There’s a street in Leicester where nearly half the residents don’t speak English to a decent level. Ben Leo of GB News recently went there to explore what that meant in practice. True to the statistics, almost nobody could speak English well enough to have a conversation, from a middle-aged Portuguese man to the Indian father who admitted to not being able to speak the language after a decade here. The only flag to be found flying there was Palestine’s, whilst the local advertising billboards were for One Nation, an Islamic charity from Batley in West Yorkshire. In the end, Leo had to, in his words, ‘scarper’ after a local got upset with them filming.
It’s important to reduce the stocks of immigrants who are already here
This reveals the scale of the challenge facing Britain when it comes to immigration. Although net migration dropped to 431,000 in 2024, a 50 per cent reduction on the year before, that still means higher levels than before Brexit. This is also net migration, which means the number you get when you subtract the number of those leaving from those coming. In gross terms, a staggering 948,000 people came here last year, with around 81 per cent of those were non-EU nationals. Some have discussed the idea of ‘net zero immigration’. But even if the government restricted immigration so that there were only as many immigrants as emigrants, that would still mean half a million could have come last year. For context, that would be ten times the total number of Huguenots who fled Louis XIV’s persecution to Britain in the seventeenth century.
Although most discussion focuses on the numbers coming and going, often called ‘flows’ by academics, the lack of English language skills even among long-term residents highlights the need to also look at those who are settled here, called ‘stocks’. To look at Leicester again, around 40 per cent of the population were born overseas, with the largest group at 16.2 per cent being those born in India. Unsurprisingly, 24 per cent of people in Leicester did not identify with any of the British nationalities. The city is already majority-minority. Around 60 per cent of the population hails from an ethnic minority.
In 2022 riots broke out in the city, after footage of a brawl following an India-Pakistan cricket match spread online. In the end, 32 people were convicted for their role in the sectarian fight between Muslims and Hindus. Some blamed the scale of recent immigration, claiming that many newly arrived Indians were strong supporters of Modi and had brought Hindu nationalist ideas with them. That is an oversimplification, as a only minority, if a significant one, of British Indians are Modi supporters, including those born here. In the 2024 general election, Leicester East elected Shivani Raja, a Hindu, as their first Conservative MP in several decades. It was the only seat the Tories gained.
Indeed, the 2021 Census revealed that one in six people in Britain were born overseas. That is 16.8 per cent of the population. By comparison, it was around 14 per cent in the United States in 1905, at the peak of the Ellis Island period, synonymous with the USA becoming an immigrant nation. We tend to think of that in romantic terms but it is telling that one of the most common genres of film tackling the subject are those that deal with organised crime, like The Godfather Part II. The Mafia was a product of mass immigration. It was concerns over issues like that which led to restrictions winning out in the 1920s.
Despite that, the actor Charles Bronson, born to poor Lithuanian immigrants in a mining town in Pennsylvania in 1921, once said that he spoke ‘broken English‘ before he was drafted by the US Army to fight in the Second World War. With so much of his town made up of recent immigrants, learning English was difficult. Some other soldiers assumed that Bronson was a foreigner. Reducing the flows of new immigrants into the USA helped but it still took time to assimilate the stocks of existing immigrants and their children. The war also helped, as it brought all parts of American society together, giving them a common cause and a shared set of experiences. Nonetheless, it was still a long process. Britain should understand well, considering the issues caused by support for the IRA among some Irish-Americans within living memory.
To avoid Britain becoming an ‘island of strangers’, as the Prime Minister recently warned, it’s important to stop the flows of new immigrants and also to reduce the stocks of immigrants who are already here. Extending the time period required for Indefinite Leave to Remain from five to ten years is a good start. Experience shows that we are far too generous with allowing people to settle. We gave a Hamas chief British citizenship and a council house. That will soon be put to the test, as a petition to reverse the change has reached the threshold for it to be debated in Parliament.
The government should begin to discuss the demographic makeup of the country and set a target for what the foreign-born population of the country should be. Considering that people think immigration on average was around 70,000 a year, far lower than reality, this would be a more meaningful benchmark for the level of immigration there is democratic consent for. It would encourage the government to think about immigration’s long term consequences. Doing so would make the assimilation of immigrants a much more plausible prospect.
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