Breaking point

How mass immigration is undermining our national community

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What makes a nation? I’d suggest six things.

A people who share a common territory, who feel a shared identity, who have a collective memory or history, speak a common language, have a similar set of values, and as a result of all these things, have a distinctive culture and way of life.

Yes, economic prosperity matters. But much more important than money, than GDP, as philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once said, is a deep and powerful sense that ‘we belong together and that we will stand by each other in the real emergencies’.

A nation, in other words, requires a “we” —a deep sense of unity that transcends politics and markets.

And for that you need something else —social trust. For a nation to work and survive, its people must be willing to trust others in the community they do not know but who they support because they see them contributing to the collective pot, playing by the rules, and preserving and passing on the same cultural inheritance.

Which raises a different question. How, then, might you destroy a nation?

You would undermine all these things. You would, either gradually or suddenly, strip away this belief among people that they share a distinctive identity, history, and culture. You would flood the national community with outsiders who do not contribute to the collective pot, who do not play by the rules, and who hold radically different if not incompatible identities, histories, religions, cultures and ways of life.

And in this way, slowly but surely, you would erode and then finally destroy that much deeper sense of “we” which lies at the very heart of a nation, has been built up over countless generations and holds it together.

Sound familiar?

I ask because I suspect that’s how many people in Britain will be feeling today when they cast their eyes over the latest statistics, released yesterday, about how mass, uncontrolled immigration is fundamentally changing the nature of their country.

What we can see in the shocking numbers is a national community and a people that are now being subjected —against their wishes— to an extreme policy that is transforming, undermining, and hollowing out the country they once knew.

They are astonishing and alarming in equal measure.

In the year ending June 2024, some 1.2 million people —equivalent to a city the size of Birmingham—migrated into Britain.

And more than 1 million of them came from outside Europe —from countries that have completely different if not incompatible histories, religions, and cultures.

Here’s just one of many mind-boggling statistics I could put before you.

Astonishingly, today, some 86% of all immigration into Britain comes from outside Europe —typically from India, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, and Zimbabwe.

In fact, in every year since 2022 immigration from outside Europe represented more than 80% of all immigration into Britain.

Just think about that for a moment.

The vast majority of immigrants flooding into Britain are now coming from countries that have much lower levels of education, skills, and prosperity, as well as religions and cultures that are utterly different from those that incubate European nations.

How can you build an integrated, cohesive, prosperous, and high-trust society on this? Can anybody in the expert class tell me? Does anybody even have a plan?

Meanwhile, the rate of ‘net migration’ into Britain, meaning the number of people coming in minus the number leaving, remains at an all-time high of 728,000.

728,000 people all looking for homes to buy, flats to rent, places in schools, doctors appointments, treatments on the National Health Service, and more, at the same time as recent governments have slashed spending and failed to build sufficient houses.

This number is more than twice the number when the British people voted for Brexit, in 2016, believing their elected politicians when they said this would help “lower the overall numbers”, and more than three times the number when the Tories came to power in 2010, similarly promising to slash net migration to the “tens of thousands”.

In the last four years alone, remarkably, net migration added more than 2.5 million people to Britain’s population, while more than 3.5 million people overall migrated into the country. It is simply the biggest wave of immigration on record.

Despite nobody in the political class speaking openly about what all this might mean for housing, infrastructure, the environment, and social cohesion, this extreme policy of mass immigration has now added the combined populations of Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester, and Bristol to the country in the space of just one parliament.

And if you take an even wider view then, since 2012, net migration has added 4.5 million people to the country, equivalent to four cities the size of Birmingham.

At what point, one might ask, did our mainstream politicians on both the Left and Right decide they would not only consistently ignore people’s request for lower immigration but also completely destroy people’s trust in the entire system?

Because that’s what they’re doing. They’re treating hardworking, tax-paying people with contempt, promising one thing only to then do the complete opposite while lying to their face. Full-scale revolutions have started from less.

While all this is further hollowing out the shared sense of “we” that has long guided our nation, it’s also unquestionably making us poorer, too —even if the pro-migration zealots in the Treasury, charities, universities, and the elite class refuse to accept it.

For example, here’s another shocking statistic you won’t hear about on BBC Verify. What percentage of immigrants who have come to Britain since 2018 came on work visas —to do decent jobs, on decent money, making a net contribution to the pot?

16%.

That’s right. Just 16%.

The rest are relatives of migrants, students, asylum-seekers, and migrants on other visas that are not actually driving prosperity at all.

Since 2021, for example, more than 1 million Indians have migrated into Britain but less than half of them, only 44%, came here to work. Nearly half a million Nigerians migrated in but only one in three came on work visas. And nearly 300,000 Pakistanis have come too but only one in ten are on work visas.

As I pointed out on X, the situation is now so absurd that last year relatives of migrant workers outnumbered actual migrant workers!

This is, put simply, insane. Nobody voted for this. No serious economist or historian of nations would look at this extreme policy and think: “yes, this makes sense. This is how you create prosperous and cohesive nations”.

But this is what’s being imposed on us from above, and what is now pushing Great Britain, the country we all love, into managed decline.

Because what we’re now living with is what I call “immigration austerity” —a policy that’s pushing us all into a low-growth, dismal, and unproductive Deliveroo economy with shabby and declining public services to go with it.

A place that works well for global corporations addicted to cheap labour and radical woke progressives for whom pro-immigration is a new religion, but which does not work at all for the Forgotten Majority in this country who are left to pay the price.

And the economic price is clear for all to see.

As even the Office for Budget Responsibility has been forced to point out, every low-wage, low-skill migrant entering Britain today, usually from outside Europe, costs the British taxpayer, on average, between £150,000 and £1 million.

But look too at the astronomical economic cost of our broken asylum system, released yesterday. Last year, the British people paid —wait for it— £5.4 billion on the asylum system, which is visibly failing to deal with illegal migration.

To put that in perspective, we just took winter fuel payments off British pensioners to save £1.5 billion. That’s 27% of the asylum budget.

Local councils cut frontline services to save £564 million, meaning no more Meals on Wheels for grandma and no libraries for kids. That’s 10% of the asylum budget.

Our hapless Labour government just smashed family farms up and down these islands to raise £520 million when Mum and Dad die. That’s not even 10% of the budget.

And police in London face £450 million in cuts, meaning burglaries, shoplifting and gang violence will likely remain de facto legal. That’s 8% of the asylum budget.

Get the picture?

All these numbers reflect political choices and our leaders on both the Left and Right have clearly chosen to represent anybody and everybody except the British people.

We’re now having to say goodbye to winter fuel payments for our grandparents, family farms that have been here for generations, public services in our communities, and safe streets all so we can put illegal migrants from places as different as Vietnam and Iraq, who have already broken our laws, including a not insignificant number who go on to commit further crimes, into fancy-looking hotels with cash cards, phones, and private healthcare. And over time we’ll have to say goodbye to many other things, too.

Because when a nation so visibly stops putting its own people first, when its leaders stop cultivating that shared sense of identity, history, culture, and way of life that has long held it together, you have to wonder what will happen to that deeper sense of “we”. And in the end, I suspect that this will be the price we are forced to pay. The price will not just be measured in money but in the destruction of all those things that make a nation and which have long held us together in this place we call home.

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