will soon become clearer, and targeted at Artificial Intelligence.
Politicians on the right have been closely aligning themselves to the leaders of AI, and they may seek to pull back from that position.
The wealth tax, central to Green policy, will help to fund the transition to wherever we are heading.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure required for a functioning net-zero economy, with renewable energy generation, grid modernisation, retrofitting, ecological restoration - plus a move to sustainable agriculture - will all require human skills that AI cannot easily substitute.
To maintain the momentum, the Green Party needs to inject this into political conversation now.
Green policies are supported on this channel because they seek to address the climate and biodiversity emergencies we face.
We cannot ignore, however, the fact that many Green supporters understandably are strongly opposed to the acceleration of AI, because of the environmental damage caused, in particular the demand on water systems.
Sadly, the horse has bolted. You can explore this more here:
Who Will Win The Next Elections?
By 2028 in the United States, the primary electoral anxiety will not be immigration. It will be unemployment driven by AI displacement, and the absence of any political programme operating at the speed and scale required to address it.
By 2029 in the United Kingdom, the same dynamic will be advanced enough to reshape the electoral map.
The Musk-aligned politicians will face accountability. The voters who trusted them will know, by then, what was automated and by whom - and who told them to look the other way.
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