Anthony Browne has a thoughtful piece in the Times (UK) on Britain is losing Britain.
A well-known commentator once told me: "It is almost a case of the empire strikes back." But it's not just the former empire, it is pretty much the entire Third World and Eastern Europe.And the punchline:
About a quarter of a million people are coming to Britain from the Third World each year: a city the size of Cambridge every six months, an unprecedented and sustained wave of immigration to one of the world's most densely crowded islands, utterly transforming the society in which we live against the wishes of the majority of the population, damaging quality of life and social cohesion, exacerbating the housing crisis and congestion, and with questionable economic benefits.
I know knee-jerk accusations of racism and xenophobia will be fired at me by those who make careers out of suppressing legitimate debate, but I am hardly anti-immigrant or anti-immigration. I am the son of an immigrant, living with an immigrant, from such a family of émigrés that I have virtually no relatives in this country. I have had three serious relationships with British Indians, to the extent of visiting relatives in India. Most immigrants - including my mother and partner - make a great contribution to society. Immigration, allowing people to better their lives where they see the best opportunity, is a great force for good in the world
The only political party of which I have been a member is Labour, and the danger of giving encouragement to the racist British National Party is a strong reason to stay silent. But what is happening now is so extreme and so damaging, and the determination of pro-immigrationists to suppress debate and smear critics so fearsome, that silence is no longer an option.
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But what is happening now is the result of sustained migration pressure the likes of which the world has never seen before. For the first time, the world has huge disparities of wealth, widespread knowledge in the poor world of how the rich world lives and how to get there through TV and global telecommunications, and cheap, quick worldwide transport. It is easier for them to get here, and far more difficult to make them leave: the revolution in "human rights" means that as soon as anyone gets past passport control they are pretty much guaranteed to stay. More than 47,000 illegal immigrants were detected in 2000, but just 6,000 were sent home.
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Economics is clearly the ultimate motivation, because it is from the poor world that all the record net immigration to the UK is coming. With the rest of the developed world, Britain has pretty much zero net immigration - almost as many people move from the rest of the developed world to Britain as vice versa each year. We should not delude ourselves: it is sustained, one-way, large-scale, economically-driven mass immigration, with no end in sight.
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The boom in immigration has been matched only by the determination of immigration celebrationists to brainwash the British public into thinking that it is all for their own good. But almost every reason given to support this immigration is bogus.
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It is certainly changing Britain. A Middle Eastern immigrant, who is now passionately British, told me: "This is not the country I came to in 1958. Britain is losing Britain in a fit of absent-mindedness. It is utter madness what is going on, and even many immigrants feel this." A Lebanese family friend who lives in Nigeria says she cannot believe that Britain is just letting itself go. A hard-Left friend says in frustration: "If we went to their country and did what they are doing here, it would be totally unacceptable."
But we are too polite to say anything about it, too worried about being called racist, just too embarrassed about being British or English or whatever it is, just wallowing too much in post-colonial white guilt.
If there are more people wanting to live in Britain than we can feasibly accept, then Britain has to tell people they cannot move here. We have to accept that people just do not have the right to live where they want in the world, and that the people of Britain have a right to decide who can move here.To paraphrase Pim Fortuyn: The Western World is full.
