Another year, another betrayal of mass immigration.
The ONS has released its latest figures for legal migration, which are 672,000 in the year to June 2023. I can say that these numbers are shocking. But we shouldn’t be surprised. In fact, importing hundreds of thousands of immigrants and setting new records in the level of internal migration to the UK followed the same course for the Conservative Government.
Rishi Sunak has sought to shape himself as a different kind of politician, moving away from the chaos of the Truss and Johnson years. But when it comes to our borders, it’s a perfect candidate for continuity.
It was politically useful to give the impression that the government was taking net migration seriously: take the appointment (and dismissal) of Suella Braverman as Minister of the Interior, whom the left-wing press dubbed “Cruella” for her seemingly tough stances on border control. .
But Suella Braverman’s rhetoric turned out to be just that. By the numbers, he has proven to be the most pro-immigrant Home Secretary the country has ever had.
Boris Johnson, the hero who oversaw our departure from the European Union and our last directly elected prime minister, is to blame for a significant portion of today’s figure. After all, it was under his leadership that the government loosened many of the visa requirements that are responsible for our current surge.
The introduction of the social care visa, lowering the salary threshold for workers and the relaxation of student visas have all contributed to today’s number. Yes, the ‘take back control’ party has managed to triple immigration from its pre-Brexit peak.
Mass immigration fundamentally transformed Britain. In 1991 around 7 per cent of people living in Britain were born abroad. According to our latest census data for 2021, this rate increased to 16.8 percent.
This transformation was always pursued without the consent of the people, and in many cases was implemented in direct opposition to it. Since 1997, no government has been elected on anything other than a platform of controlling legal immigration. However, a few months after taking office, his manifesto promises would be rudely shelved.
New Labor, as we all know, had the first boom in legal immigration. But it was not until the election of David Cameron in 2010 that the rapid opening of Britain’s borders was adopted as a permanent feature of political office. The then Prime Minister promised to bring “net migration back to 1990s levels – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands.”
The opposite has been confirmed: While net migration averaged 247,000 over five years, the number of new arrivals exceeded 600,000 in 2014. The party repeated its “tens of thousands of promises” when it appeared before voters again in 2015 and 2017. In fact, average net migration would average 251,000. Perhaps Boris Johnson felt some embarrassment when he quietly scrapped the commitment to “tens of thousands” in his own manifesto, instead vaguely expressing a desire to reduce overall numbers.
Any politician serious about ending the endless cycle of border surrender will face an uphill battle: with the Treasury, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Health and Social Care, the Department for Education and, yes, the Home Office. This isn’t to say that mass immigration is making Britain rich – it isn’t – but rather that our short-term politicians have become addicted to it. This suggests that they prefer cheap labor over capital investment, lowering institutional standards over expensive (and electorally unpopular) reforms, and negligible GDP growth over per capita improvements.
What about culture? Suella Braverman was right when she said that multiculturalism had failed. It is simply impossible to integrate millions of people from radically different cultures, especially when our political, cultural and media class deride our culture as evil and mired in violent oppression. Global Britain is expected to continually erase its own history.
Integration has been proven to be a false God, an anathema to the liberal values that built our nation. The consequence of this failure is clear: we have seen weeks of hate marches in which some people who came to Britain openly supported terrorism; the institutional cover-up of Asian grooming rings across the UK; and numerous terrorist attacks. The legislation, aimed at calming tensions in the community, has emboldened police officers to arrest citizens for obscene tweets and inflated the diversity and inclusion bloc.
As continental Europe rides a wave of nationalist populism, emboldened by voters sick and tired of their traditional political classes shamelessly casting aside their democratic mandates, a question arises here: Will we have our own anti-immigration movement? Who will lead this? But can he destroy Britain’s bipartisan consensus once and for all?
Conservatives are the party of mass immigration. No matter what is promised in the next few days, it is vital that we remember this.
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