sorry, didnt mean to post that without my comment. my comment is this - how can you say that immigrants come over here and earn as much money as they can and not pay tax on it.
EU Citizens working in but not classed as resident in another EU country can opt to pay tax either in the country where the money is earned OR the country in which they are resident. In general that means neither as much of the money is earned through casual work of some form.
So if I sent you to Paris for a couple of months to clean windows for me you could opt to pay tax on what you earnt back here. But realistically, would you declare it once you got back........? Would anyone ever know? This is a loophole that is used a lot.
Workers working on the Olympic site all signed their contracts abroad. Some of them were working here for years but they quite legally didn't have to pay tax in this country. Did they declare it when they got home - I wonder
You say its wrong to attribute the woes of the cleaning industry to immigration (actually its migrant workers we are talking about) yet practically every house I go to that has a cleaner that cleaner is Eastern European. When do you ever see English people doing driveways or working in care homes. Even the dustmen round here are Eastern European. Where I take my van to be serviced all the mechanics are Lithuanians
Its only an extension of what happened here twenty years ago when builders and even window cleaners would come to London from South Wales or the North to work Mon-Fri then go home. Twenty five years ago my wife ended up in Hospital in Ibiza. The woman in the next bed came from Leeds, her husband was an electrician working on the new wing of our local hospital here in NW London.
Eastern Europeans work hard and they are good at what they do but simple economics means we cannot afford to live on what they can afford to live on. So they have the inside track. Simple really.
This part of North West london is the traditional epicentre of the Polish community in this country. The Polish war memorial is just down the road and we have Polski Shleps all over the place. There is a Polish free paper. I have worked in Poland (for a month) and I will be going to Poland later this year to visit some of the battlefields with a group I belong to that visits battlefields all over the world. I like them and admire them as a people, I am certainly not against them.
But its Darwinian, survival of the fittest and the simple fact is they are the fittest. Which brings me neatly back to the OP. They will beat us in the long run its inevetable.
They are not killing the trade, Its us! we are just failing to keep up. Thats the truth of it I can remember all the same sort of stuff in a different context when the Japanese cars and motorbikes started coming into the country. Why would anybody want to buy a Honda Civic when you can buy an Austin Allegro? Or a twin cylinder DOHC Honda 250 when you could buy a BSA C15? Jap crap they called it. Where is Austin and BSA now?