1 PROF ROBERT TOMBS: Mass Immigration is Destabilising Our Country
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Last weekend, my cousin's lovely child, not long out of medical school, wed her sweetie - a good-looking young physician from an Indian family.

The Hindu wedding was incredible, colourful and substantial enjoyable for everyone. Watching as young English and Indian people danced together, I showed that the day was an ideal example of multicultural integration as we all want it to be.

But it is alarmingly ignorant to take these advantages for granted and to anticipate that the conference of cultures will automatically result in universal love.

The UK has perhaps the best record of any nation in the manner in which, for hundreds of years, it has taken in immigrants and refugees from every corner of the planet, using a safe and civilised haven.

From the Huguenot Protestants who ran away massacres in France during the 16th century, to the Jews escaping Nazi genocide during the Second World War, right up to the Ukrainian females and children offered shelter today, British tolerance and empathy have been a lifeline for millions.

Now that tolerance is being stretched to its limits. Mass migration, compounded by people-smuggling on a commercial scale, is destabilising our country.

We should not fall into the trap of expecting that, because it has actually normally exercised fine in the past, Britain can absorb any amount of demographic modification.

We have never seen escalating immigration on anything like the scale of the past 20 years, wites Prof Robert Tombs

History shows that, even here, sudden increases of migration have triggered turmoils that last for centuries. And we have actually never ever seen intensifying immigration on anything like the scale of the past 20 years.

Official figures from the Department for Education exposed on Thursday that white British children are already the minority in one in 4 schools in England.

This transformation has been specifically marked in our big cities. At Rockwood Academy in Birmingham, for instance, there was not a single white British pupil tape-recorded among the 1,084 who go to the school.

Last week likewise saw the publication of a report from Professor Matt Goodwin at Buckingham University, anticipating that white Britons will be a minority of the population by 2063 - barely more than a single generation.

By the end of the century, according to his figures, 60 per cent of the nation will have been born overseas or will have at least one parent who is an immigrant. By then, more than 19 per cent of Britons will be Muslim (compared with the existing 7 percent). Goodwin's projections are based upon census data and figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

I suspect these numbers terribly ignore the true rate of modification. They assume a stable increase and stable geopolitical conditions, when we have every factor to expect both of those factors will prove unpredictable.

An anti-immigration protester holds up a placard during a demo in Dover in 2020

Climate modification could have a terrible effect on migration, if even one or 2 of the more alarmist theories are borne out.

Tens of millions of people in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh could be made homeless if sea levels increase. Millions more would leave their homes if glacial melt in the Himalayas triggered catastrophic flooding in India.

Civil wars in Sudan, Congo and Eritrea have currently driven enormous varieties of people to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. African nations from Nigeria to South Africa are in risk of tearing themselves apart, and the result would be a huge rush of people looking for to escape the battling.

These upheavals would be small compared with the aftermath of war in between India and Pakistan, or in the Middle East. In those cases, Europe could see 100 million refugees or more.

Add to that the rise of organised criminal activity and people trafficking. For all Sir Keir Starmer's bluster about 'smashing the gangs', he closes his eyes to the fact that this is a multi-billion-pound service - one that will not cease even if he makes speeches.

These are not minor bad guys. They are worldwide cartels, who have actually discovered an income stream that equals benefit from the drugs trade. The Government has no concepts at all about how to stop them.

The varieties of economic migrants making the dangerous crossing from France in overloaded dinghies are installing, in some cases topping more than 1,000 in a single day.

The cumulative impact is mind-boggling. According to your house of Commons library, 44,000 individuals arrived illegally in the 12 months to March - which figure, obviously, represents just individuals we understand about. Many more have likely slipped under the radar, landing undetected or hidden in lorries and containers.

But 44,000 corresponds to simply 5 per cent of the immigration total for the year. Legal arrivals surpass the illegal ones by about 20-to-one.

Nothing in our long and remarkable island story has actually ever come close to this. Mass immigration, introduced by New Labour under Tony Blair, is a negligent experiment in group transformation that has never ever been attempted in Britain before.

But it has actually occurred elsewhere. And for native populations, it has typically been disastrous.

When Europeans settled in the Americas, from the 16th century, they required their method on to the land. In Australia and New Zealand - countries that were much less densely inhabited - there was less massive violence however the result on the aboriginal people was no less terrible.

Significantly, the British Empire never enabled migration to India, which had a big settled population. British subjects were encouraged to settle just in sparsely peopled areas: for instance, Canada and wide-open parts of Africa such as Kenya.

But in every case, once this process began, it was soon unmanageable. More than 6 million Irish emigrants arrived in the US throughout the 19th century, a 3rd of them in the area of less than a years from 1845.

Almost as lots of Italians emigrated to America, the majority of them in between 1880 and the early 1920s. In a country riven with racial divisions, the Italian and Irish communities battled to endure, frequently of course by effort, but likewise by political corruption and organised criminal offense.

Starry-eyed Left-wingers like to declare that Britain too is a 'nation of immigrants'. That's utterly disingenuous.

William the Conqueror, who showed up across the Channel in 1066 with his own flotilla of boats, brought only about 7,000 guys. Yet that small army and the French-speaking Norman immigrants who followed damaged the native Anglo-Saxon culture and ruled over a whole individuals.

Almost every big Saxon building was destroyed, the ruling elite was changed, their residential or commercial property took and the language altered beyond recognition. For centuries, Saxons were forced to labour as serfs, abhored as an inferior race by the colonising elite. Even Saxon saints were demoted.

It took a minimum of 400 years for the aftershocks of the Norman invasion to diminish.

Resentments ran so deep they are still noticeable in our folk legends: Robin Hood was pictured as a Saxon knight combating Norman oppression. The concept of this 'Norman Yoke' inspired democrats well into the reign of Victoria.

Even today, nearly a thousand years later on, the Conquest might be embedded in our class system.

A 2011 study found that Britons with names indicating Norman descent - such as Mandeville, Lacy, Glanville or Percy - were on average 10 percent much better off than those with Saxon craftsmen names such as Smith, Cooper, Baker or Shepherd, practically a millennium after the Battle of Hastings.

To comprehend totally how harmed a nation can be by unrestrained migration, we need just take a look at Northern Ireland. During the 17th century, tens of countless Scottish protestants migrated to Ulster. Though separated by the Irish Sea, these 2 nations are so close that on a clear day they show up to each other.

This was a state job, initiated by the Scottish and English federal governments during James I's reign, and developed as a way of ending mass poverty in Scotland by motivating individuals to live by farming in Ireland.

Well, we all know the result: it caused enmity and violence still widespread today that has actually seen thousands killed over the centuries.

Not all the social inequality in Britain is the outcome of the Norman intrusion, of course, any more than all Ireland's Troubles were the effect of a plan to relieve starvation in Scotland.

But when issues have complex causes, individuals seek simple scapegoats - and migration will always supply one.

The UK population is now 69.5 million, according to the ONS. (Many think it to be

considerably greater). That's a boost of 10 million this century. Yet the birth rate is falling: in 2023 it reached its least expensive rate on record in England and Wales, at 1.44 kids per woman, compared with the 'replacement rate' of 2.1 - the number of children required to keep numbers stable.

If our growing population is not due to giving birth, it should be driven by migration.

The falling birth rate is not a new phenomenon. In 1938, it was anticipated that the UK population would peak within 5 years at 41 million, and that it would then fall steadily for the next 3 years, to 31 million by 1975.

In the event, this turned out to be nonsense, partly since the official statistics did not expect the Second World War and the baby boom that followed.

But the forecasts also failed to take account of the beginnings of immigration from previous nests, with lots of thousands arriving from the West Indies after 1948 - the 'Windrush generation' - and Pakistan and India following independence and partition in 1947.

There were other surges, for example from East Africa after the rise of the despot Idi Amin who expelled 80,000 Ugandan Asians, among them the moms and dads of previous Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Crucially, the excellent majority of these immigrants were figured out to incorporate into British life. If not currently English-speaking, they found out the language. They looked for work or started organizations. Many brought much required skills and dynamism.

But that is not the case today. A high percentage of legal immigrants pertain to do low-paid work, for example in care homes and the hospitality sector. Those who certify under the federal government visa scheme for experienced employees or health and care workers can expect to be paid 80 percent of the basic wage.

Those in the fishing market, for circumstances, get ₤ 12.82 an hour, rather than ₤ 15.88 for British workers. A similar disparity applies in many trades from welding to dance and choreography.

When will white Brits end up being an ethnic minority? Map exposes areas where they already are

This has a threefold result: wages are depressed, new arrivals live in relative poverty, and numerous British people have actually left of the labour market. Resentments grow on all sides and the cost is unsustainable.

Many other migrants, it has to be said, take full advantage of our generous asylum system - consisting of housing (sometimes in comfy hotels), food, complimentary NHS health care and even investing cash.

The greatest source of animosity, however, comes when immigrants refuse to integrate. Incredibly, numerous on the Left motivate this by trashing our culture and libelling our history - raising every background other than the indigenous one. It spells catastrophe for our future when immigrants are encouraged to stay locked within their own communities and taught that the British have actually constantly been their enemies.

How harmful this is, we can see by looking throughout the Channel, to France where second and 3rd generation immigrants from North Africa create a continuous state of unrest. Riots are frequent, car-burning is a nationwide sport and extremist political leaders talk of're-migration' - the expulsion of people who 'do not suit'.

This will be Britain's future if the Government does not take control of the situation today. Immigration can benefit everybody, but just if it is strictly handled, democratically accepted and culturally incorporated.

Allowed to run out of control, as the arc of history programs, it damages countries.

Professor Robert Tombs is the author of The English And Their History

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