Britain is a wonderful, welcoming country that has welcomed newcomers fleeing persecution or poverty for centuries. Our gradual endorsement of religious tolerance after the English Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment, our individualism, our early embrace of capitalism, our commitment to the rule of law, our leading role in the abolition of slavery, all helped shape a culture to this day. It remains more open to foreigners than its European neighbors.
It’s one reason why so many first- and second-generation immigrants love this country, why so many are so successful and contribute so much to politics, business, medicine, academia, sports and entertainment, and why Rishi is completely uncontroversial. Sunak is our first Hindu Prime Minister.
Voltaire, who visited Britain in the 1720s, was stunned. “Go to the London Stock Exchange… and you will see representatives of all nations assembled for the benefit of mankind,” he wrote. Letter Philosophies. “Here, Jews, Muslims and Christians act as if they are from the same religion and call only those who go bankrupt as infidels. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Anglican accepts the Quaker.”
Fast forward three centuries and we continue to integrate immigrants much better than the French or Germans; it’s a capability that has been dubbed Britain’s “superpower”. In Western Europe, children of immigrants perform worse than native-born children; Pisa tests show that children of immigrants in the UK are better at maths than children of natives, and children born abroad do almost as well.
Anglo-Chinese, Indian, black African, Pakistani and Bangladeshi children all achieve better grades at GCSE than their white British peers. Some of the best private schools in England are now dominated by ethnic minorities – and conversely, Muslim Bangladeshi children on free school meals outperform the average white British child at GCSEs.
White children are the least likely of any ethnic group to go to college. Analysis of the last four censuses reveals, on average, a decrease in the geographic segregation of minority communities.
Tragically, instead of adopting a policy of controlled, rational immigration to create a modern, united, multi-ethnic British nation, our ruling elites (first New Labor and then the Tories, supported by culture and business) have tragically adopted this policy They adopted the policy. He made such a serious mistake that the entire multicultural structure may now come crashing down. What could have been a model for others to follow was ruined by apathy.
The initial bogus claim was that we could handle net figures of hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year. On which planet? The staggering inability of the state to build infrastructure or to allow free enterprise to do so means that large-scale immigration imposes huge costs on the existing population (including earlier immigrants) through traffic congestion, rationed healthcare, and smaller, prohibitively expensive homes.
Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien analyze data in their brilliant way Taking Back ControlFrom the Center for Policy Studies. England’s population grew by 6.6 per cent between 2011 and 2021 (it would have grown by 2.7 per cent without immigration), but over this period its main road network grew by only 2.3 per cent, the rail network by 1 per cent and GP surgeries by 4 per cent. (At a time when the population is aging), the number of secondary schools increased by 4.9 percent, net machinery and equipment capital increased by 4 percent, and, maddeningly, our electricity generation capacity collapsed by 14.2 percent.
High immigration diluted our per capita capital stock: we became effectively impoverished. Housing grew 9.6 percent faster, but even that is not enough to cope with the massive pent-up demand resulting from years of under-construction and intense migration geography. Homeownership is collapsing, quality of life is deteriorating, and the institutional foundations of conservatism and capitalism are fatally weakened.
The second misconception was that large-volume immigration, as opposed to small-scale, targeted, high-skilled immigration, would accelerate productivity growth and save us from the baby crash. Although more foreign-born people now live in the UK than in the US, productivity has remained stable; The availability of labor may have discouraged automation.
Many immigrants contribute much more to government spending than they spend, but some do not, especially if they are not working or earning enough. Meaningful data are not available to perform a proper cost-benefit analysis of mass migration as a whole, or even for different nations. But we need to be much more discerning and only bring in immigrants whose skills and values are such that they will make a net contribution to the Exchequer throughout their lives.
The third mistake was to take advantage of mass immigration to camouflage other problems. More foreign students, many of whom are staying permanently, are subsidizing domestic fees. Foreign care workers allow authorities to significantly underpay staff. We don’t train enough doctors, healthcare professionals or others on this issue; It is easier to import ready-made workers. 5.5 million people receiving unemployment benefits were pushed into the memory hole. The success of immigrant children allows the oblivious to ignore the appalling educational performance of the white working class.
The government’s final mistake was to tolerate the awakening of critical race theory (CRT), an ideology that rejects color-blind integrationism and pits racial groups against each other, while ignoring the rise of Islamist extremism out of cowardice and stupidity.
Yes, Britain’s superpower is integration, but Islamism and CRT turned out to be its kryptonite. Authorities did nothing to protect a teacher being chased by extremists in Batley. They did not combat radical preachers and were of no use in encouraging moderate, reformist Muslim voices.
Poisonous anti-Semitism, which has largely disappeared from British life, is spreading again. The return of anti-Israel sectarian parties, including the Greens, was the final straw.
We need to seriously reduce immigration. We need to be much more careful about who we let in. We can no longer allow our rightful openness to immigration to be perverted and manipulated.