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Monday 21 May 2012

One More Trip on the Immigration Merry-Go-Round

Wednesday, 28th October 2009

This post on immigration prompted a pair of fine, Chestertonian (in the sense of we the quiet people of England stuff) responses to which I think it's only proper that I reply.

First, Carroll Barry-Walsh writes:

Of course, it's the type of people we let in because there is a difference between letting in people who share our values, who want to - and take positive steps to - become British and discard those elements of their culture which are inconsistent with or hostile to our culture. And then there are those who simply come from the Third World and continue to live here as if they were still there but with more money. They don't discard those cultural practices which are contrary to our values, to our laws; no - they demand that we accommodate them, that we tolerate the intolerable. That is what we don't like and want to change. There is nothing "enriching" about having polygamy or Female Genital Mutilation or "honour" killings or forced marriages or burqas or death for apostates or book-burning on our streets or demands that free speech be curtailed or virulent anti-Semitism or demands for sharia law etc and it is utterly disingenuous to pretend that there is.
There absolutely has to be some recognition that if people are let into the country they have an obligation to assimilate and become British and that this means that they cannot continue to live as if they were still in their country of origin.

A nation is more than simply a collection of people who happen to be in a particular geographical area at any one time. A nation consists of people with a shared culture, a shared language, a shared history, shared values and beliefs, a shared narrative about what they are about and where they are going. People coming to this country can become British, no matter what their origins and colour/ethnic group etc but they need to do something positive to become British and we need to make it clear what we expect of them. The problem we have now is that we have not had that expectation, still don't have it in any meaningful way and Labour in particular have poo-poohed the very idea of a nation as I have described it.

Secondly, from Simon Denis:

If people fear change then immigration will terrify them for it represents a change more substantial, more intimate than almost any other kind of development. It breaks the easy familiarity we have with our environment; it breaks the easy association of our national life with its past; it introduces new and jarring associations with a number pasts which to many have little or no appeal - and that is just the start. It transforms neighbourhoods - churches and Sundays and pubs are replaced - by mosques and Fridays and halal butchers. The very smells on the street cease to represent anything sensibly like home. Can you not see this, Mr Massie? Do these visible, tangible, palpable upheavals not affect you at all?
Of course in small doses a touch of the foreign, the colourful, the exotic is welcome. Of course, if one or two areas gain an ethnic character distinct from the prevailing type, nobody is harmed. But when a whole country looks as if it is about to go under for ever beneath a sudden tide of indifferent and sometimes hostile newcomers, then something has gone wrong.

It is at this point that you will remind us that the figures are misleading - the number of people coming in is going down, you purr. So we have always been informed when the reality of immigration becomes unbearable, but it makes your argument inconsistent. Either you think that continual, large scale immigration is a good, in which case stop reassuring us that it is not happening. Or you think that if it were happening, our anxieties would be understandable - in which case, don't quietly imply that somehow we are "racist", objecting to the type not the number of immigrants.

We are not against any particular type; rather, we are for a particular type - the English type and his or her right to predominate in England. Our objections to mass immigration would still stand, therefore, even if we were genuinely getting the most various and mixed new population in the world. It is the long continuity of an island people in its island home which we cherish - yes, a particular people and only "white" as it happens.

We want the familiar; we want our home; we want something of old England to survive in this heartless unmeaning world. Why criminalise so tender and so necessary an emotion? Why moralistically ram the multi-culti nowhere down the throats of a perfectly tolerant people? You say you are a free trading liberal. So were Gradgrind and Scrooge.

I've edited both posts a little, but not, I trust, to the extent of distorting their meaning. And as I say, these are eloquent and heart-felt responses that, I think, express sentiments shared by many people. I sympathise with some of the points here and, you may not be astonished to discover, would disagree with others.

Nonetheless, I'd say that it's disingenuous of Carroll Barry-Walsh to suppose that those of us who favour immigration don't also think it important that immigrants "buy into" their new country. That needn't mean forsaking all ties with the lands of their birth, not least since Britishness has been a hyphenated matter for millions of us for centuries. (Not simply in terms of Scottish-British or Welsh-British, but also Catholic-British or Jewish-British and many others). But, for example, it does mean that there cannot be a place for honour killings or female genital mutilation in Britain. There's no contradiction between embracing the positive, liberating consequences of immigration and deploring these practices. Indeed I'm not sure you can properly embrace the former without deploring the latter. Coercion is coercion.

To that extent, then, we may agree. But I think Mr Barry-Walsh under-estimates the attraction of assimilation for immigrants themselves. It is in their interests to do so after all. The question of what's good for the immigrants themselves is too often ignored in these debates.

True, we have a problem - a significant, but, I think, manageable one - with pockets of our immigrant communities and true too assimilation and integration is not always as easy or rapid as might be considered ideal. But on the whole and in the medium, let alone the long-term, it does happen.

Social change is always disruptive and often challenging. This isn't merely a question of immigration. Consider, as a companion to this discussion, the challenges and disruptions caused by the changing role of women in our society. That's something that's changed beyond almost all recognition in the past century. And like all change that involves losing some things that had some value even as it also brings change that is liberating and beneficial. There are always trade-offs, but who really thinks the emancipation of women is to be regretted? You can't wind the clock back. Our culture isn't what it was in 1900 and it isn't what it will be in 2100 either.

Simon Denis also, I fear, has a view of Old England that is preserved in so much aspic that it seems almost Jacobite. That kind of despairing romance has a certain appeal and power, for sure. Change is often disconcerting and it's not surprising that many people find it discombobulating. That's understandable. But it has always been thus and, most probably, always will be. So, yes, I think it silly when those of us that are pretty relaxed about immigration pretend that the arrival of new and unfamiliar peoples has no impact upon the host country. Which is one reason why I don't make that claim. I recognise that, as Mr Denis puts it, immigration can introduce "new and jarring associations".

But again, 'twas ever thus. This was true of Jewish immigration a century ago and true of Irish immigration too. And, for many, it was true of the wave of post-war immigration from the Caribbean too. Each of these arrivals were controversial, sometimes massively so. The end of England or Scotland or Britain was frequently just around the corner. But it never quite happened, did it? Britain may have changed - as all countries change - but it also became a kinder, gentler, better place that moved on from the era of "No blacks, no Irish".

I don't see why this country - still, despite everything, a fine, if sometimes infuriating place to live - cannot absorb and benefit from immigration again. We've done it before so why can't we do it again? I believe we can and will. Not least because, of course, it's happening anyway.

The ghastly antics of a tiny - relatively speaking - number of muslim extremists are highly visible; the successful integration and contributions to our society made by hundreds of thousands of other muslims pass comparatively unoticed precisely because they're so normal, so much what we expect and have become accustomed to seeing based on our experience with previous immigrant communities and out own interactions with our muslim neighbours, colleagues, friends and acquaintances. This is a real silent majority that is rarely heard from. Too often, however, we assume the particular must be the general when it's actually nothing of the sort.

As for Mr Denis's point about the "inconsistencies" in my argument: I do believe that the numbers involved are often less dramatic than is suggested by the popular press and I also believe that we'd have little to fear even if the doom-mongers predictions were more accurate than I think they are. But that doesn't mean I can't also appreciate the concerns reasonable people can reasonably have about immigration even if I think them often over-cooked and, occasionally, hysterical.

But, again, I'm struck by the pessimism displayed by those most afraid of immigration. The last census reported that 92% of UK residents were white. Now that was in 2001 and doubtless the figures will look a little different at the next census. But they won't be massively different. Yet to hear some people talk you'd think the "White British" - who constitute 85% of the population - are an oppressed minority in their own country. I would suggest that this is unlikely. How can the "whole country" be about to "go under" when non-whites - resident for generations or newly-arrived as they may be - constitute less than 10% of the population?

Furthermore, we're invited to believe that the muslim minority - less than 3% of the population - is poised to "take over" Britain within our life time? Please. Even allowing for higher birth-rates amongst first-generation immigrants (though the longer immigrant communities are established the more their birth-rates tend to move towards the national average) this isn't going to happen. Yes, Britain will be less "white" in 2040 than it is now. But it was less "white" in 2000 than it was in 1970 too. Societies change and adapt and evolve but that doesn't mean severing all the threads that still connect us to the past. There will, my friends, always be an England even if it's a little different from the England of an imagined happy and care-free and innocent past.

Again, however, this problem - if that's how you perceive it - is a measure of our success, not failure. Nor are we alone in facing these issues. They are, to one degree or another, common to almost all successful, western countries. You knew Ireland was doing well once it had, for the first time, a (non-British!) immigration "problem". One consequence of this is that the idea of states' based on ethnicity is going to have to adapt. In some ways that makes stressing both the rights and obligations of a polity based more on civics than blood or soil more important than it might have been in earlier, poorer times.

It's easy to scoff at American-style citizenship ceremonies and tests, but there's some value to these rituals. They help. Indeed, in some ways we're all going to have to become a little bit more American. My own opinions on immigration and citizenship owe much to my own times in America. I might live in rural Scotland at the moment, but my views on these issues are largely informed by having lived for several years in a largely immigrant neighbourhood in DC.

There are, I think, two main routes towards real success in the modern, western world. You can either be a small, relatively homogenous society such, to risk simplifying things somewhat, as one finds in Scandanavia and Finland or you can be a larger, more diverse society such as the United States, Australia, Canada or New Zealand - all of whom have large foreign-born populations and all of whom are startling successes at least in part because of, not despite, their immigration policies.

True, Britain is an older, more crowded place than any of these and so not every lesson from overseas is always directly transferrable here. But I'd argue that as an old country infusions of, forgive me, new blood are all the more useful. They refresh and invigorate. And in any case as a nation founded upon trade and upon being open to the world one could also say that a tradition of importing and exporting people is indeed a large part of what has made Britain, Britain.

Anyway, my own instincts on immigration are hopelessly utopian. We do not live in a world of open borders and nor are we likely to do so anytime soon.

But, you know, when I see a black Englishman playing Hamlet or a Bolton-born British-Asian boxing for Britain or a Paisley-born Pakistani-Scot representing his country at cricket or the son of a Romanian Jewish immigrant leading the Conservative party or any one of dozens and hundreds and thousands of other, quieter, less prominent examples demonstrating the contributions immigrants and their children have made to the life and culture of this country, enriching it even as, yes, their presence helps change it subtly, I find it hard to see that the country is being destroyed by this.

On the contrary, I think it's admirable that this has been a country prepared to grant so many people from distant lands the chance to make a better fist of life for themselves and their children and grand-children. I happen to think that there are cultural and economic benefits to this, but most of all I think it's just the right and moral thing to do.

Perhaps, as a man once said, all we have to fear is fear itself.

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Wilhelm

October 28th, 2009 4:07am Report this comment

Alex

Please dont tell me that some one actually pays you for writing this piffle ?

DavidDP

October 28th, 2009 7:03am Report this comment

Wholeheartedly agree, Alex.

Roy Smith

October 28th, 2009 7:20am Report this comment

Fully support Wilhelm's indignation, and congratulate him on his sound judgement and interesting forthright posts.

Merlyn

October 28th, 2009 8:10am Report this comment

Alex, all the other nations we have imported had nothing in their religious code to prevent them from integrating. This one does.
To be true Muslims, they must not make a friend of an unbeliever, they are required to make the world Muslim, by whatever methods they find... otherwise they are not TRUE Muslims. You really must check this for yourself in the later pages of the Koran.
Moreover, you might notice that Islam extremism is on the rise, not diminishing as we might expect. Look at once liberal Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon. The list goes on. Lets not forget the global jihad waging either. Ahmadinejad has been smugly saying that Muslims don't need to resort to violence
when they have their wombs.
Because of our dependence on oil we have just about every institution here vetted and "corrected" by Islam... our university's curriculum, religion, schools, politics, journalism... need I go on?
Oh no, this is indeed of a different ilk, and demands that we take back our own authority, right now before we are all Dhimmified, dummified or blown up!

Rhoda Klapp

October 28th, 2009 8:53am Report this comment

Alex, thanks for engaging. I take it all back.

Ray Burston

October 28th, 2009 9:09am Report this comment

It's not the fact of immigration that is the problem, Alex (after all, there have anyways been people coming and going on these islands, whether for reasons of persecution, self-betterment, commerce or romance), but rather the numbers and the suddenness.

Perhaps a better analogy is with that of food, because there's nothing absolutely wrong with eating hamburgers or with eating chocolate cakes. However, too many hamburgers or too many chocolate cakes consumed within too short a space of time will inevitable prompt in any man a severe outbreak of indigestion, to put it mildly.

The ordinary British people are not racists, Alex. However, right now we are feeling just a touch too flatulent for our own liking.

Frank S

October 28th, 2009 9:18am Report this comment

Your 'ghastly antics of a tiny' few extremists is cause for more concern than you seem to think. I suppose many, perhaps even most, muslim immigrants in the olden days looked forward to a freer life upon reaching the UK. Not anymore. How many gangsters do you need to terrorise and subjugate a neighbourhood? How many people in Sicily belong to the mafia? I suspect the numbers would be quite 'tiny'.

daniel maris

October 28th, 2009 9:25am Report this comment

This really doesn't address the issues.

Mr. Massie fails to:

1. Assess the impact of numbers. Over the next 20 years as a direct result of immigration, present, past and future, we are going to have to build houses, schools and all the other infrastructure necessary to support an additional 12 million people (and that's according to the official projection).

2. The very, very different character of immigration between different groups. There is clearly a world of difference between immigration by Australians from a European-Christian-democratic cultural background and immigration by say Somalis from a African-Muslim-non-democratic background. Anyone who suggests otherwise is completely deluded.

3. Whilst Mr.Massie may say his is essentially assimilationist he can't dictate to immigrants. The reality is that many immigrant groups have chosen to adopt a very closed culture retaining the mother tongue, barring out-marriage and bringing in brides from the areas of origin. That has now been going on four three generations since the 1950s. People are still speaking Asian languages in Bolton and Whitechapel. Yiddish died out. Urdu will not.

4. Whilst mass immigration is fracturing our society, there is one group that while not monolithic does have a broadly similar ideology which is entirely opposed to Mr. Massie's bland and blithe words. This is of course those followers of Islam. In greater or lesser degree they don't see themselves in any way beholden to this country. Islam is a fully formed political and religious movement that has its own ethics, law and constitution. Muslims are taught to consider themselves greatly superior to all other peoples and to view with disdain people who do not share their religion. It's not a recipe for good community relations.

As for Northern boxers from an Islamic background, what about Prince Nazeem? He couldn't have been clearer that he boxed as a Muslim (he didn't even want to fight fellow Muslims) and that he boxed to advance Islam.

DavidDP

October 28th, 2009 10:05am Report this comment

"all the other nations we have imported had nothing in their religious code to prevent them from integrating"

That's wrong. Why do you think Orthodox Jews live in Stamford Hill and have their own emergency services?

Ken

October 28th, 2009 11:23am Report this comment

Mr Massie you refer to "the ghastly antics of a tiny - relatively speaking - number of muslim extremists..." but you ignore one significant difference between this and the earlier immigration waves you contend have been successfully assimilated; today's over-indulged colonisation is ocurring in the full glare of a 24/7 global media spotlight and the Internet (blogs, YouTube etc etc).
The anti-European outrages committed by your "tiny number" are magnified and amplified as never before.
Assimilation in such a febrile environment is far from the given you wish to make it out to be.

Laban Tall

October 28th, 2009 11:25am Report this comment

You say 'How can the "whole country" be about to "go under" when non-whites - resident for generations or newly-arrived as they may be - constitute less than 10% of the population?'

The answer to that depends on fertility. The 50s and 60s children of the baby boom did not produce a baby boom themselves - instead fertility collapsed in the 70s and 80s as the 60s sexual revolution, the Pill and feminism kicked in. They did not have babies at replacement rates. By contrast, immigrants, especially those from the Indian subcontinent, still see children as a blessing rather than a burden and expense, although that's a trifle unfair to the average native, who has been squeezed by house prices which make babies a difficult financial option for all bar the state-funded or those with a hefty single income.

The result of this is that, as reported on BBC news, according to the DFES, or whatever they’re currently calling themselves, 23% of primary school children are now classified as ethnic minority.

The last time I looked (2006 ONS figures) more than half the births in London (53%), and 21.9% of UK births (up from 12% in 1996) were to mothers born outside the UK. Given the birthrate differentials (ONS figures, p14) between incomers and natives, it seems not an unreasonable assertion that Native Brits will be a minority in the UK before the end of the century.

That's how, Alex. Compound interest is a wonderful thing.

Philip Walker

October 28th, 2009 1:14pm Report this comment

Laban, your definition of native Brit needs extracting. If you mean someone whose ancestry has been exclusively on these islands for the last 17,000 years, then say so. Other definitions exist, and one very reasonable one provides that every child born and raised on these shores is a 'native Brit'. Native Brits can't ever be out-numbered if you're relying on birth-rates to do it.

Jez

October 28th, 2009 1:31pm Report this comment

Alex, we can see you're at least trying to engage this situation.

Which is not happening anywhere else in the mainstream btw

I do not agree with many of your points or conclusions but it's a start- well done for that.

Augustus

October 28th, 2009 2:51pm Report this comment

Leaving aside the question of Muslim immigrants from Africa and Asia, it's been well-documented that overall immigration was stepped up to cope with the 'boom times'. But if the downturn continues and gets worse over time, the millions of jobless nationals could start to get very angry with those they perceive to have stolen their jobs, bringing down wages and rising crime. They may well take to the streets in protest and force the authorities to do something.
A future newspaper headline might read:
Immigrants brought in during boom times -blamed for bringing down wages, stealing jobs and rising crime - are being rounded up and deported.

Massie would laugh at this. A left-liberal politically correct journalist couldn't imagine such a scenario. After all, the TV still works. Reality shows a-plenty. Why fuss over a disturbing future? But panic and hatred does have quite an unstoppable momentum, especially when the war drums begin to beat.

PT

October 28th, 2009 4:02pm Report this comment

I can't see what the changing role of women has to do with this debate. I must have missed the people chained to railings demanding mass immigration.

A better analogy would be the planners of the 1960s who pushed through the physical transformation of Britain's town & cities. They demolished historic buildings, created bleak concrete shopping malls, built ring-roads and moved the plebs into tower blocks - all without public consent.

Today they are rightly regarded with contempt.

PJ

October 28th, 2009 4:51pm Report this comment

What a fantastic, passionate, provocative piece of writing.

And what spectacularly moronic comments it has attracted in return.

I particularly enjoyed Laban Tall's amateur hour demography lesson, and Daniel Maris's apparent refusal to read what the ONS actually said when they released their recent 'projection' - i.e. it is an extrapolation based on recent, historically high levels that are already showing signs of tailing off and are highly unlikey to be sustained.

But hey, never let the facts get in the way of rambling gibberish.

Carroll Barry-Walsh

October 28th, 2009 5:07pm Report this comment

Alex,

Thank you for responding to the comments made and since you have kindly responded to my comments, I hope you won't mind me responding to a couple of your points.

(1) You say that I underestimate the attraction of assimilation for immigrants themselves. I don't - as a child of immigrants myself, on both sides, I know full well what assimilation involves but equally you need to accept that, unlike in the past, there are two crucial differences: first, we are getting immigrants from groups who do not see a need to assimilate and, indeed, think it a threat to their identity. So we are getting self-imposed isolation and separation. It is perfectly true that previous immigrant groups assimilated well: the Jews, for instance, assimilated into the country’s values - not least because Western values are based on Judaeo-Christian values - without losing their identity and added something of benefit to this country. But what they didn't do is demand that Britain changed to suit them and get violent if we didn't nor did they go round glorying in wholly inappropriate victimhood. Nor did other immigrant groups. But now we do have an immigrant community which does do that and where the 2nd and 3rd generation have become even less assimilated and integrated than their parents/grandparents and seem to owe very little loyalty to this country. That is a very worrying development which we have not had in the past. We should have had a wake-up call when we found people demonstrating in the streets in favour of the murder of someone who written a novel and burning books and doing so at the behest of a leader of a foreign country. Second, the authorities are spreading a multicultural gospel which goes wholly against the idea of assimilation. And this has led to policies which encourage the idea that adherence to British culture is somehow optional. Why, for instance, do public authorities publish their leaflets in a variety of foreign languages? If someone comes to live here they should learn to speak English not be allowed an easy way out by allowing them to continue using only their mother tongue. Why, since polygamy is illegal in this country, do we allow polygamous wives into the country and pay benefits for them? How are we going to stop self-imposed segregation if we allow young Pakistani men to bring in wives from rural Pakistan, chosen precisely because they are not assimilated, not Western in outlook and behaviour? How are those girl brides supposed to bring up the next generation to be British? If you adopt a morally relativist approach of saying that all cultures are of equal value, on what basis do you then say to immigrant groups that forcing their daughters into marriages against their will is wrong? They have to understand that equality is a key value of our country and that it applies across the board, not least because it is in the interests of the women themselves. But those in favour of immigration have got themselves in such a muddle that they appear to favour the cultural rights of a particular community (see those in favour of sharia law) over the rights of a British female citizen who happens to be born a Muslim. How are Muslim women supposed to assimilate and take advantage of the freedoms they have here if we do not also insist that Muslim men assimilate and change their attitudes to women?
(2) You also say that we are foolish in being worried about a Muslim minority of less than 3%. A minority - especially when it has within it a vociferous and potentially violent minority - can achieve changes even when its numbers are small. This government was willing to introduce a law making criticism of religion a criminal offence purely to placate Muslims. That they did not succeed is not to their credit. They were willing to limit free speech - a right that had to be fought for over hundreds of years - to suit the convenience of recent arrivals who seemed to think that the honour of their religion should trump all other considerations. They were willing to give up a key freedom - the foundation really of our democracy - the minute, in your words, there were "the ghastly antics of a tiny …number of muslim extremists". Similarly, we now seem to have moved to a position where there is a right not to be offended so that there is a sort of creeping self-censorship of perfectly proper, indeed much needed, criticism. This seems to me to be a particular problem with Islam which appears to be both a peculiarly rigid sort of belief system but also one where its adherents seem to believe (maybe rightly) that the merest whiff of criticism will bring the whole edifice crashing down, which is why they often behave so hysterically in trying to shut up anyone making any sort of criticism at all. This simply will not do. I value Western freedoms and liberties and I do not want immigration by people with such a different set of values and beliefs coupled with an intransigent unwillingess to adapt and adopt the West's beliefs because the consequence is that we will all become less free and lose something truly valuable in return for nothing. The reason I and others are concerned about Muslim immigration is because we do not see the development of a British Muslim community - like British Jewry - who consider themselves British first, who have their first loyalty to this country and who discard those aspects of Islam (e.g. death to apostate / sharia law) which are incompatible with life in the West. On the contrary, recent opinion polls suggest the opposite and the government knows it has a problem with terrorist plots originating amongst that community. And despite that, the government is busy channelling money to groups with terrorist links to enable them to teach their children how to be muslim (and it doesn't take much imagination to work out that this will not be the peaceful Islam of politicians' fond imaginings). Or it is sending young men to fight in Afghanistan because, we are told, 75% of all terrorist plots originate there and in the badlands of Pakistan while at the same time allowing in thousands of young Pakistani "students" into this country when we know that much of their study is a sham. This is both incoherent and dangerous. But it follows in my opinion from a failure to think intelligently about what immigration means for both the immigrants and the country to which they move.
It seems to me that too many people who are in favour of immigration do so on the basis of a superficial analysis of the past i.e. that because there has been immigration in the past which has turned out all right, it will be so in the future without really analysing what made it successful in the past, whether we're doing the same things now or whether there are qualitative differences now or wishful thinking about the sorts of people we're letting into the country or, most disgracefully, ad hominem attacks on those raising such concerns. I exclude you from this Alex. At least you're trying to engage sensibly in this topic. Thank you.

Fergus Pickering

October 28th, 2009 5:13pm Report this comment

A tiny number of muslim extremists? What number would you say that was? How many muslims think 9/11 was engineered by the Jews. A tiny number? How many muslims have som sympathy with the tube bombings? A tiny number? How mamny muslims think that sharia law should be extended in this country? A tiny number? How many muslims supported the fatwa agains Salman Rushdie? A tiny number? How many muslims have some sympathy with honour killings? A tiny number? How many muslims think homosexual behaviour should be punished by death? A tiny number? What do you think, Mr Massie?

daniel maris

October 28th, 2009 7:34pm Report this comment

Philip Walker -

The problem with your definition is it defines as "native Brits" people who conspire to bomb this country, don't use English as their main language, and despise most of their fellow countrymen.

I personally would avoid the term "native Brits". What I would say though is that a phrase like "true Brit" or "true Englishman/woman" does mean something. It means an emotional attachment to this country, its culture and its institutions. More formally we need the concept of citizenship - and citizens of a democratic society should be loyal to their country.

Tokyo Pete

October 28th, 2009 8:46pm Report this comment

Other advanced democracies in the world have had the intelligence to reject multiculturalism for example Japan and South Korea.

It is time for the British people to wake up to the fact that multiculturalism is not inevitable in modern society as the left would like you to believe.

A policy of very strict immigration controls to maintain ethnic uniformity is NOT the demand of an extremist - are the people and leaders of Japan extremists - no of course they are not.

Simon Denis

October 28th, 2009 10:50pm Report this comment

First, to thank Mr Massie for his courteous, detailed and elegant reply. As so many have responded to his remarks already, I will not go back over old ground. Suffice it to say that I remain sceptical of the benefits of immigration into Britain on the current scale. Absorbtion of the kind to which Mr Massie refers can only take place, I submit, when the host society is both confident and predominant. Britain, at the moment, is neither and despite Mr Massie's intellectually supple defence of at once playing down the numbers and playing up the advantages of current immigration, there remains at least a tension if not a contradiction in his view. At this point the argument comes down to statistics. I wish only to offer a warning: when a body is soaked beyond a certain point it dissolves. I very much fear that the dissolution of Britain and a state of Arnoldian "anarchy", is on the cards. The increasing population of newcomers has now little or nothing into which it can assimilate, even supposing it wants to and so they take on the character of settlers rather than immigrants, preserving their collective profile in closed communities on larger and larger chunks of English land. Do the Leicester or the Bradford of today, admirable though they may be, truly represent something one can call England? One way round the problem might have been - had our intake been duly variegated - to become a mini-USA, in which the host culture is deliberately civic and "thin", a mere platform of essential liberalism on which private religions and identities could flourish as so many "cultures" on a socially clinical watch glass. Alas, as Mark Steyn has pointed out, Europe has allowed one culture above all others to loom large in its recent intake - Islam. Now, I do not condemn this religion out of hand. The Quilliam Foundation and other such movements offer us genuine hope. That said, who can deny that the "open door" has allowed generations of British muslims to avoid precisely the redefinition of Islamic values that Quilliam represents? And who can deny that this makes even the platform of essential, US style liberalism distinctly uneven and shaky? Finally, as an old Tory - Jacobite, if you will, for I hate the Reformation and all the Cromwells - I am sorry that the American hotel should have replaced what Sir Jonathan Sacks refers to as the British "Country House" model of assimilation, but it is now, very possibly, our only hope. Old England, that intimate society, that treasure trove of solemn memories and haunting losses, that precious achievement of accumulation, repair and rescue carried out over the centuries, has been broken. Who can really dismiss this as just another change?

daniel maris

October 29th, 2009 12:45am Report this comment

Simon Dennis says:

"The increasing population of newcomers has now little or nothing into which it can assimilate, even supposing it wants to and so they take on the character of settlers rather than immigrants, preserving their collective profile in closed communities on larger and larger chunks of English land."

This is a very good and a very important point. And it relates to the issue of what you might call the "Shariah constituency". Muslims might be a relatively small minority - some 2 million in the UK out of 60 million - about 3%. But in our urban areas they are not a small minority within a larger fairly homogenous majority culture. They are a minority surrounded by other, smaller minorities. They are what you might call a superminority. It is easy for them to have a major impact within urban areas in the UK. You have to look at the whole picture and the whole picture is one of an increasingly fragmented society with the Muslim minority the most confident and largest sector within urban society in many parts of the UK.

I would add that looking at migrant numbers is also not part of the whole story. If you have migrant communities who fail to adopt English as their main language, who retain old customs, refuse to mix with the rest of society but whose rate of demographic growth outstrips the average, then that is a form of "internal" immigration or continued immigration. This is why we now find that over 50% of primary school children in Inner London don't have English as their mother tongue.

Someone mentioned compound interest, and it is all very relevant here, as is the inevitable political pressure that will build up for relaxation of immigration controls as the migrant/post-migrant population becomes larger and larger.

I find it amazing that commentators like Mr Massie don't see the dangers ahead - not at some far distance point, but in the next couple of decades.

And let us never forget that in the jet age population levels can change very quickly. Just five jumbo jets a day can move half a million people a year, or 5 million in a decade. There is every prospect of the non-migrant population in the UK voting with its air tickets if conditions do deteriorate - with people heading off to Spain, USA, Cyprus, Australia, Canada etc. We could easily see outflows of a million a year - 10 million in a decade, 20 million in two decades.

The character of the UK could change very quickly.

Beer Moth

October 29th, 2009 6:23pm Report this comment

I'm sorry Doc but it's still just so much wishful guff.

One major flaw in your stats is that illegals generally don't appear on census returns. The real figures will be higher - I would argue, much higher - than the ones which are used here as evidence of our assured future.

We are not in a situation here, of enrichment by augmentation. We are undergoing elimination by displacement; a tried and tested method of Imperial Islam: move in, breed up, push out.

Why would the recent rapid expansion of the muslim population, come to some kind of gentle easing? What is there to hinder the steepening curve of its trajectory? Nothing. The cities have now been won and the next 20 years will see the spilling out into the shires. It is to happen.

Good-night ladies, good-night, good-night.

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