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The great deception Immigration
25 times higher than ever before
ANDREW GREEN
UK
Daily Mail
Saturday April 21, 2007
For many years now, the Government and the liberal Left's case
for mass immigration has rested partly on their repeated assertion
that Britain is a melting pot of different cultures - or as they
describe it, "a nation of immigrants".
Our history, we have been told, is punctuated by regular waves
of substantial numbers of immigrants to our shores; from the Romans
to the Normans, from the Huguenots of the 16th and 17th centuries
to the Jews of the 19th and 20th, in-comers have settled here over
the centuries and have influenced the racial and cultural make-up
of this country for the better.
The slogan was first promoted in Britain in 2001 by the then immigration
minister Barbara Roche, who pronounced that "the UK is a nation
of immigrants".
This absurd claim will finally bite the dust with the publication
today of an important new book - A Nation Of Immigrants? by Professor
David Conway, senior research fellow for the political think-tank
Civitas.
Of course we have immigrants in Britain, nowadays in substantial
numbers: yesterday, official figures from the Office of National
Statistics revealed how immigration has swollen Britain's population
by nearly 1.5 million just in the decade since 1995.
And, of course, many of them have made, and continue to make, a
considerable contribution to our life as a nation. The list of distinguished
people is a long one and our country would be different and, very
possibly, less vigorous without them.
But that is entirely different from suggesting that we are, by
nature, a nation of immigrants - with the implication that present
levels of immigration are merely a continuation of past trends,
a continuation of the process that has made us what we are.
Any such claim falls apart when examined closely, as Professor
Conway has demonstrated. He looked at the scale of previous waves
of immigration and found that they were far smaller than the massive
inflows which we are now facing.
A certain amount depends on how far back you go. Britain has been
an island for some 8,000 years - before that, it was connected to
mainland Europe.
The earliest population were hunter-gatherers running only to a
few thousand. A big increase in population, some 6,000 years ago,
seems to have been due to the arrival of new techniques of farming
and a consequent boost to food production, rather than to a large
inflow of people.
By the time of the Roman invasion, the inhabitants numbered some
1.5 million. The Anglo-Saxons and Danes of the Dark Ages were the
most significant subsequent arrivals - yet their numbers were never
overwhelming and the population remained roughly at 1.5 million
until the Norman Conquest.
For practical purposes, the arrival of the Normans in 1066 is the
sensible place to start an assessment of the impact of immigration
on our society. To go back further is to get lost in the mists of
time.
And when you look at the record of the past 1,000 years, the number
of people who arrived in Britain from elsewhere is extremely small
- even when you take into account the much lower populations of
earlier times.
Furthermore, in almost every case, their arrival was spread over
decades rather than years.
William the Conqueror arrived with only around 10,000 troops of
largely French extraction. The total number of Norman settlers in
Britain was never more than 5 per cent of the population, but they
seized the levers of power and grabbed a third of the land.
In the subsequent 1,000 years, there have been only two numerically
significant migrations into Britain - the Huguenots in the 16th
and 17th centuries and the Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Professor Conway's work reveals that both were surprisingly limited
in scale.
The Huguenots were Protestants driven out of Catholic France by
religious persecution. The first wave came in the second half of
the 16th century and a larger, wave followed in the late 17th century.
The total number settling in Britain has been estimated at 40,000
- still only 1 per cent of the population at the time. Many brought
valuable skills, some were affluent and their impact was generally
beneficial - but they were still a tiny number.
It was another 200 years before the assassination of Tsar Alexander
II in 1881 triggered pogroms in Russia and Poland. Between 1880
and 1914, it is estimated that some three million Jews left Eastern
Europe and Russia.
The majority went to the U.S., while some 150,000 settled in Britain,
arriving at the rate of perhaps 10,000 a year.
They were followed in the period between the two World Wars by
perhaps 70,000 others fleeing Nazi Germany. It hardly needs to be
said that they have made an outstanding contribution to our society.
But again the numbers are tiny. Taken together, they amounted to
roughly half a per cent of our population at the time, spread over
half a century.
Professor Conway also looked at the Irish migration of the 19th
century. This is a quite different case, as Ireland was part of
Great Britain, in full political union with England, Scotland and
Wales at the time, but the numbers are interesting.
Irish-born adults living in Britain doubled from 300,000 to 600,000
in the 20 years around the potato famine of the mid-19th century
- again, some 1 per cent of Britain's population at the time, spread
over decades. Even by 1880, the Irish community in Britain was only
3 per cent of the population.
The claim that Britain is a nation of immigrants is even more bizarre
when you consider that, between 1815 and 1914, Britain quadrupled
her population and yet still dispatched more than 20 million people
to destinations beyond Europe.
The reality is that we have historically been a country of emigration,
not immigration.
Indeed, that situation persisted up to the mid-1980s, when immigration
first exceeded emigration.
Why all this focus on numbers? First, because they disprove the
Government's claim, so one more falsehood on immigration collapses
on examination.
Second, because numbers do matter. And the larger they are, the
more they matter. And third, because, although it may not be politically
correct to say so, culture matters too.
The Huguenots and the Jews were both of European, Judeo Christian
culture and so more easily integrated into our society.
We are taking large numbers from cultures very distant from our
own and from each other.
Unlike the U.S. - which is, indeed, a nation of immigrants - we
have no mechanisms for absorbing such a mix of people.
The concept of 'multiculturalism', allowing different groups of
immigrants to pursue their own cultural agenda without regard to
the indigenous population, was an attempt to avoid the issue.
Its disastrous failure was demonstrated on 7/7 in the London Tube
bombings carried out by men brought up in Britain.
< Consider the present position. In the two years 2004 and 2005,
foreign immigration totalled about 630,000 or just over 1per cent
of our record population of 60 million.
The only two previous significant waves of foreign immigration
in the past 1,000 years - the Huguenots and Jews - each amounted
to less than 1 per cent spread over up to 50 years. So the inflow
now is some 25 times any previous level.
Such numbers are, of course, having a huge impact on our society.
The growth of our minority ethnic communities illustrates the point.
By no means all of them are immigrants, since about half were born
and brought up here and are as British as anyone else.
But their parents and grandparents were immigrants, so their numbers
are some measure of the impact of immigration on our society over
the past halfcentury.
In 1951, ethnic minorities were 1per cent of our population. They
are now 8 per cent. And in state secondary schools they number 17
per cent.
To these, of course, should be added immigrants who are not part
of the black and minority ethnic communities - notably, in recent
years, the Poles.
Meanwhile, in Greater London one child in two is born to a foreign
mother and in several of our cities, the indigenous community will
find themselves a minority before very long.
Small wonder that there is widespread public concern, that two-thirds
of us feel our culture is under threat, and that 83 per cent want
firm action from the Government.
Why is it, then, that the Government is deliberately perpetuating
the ridiculous myth that we are "a nation of immigrants"?
Its track record should tell us the answer: if you can't solve a
problem, spin it.
What has happened - quite simply, indeed undeniably - is that the
Government has lost control of our borders. Ministers have no idea
who has come, who has gone and who is still here. They were far
too slow to tackle the asylum mess which they inherited from the
Conservatives.
Then they deliberately and, in my view, crazily made a massive
increase in work permits followed by an appalling miscalculation
over the likely inflows from Eastern Europe.
So, prevented by political correctness from addressing the root
of the problem - which is the scale of immigration - they reached
for the spin.
We were repeatedly told that none of this mattered because we are
a nation of immigrants anyway - a nation that has successfully absorbed
immigration down the centuries. That line has been shot to pieces
by Professor Conway.
The Government is now left with its second defence - that all this
immigration is beneficial, even necessary, for our economy. Two-thirds
of the public do not believe this, but the Government continues
to repeat it. The public are, of course, right.
Nearly all the benefit of immigration goes to the immigrants themselves
- which, naturally, is why they come.
The Government claims that the entire country benefits from the
growth in our economy as a result of immigration, but calculations
based on its own figures show that the value of this growth to each
member of the indigenous community comes to less than 50p a week.
Not a lot, you may think, when you consider the added cost to the
economy caused by current levels of immigration - cost in the form
of extra pressure on public services and infrastructure.
Indeed, the latest figures issued by the Government itself show
that we shall need to build 200 houses a day, every day, for the
next 20 years just to house new immigrants - not existing immigrants,
but new ones. This takes no account of the illegal immigrants, who
must number at least half a million.
Fortunately, the public is waking up to the situation. The chattering
classes are still not too bothered. They like the cheap nannies,
cheaper restaurants and lower inflation that the lower wages of
immigrants bring.
But for the working class that means less money and less job security.
They are not amused. Indeed, the white working class who are the
most directly affected by mass immigration are beginning to desert
Labour in droves.
This may be why the Government is at last taking action. Liam Byrne,
Barbara Roche's successor as Minister for Immigration, admitted
this week that the country is "deeply unsettled" by the
present massive levels of immigration.
Only last month, and just in time for the local elections, the
Home Office issued two documents setting out how it intends to restore
control of our borders, with better records of arrivals and departures,
new visa controls, ID cards for resident foreigners and new measures
against employers of illegal workers.
This is all sensible stuff and long overdue - but whether the Home
Office has staff of sufficient quality and the resources necessary
to achieve their aims remains to be seen.
The truth is that we cannot continue as we are. Migrants are now
arriving at very nearly one every minute. We cannot possibly integrate
people into our society at such a pace, and we should not be expected
to do so. Political correctness must be put aside.
There must be a sharp reduction in immigration. The public must
be reassured by clear evidence that the situation is no longer spinning
out of control.
The best objective would be to reduce foreign immigration to the
same level as the number of British people emigrating each year.
This has doubled under the present Government to about 100,000 a
year.
Such a limit would allow room for those who are really essential
to our economy, as well as leaving room for family reunion (under
tightened rules).
Genuine refugees should not, as a matter of principle, be capped.
In any case, they nowadays number fewer than 10,000 a year.
Firm and effective action is the only way forward. Spin has had
its day. And Professor Conway has made a valuable contribution to
its demise.
• A Nation Of Immigrants? by David Conway is available from
Civitas, £10 including p&p, www.civitas.org.uk.
Sir Andrew Green is chairman of MigrationWatch and former Ambassador
to Saudi Arabia and Syria.
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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