I’m pretty confident the author hasn’t served in an army. It is amusing to see a picture of what is essentially an army field kitchen captioned with “This is not what an invasion looks like.” That is exactly what an invasion looks like: tents for cooking, tents for sleeping, tents for messing. A stilted, wretched human flow is exactly what a successful invasion becomes.
Now let’s get stuck into some numbers. A tricky subject for most opinion writers and one entirely ignored by the author who nonetheless makes some wild claims that can only be rooted in numbers. “Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically”. Let’s see shall we?
UK GDP per capita has collapsed since mass immigration took off. In 2007 it stood at $50,600. It has fallen to $46,300 last year. (I use dollars because it is the reserve currency against which everything is valued, including the commodities we depend on to survive. Even in Sterling terms it has stagnated. Both are unprecedented in the last 200 years.) This is the denominator effect: the number of people is growing faster than the productive parts of the economy. This should hardly be surprising when the productive capital assets of the UK economy have hardly grown.
The other part of the equation explaining why immigration is undermining real economic growth is actually included in the article. Ali. Not Ali personally. But Ali typifies someone desperate to get paid work and – thanks to his background – he will work for a pittance both inside and outside the formal economy doing low and no-skilled work. Ali is not improving productivity; Ali will fill a role that investment and productivity improvement would have filled like it had done in the previous 150 years of increasing labour costs. But not now. Thanks to stagnating labour costs, the economic miracle of rising living standards has been choked off by an infinite supply of labour both locally and globally.
Very well said. I have often claimed that mass migration is responsible for the “fall in productivity” that has happened in the last 20 years. This works on two levels: First, flooding the labour market with unskilled labour reduces the need for mechanisations that would improve unit capita productivity. Second, since the majority are unskilled, they are not able to perform high value tasks that require training and many years of education.
As such, there is a downward pressure on productivity from two forces, both of which are sizeable but never discussed.
So true. But as with Brexit, climate change/Net Zero and the Welfarist culture, independent free thinking analysis of mass migration simply does not exist within the University Fear Factories or Leftist State. Groupthink prevails and is ruthlessly enforced. So we have only read about the joys and cultural benefits of uncontrolled mass migration and an extra 10 million people. Even as the debate reached a crescendo with the 12000 Albanians on a beach farce, no one paused to reflect on the Manchester Arena revelations unfolding that same week. The Truth is buried here in the UK. Unherd makes us feel free. But we are not.
I really agree with your response to the article and it is striking to note the cost of unstructured immigration. “Ali” will work in the black economy, contribute very little, if anything, and it is dreadfully sad that this abuse happens. It is a form of modern slavery that the liberal/left don’t seem to accept. We simply cannot help everyone and our social services are crashing under their weight. What I would like to hear is some practical ideas to stop this invasion.
What I would like to hear is some practical ideas to stop this invasion.
The only solution is to make it clear that no illegal immigrant will ever be offered asylum or the right to stay in Britain. If you allow anyone to enter illegally and stay, people will always chance their arm.
The way to do it is to arrest every arrival and charge them with illegal entry (as is currently law). Then detain them (preferably in an offshore facility so as not to overwhelm the domestic prison system) until they can be a) deported to their country of origin or b) transferred to Rwanda (or similar) where they can apply for asylum with our blessing.
We should only take in refugees on official schemes where asylum is offered before they travel here. We already take 10k from UNHCR refugee camps plus the HK, Afghan and Ukraine schemes. That is surely enough.
If this is deemed to not meet our international commitments, then override the commitments.
They can’t be charged with illegal entry, Matt, because surprisingly there is no such criminal offence. The remedy for unauthorised immigration is deportation but the combination of the Human Rights Act, Modern Slavery Act, activist lawyers and lefty opinion makes that almost impossible.
Worse, a recent Supreme Court ruling states that people landing on a beach from a rubber boat have to be treated as arriving passengers who just happen to have missed the entrance to Dover Harbour.
I don’t know whether ‘the law is an ass’, but it appears that Supreme Court judges certainly are.
As for the lawyers retained by people turning up on the beach or climbing out of lorries; they are, in my opinion, totally unscrupulous, and it is surely against the interests of the country that they should be financed by legal aid. This has to be paid for by taxpayers, and is therefore not a ‘human right’ as is free speech.
I believe it is illegal to set out in a boat with intent to cross the Channel without first informing and receiving permission from the relevant maritime authorities of both France and the UK.
And you don’t even mention the effect mass immigration has on inelastic goods and services like housing, health, schooling etc. If 21st Century Britain was a “nightwatchmen state” like the USA in the late 19th Century, mass immigration might be a boon (though it might not be for the reasons you explain). But it isn’t. It is an expensive and complicated welfare state. Adding unlimited numbers of new people – most of whom will never become net tax contributors – to a system of rationed provision will lead inevitably to long waiting lists and severe drops in the quality of service.
As for housing, we cannot build a third of the number of new houses needed for new arrivals every year. Is it any wonder that prices are many times earnings?
Yes, well pointed out. The author fails to mention that not only is GDP per capita less now than it was10 years ago, but that other things, like average house prices, over that same period, have nearly doubled (and in London and the South East they have more than doubled).
This is before the messier affair of assessing the impact on healthcare, schools and infrastructure.
In short, in the last 10 years we have become a lot poorer and are housing affordability has halved. In that time we are told that the 5 million new migrants have been an “unquestionable good”.
There is no counterfactual argument I have seen which attempts to model house prices, wages and other goods in the absence of mass migration. And without this alternative case, it is impossible to make any case for a net benefit of migration.
Even the USA in the late 19th century restricted immigration, once it recognised the problems is caused, vetted those who entered for health, and it didn’t feel its had to pay for their welfare.
Well said Nell. And what David has failed to mention and possibly doesn’t even perceive as a problem, he being a male, is that these are all feral men, i.e. men without a society and/or community behind them. Men have ‘needs’ so men claim and history shows us how they satisfie those ‘needs’ when we look at the aftermath of war and natural disasters like earthquakes. The facts are appalling. When the social net work that holds men together, when it crumbles they become feral, then men f**k their way out of their despair. It’s not a secret. We women all know this and so do the men, although mostly in denial when confronted. War famine earthquakes are all followed by men seeing to their ‘needs’. These very nice good men in their tents in Calais are potentially dangerous to women, that’s a fact. Had you been a young or even middle aged female or possibly old female (regard the sacking of Berlin when the Russians arrived. Those men were fathers, brothers, sons, but they raped! As do many men when outside of social restrictions, i.e. feral men. Wondering around those camps alone you most likely would not have returned in the condition you arrived had you been female. Furthermore, these men are not from cultures that have an understanding of the freedom Western women have. They ‘know’ that Western women and girls are free to have sex as they wish. This being a very strange concept for these men, they mis-translate as free free for them to use. This is being played out across the country outside girls’ schools and night clubs. Added to that, the world has full knowledge of the ‘grooming’ a euphemism for rape gangs, and this country’s denial if it, and consequently our country’s seeming condolence of it. Yes, every other country knows about the Muslim rape gangs, every country except this one whereby most people unbelievably have never heard anything about this. This must read as offensive to nicely brought up men! But this is an elephant that sits in plain view, that most men cannot see, sadly including David P. .
Great comment, on a subject that many look away from. It’s happening right now in the Ukraine too.
Did i also detect an element of misogyny in the article regarding Suella Braverman? Whether or not, she is absolutely not regarded as a laughing stock outside the liberal lefty circles. I wish her luck in her attempts to stem the tide of what you rightly describe as feral men. The author should be more than just ashamed of himself for pandering to them. His conclusions are intellectually, but more importantly, morally bankrupt.
We should stop apologising for speaking the truth. This is how we got into this mess in the first place. By speaking up and saying that this is not right, and it isn’t, you are doing everyone a favour Elaine. German women suffered unspeakable suffering at the hands of allied soldiers and their “needs”, back then the left swept it under the carpet so as to not distract from the holocaust. This was wrong back then and it is wrong now.
What I am discovering more and more is that women tend to be the big losers of this leftist agenda. Be it rape gangs or transactivists, or whatever comes around next. Women seem to cop it harder than men do and this is not acceptable. Women are our mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, aunts, cousins, neighbours, friends, colleagues, or even some of the people you encounter during your day. Keep speaking Elaine, and we are with you.
Peter, Thank you. Women do have an extra issue to deal with in wars, and in other situations when society breaks down. They, like men have the bombs, then the guns, but for women there is also the rape. It has always been so no matter who the army is. Rape and Pillage we learned about from our school books by Virgil, an odd choice of book for school children!. Still little did we know that the “Rape of the Sabine women” was not history but the usual when it comes to war, etc. As in another comment above, it’s happening in the Ukraine now. It must never be hushed up. Its good to read here of men who do not want it hidden. Again, thank you all who have supported my comment. It was so blatantly obvious that no women could have carried out the journey in which David P engaged.
There is also all the deserted wives and children back home. How many of these men will conveniently forget they have a family? how many women are in despair because the breadwinner has disappeared? I’m sure some will te-unite, but I am also sure many won’t.
GDP per capita has grown if at all much more slowly than before 2008-9, but the value of Sterling against the Dollar has fallen by enough to account for the dollar reduction in GDP. How does this square with your claim that it is a ‘denominator effect’?
To repeat myself, I also referred to Sterling GDP per capita – as you agree – stagnating for 15 years. Between dollar fall and Sterling GDP per capita stagnating, my original comment covers the span of numbers from the truly abysmal to the just awful: stagnation for 15 years is unprecedented in 200 years of economic history. Gross GDP has grown, per capita has not, which means it is a denominator effect coupled with productivity stagnation.
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago
“Braverman is a laughing stock: she is crass and insensitive and politically obtuse. She warned of a looming “invasion”. What I saw in Calais was many things, but it was not an invasion; it was stilted, wretched human flow.
But she is not wrong when she says Albanians are coming over — often illegally and under false pretences — to engage in criminal activity.”
The author writes from direct experience of his subject matter but is totally biased and incoherent in his analysis. Braverman is only a laughing stock to those who enjoy seeing her shackled by refugee conventions and UK slavery legislation and a dysfunctional Home office Civil-service that is not fit for purpose. Why should she be sensitive and chose a more mealy mouthed description for the influx of Albanians and others who are coming illegally to “engage in criminal activity” as the author admits.
Of course she is not going to be able to resolve a long-standing problem that has festered for some years in a matter of months. It is going to take considerable time and effort against the entrenched attitudes of the Home office machinery to achieve a resolution to the complex problems of repelling the illegitimate migrants and speedily processing the few legitimate refugees that ought to be settled in the UK rather than elsewhere in the world. The author ought to at least pretend to give Braveman a chance of trying to resolve the difficult problems she faces in this area instead of dishing out gratuitous insults.
At present the UK has all the cultural enrichment from abroad that it can manage it doesn’t need to import more friendly hard working drug dealers.
It seems to me that the uk can not support the welfare bills these people will incur with the present taxation base but the left and the ‘compassionate class’ just don’t get this fact
They are like rebellious teenagers complaining about everything and believing themselves to be morally superior whilst expecting someone else to pay the bills.
Is that migrants or us, the home population, you are referring to?
Who is and who is not paying the bills for what? A cheap question requiring an expensive response, perhaps?
Sam Brown
1 year ago
It is an invasion. Most are economic migrants and they are already in a safe country. There is no justification for their actions and they are not victims, they are willing customers of the people smugglers. I feel sorry for the hundreds of millions nay billions of people worldwide who have a lesser life than they might have in the UK but life isn’t fair, was never meant to be fair and never will be fair and we, the British people, do not owe everybody who wants it a better life. And that is the reality.
Yes, I agree. So do we simply let everyone who wants to come arrive here unhindered? The UK is 23,600+ sq kms. France is 543,000+ sq kms. How do we fit in all the people who believe it will be better for them to live in these states?
It’s worse than the areas make it look as I suspect most of the migrants intend to settle in the South East. I can’t see many schlepping to Wales or Scotland.
unfortunately our FM will tell them that there is a welcome in the hillside but us deplorables won’t have it. We have more than enough homeless and unemployed with out addng to the burden already imposed on the ratepayers. Suella Braverman’s descripton “It’s an invasion” is absolutely correct.
Please listen to yourself. Or if you can’t, try thinking about all those lovely TV programmes like “A Place in the Sun” or even whooping it up and gorging ‘all you can eat and drink” foreign holidays well above your pay grade at home.
There’s a world of difference between considering just who is really benefitting from mass migration of cheap labour and mouthing ugly contempt for fellow human beings whose rights you consider by nature inferior to your own.
Would also suggest thinking a little harder why it was only the UK government that pushed for early and greater FOM from new member countries and also did not bother to apply limitations to length and conditions of stay permissible by EU law.
How gangs of workers were often recruited by some UK employers also might also make one feel a little less superior and even inclined to redirect one’s anger on behalf of unprotected economic migrants and towards those who really benefit from the miserable situation affecting us all in our different ways.
Rob N
1 year ago
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain”
I disagree. Some immigration has benefited the original Brits and their families but we would have been better off with NO immigration. We did not learn to make full use of our own people but instead got in cheaper, harder working immigrants who pushed even more of our native workforce out of work and into a semi permanent underclass.
Immigration has also massively increased the population both pushing up house prices and reducing the ‘green and pleasant land’. It has also weakened societal strength and caused massive criminal problems.
It might have been hard to learn to stand on our own 2 feet, rather than importing workers, but it would have been a much better long term policy. The problem is that the wealthy/establishment want their cheap workers, boosted economy now while the rest of us look for quality of life and a reasonable income.
Here in Australia, the big companies love to bring in workers from overseas. They are not interested in training up Australian youth. Our Universities are not interested in supporting this concept either. They are more interested in bringing in overseas students who pay full fees. They only do this as a ticket into the country. My experience with these students is that they see themselves are entitled to stay here, they have little regard for local students, even less regard for our culture. Many Anglo Aussies are strung out on welfare for generations. They are becoming less literate, some even illiterate. It is very scary how we ignore our own people .
Large scale migration is a short term stopgap at best but the price paid on the locals is horrendous. The current climate towards Anglo Australians is unbearable. We are seen as racist invaders. Our cultural heritage is being torn down. Our kids are being taught that we are thieves and murderers. Migrants often claim discrimination when in fact they hate us. Our bureaucrats are so left wing that they consider only non white people to be culturally and linguistically diverse. “If people come from Europe, they don’t count” (Exact words from the meeting I was in! I fought against it and lost and no longer work for our public service anymore)
We see that white people are disappearing from our screens and being replaced by non-white people. Every couple in our ads are mixed race or non white. All in the name of diversity. This is only found in white cultures. The time has come to stand up for ourselves before it is too late. The writer of the piece, David Patrikarakos, is standing up for his people (or his mum’s) and good on him for doing so. But we should also stick up for our people as well, it is only fair. I forsee that the day is coming where it will be harder and harder for Anglo Aussies to get ahead and so it would be nice to have somewhere where I can exist.
Norman Powers
1 year ago
To summarize the article: despite extreme political bias and an apparently desperate attempt to not find what Braverman was talking about, he found it easily anyway.
I don’t think we learned anything from reading this. Pretty puzzlingly low quality, given it’s in unherd.
Last edited 1 year ago by Norman Powers
Matt M
1 year ago
It is illegal to enter Britain except through an official port with the correct paperwork.
All illegal immigrants should be arrested, detained and deported either to their country of origin or, in exceptional circumstances, to Rwanda where they can claim asylum.
We should make it clear in law that no international agreement will be applied and we should not pay a penny in legal aid to any foreigner.
We should sack any Home Office employee or Border Force agent who does not fall in line.
If parliament refuses to pass any required legislation or the Supreme Court blocks any part of the plan, Sunak must call an election and put the plan to the people.
The biggest challenge is that the people smugglers tell their willing passengers to discard their identity documents to make it impossible to deport them. Having just had a personal light bulb moment, the solution is to get Rwanda operational and then make it plain that anyone arriving on our shores without official identification documents will automatically be processed in Rwanda. Those that do have documents can then be processed and deported if not genuine asylum candidates. We must also change the law on modern slavery to shut down the excuse used by all of the Albanians that they are being trafficked.
I had that light bulb moment a few months ago Sam – it took me a while too. Rwanda and other incentivised countries need to be the final destination for illegal immigrants whose country of origin cannot be identified or where it can but it is unsafe to return them there (like a warzone).
But the problem isn’t only destroyed documents. Even when we can establish their country of origin, many countries take ages to supply us with the necessary paperwork for the repatriation. All the while the illegal immigrant is living in Britain and then when the deportation finally can take place, lawyers swarm in to say that they have now established a life in this country and are having their human rights infringed.
To solve this we need to keep all illegal immigrants in detention centres until they are deported. This really needs to be done offshore otherwise we overwhelm the domestic prison system. People have suggested Scottish islands, the Falklands, the Ascension islands and old cruise ships moored up somewhere. Or all of the above.
Either way you should never step foot in the UK, you should be held without any means of appeal until deportation to your own country or Rwanda becomes available.
If you want to claim asylum in this country, it needs to be through an official scheme and agreed before you a travel here. We take 10k or so a year directly from UNHRC refugee camps and thousands more Ukrainians, BMO Hong Kongers and Afghanis who worked with the British army. Surely that is sufficient.
My view is the total number of LEGAL immigrants – including work visas, family re-unions and refugees – should be half the number of new houses built in the previous year.
So that should have been 88k in 2022.
The actual number of legal immigrants in 2021 was 230k (plus probably 50k illegals).
Last edited 1 year ago by Matt M
Prashant Kotak
1 year ago
“…In Britain, her incompetence manifests as chaos…”
Having a go at Braverman is fashion of the month: a pop at her of some description is pretty much mandatory it seems, to indicate you are amongst the right-on, even if you are then forced to acknowledge she may be right about some things. I know very little about Braverman, but one thing I do know is that she has been in position hardly any time at all, so what exactly is the basis of attributing incompetence to her? Her ‘crime’ is that she hasn’t managed to make any dent in a few weeks, into a problem no one has managed to solve in decades?
The author is in effect accusing her of inflammatory language when pussyfooting language has been shown to be completely ineffective for years on end. But I don’t care about language sensitivities, I care if can do a job or not, and only a decent period of time can yield that answer.
I agree, I can only hope she is up to what is demanded now Time will tell.Good luck to her – no one can envy her the job ahead.
Aaron James
1 year ago
Why is this allowed? It is a crime to illegally enter a Nation you have no permission to enter. Turning your immigration Policy over to Criminal Cartels – criminally wrong of the Government to do this; they should be charged for abetting a crime. It is expected that after tomorrow’s election, if/when the Congress flips Republican Biden will be impeached because he intentionally has the border open and well over 4 million illegals have entered. That is in violation of his oath of office to uphold the laws of the Nation.
”Then there is the wider picture. Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially.”
Sure…. I left London in the 1970s and have been returning since, it is depressing to have watched the changes in my old parts. I challenge your ‘Unquestionably’ – I question it. It could have greatly been positive – only there was almost no consideration given for the most part on Who this immigration is made up of. Some groups of immigrants fill the ranks of the professionals, some rather the opposite – and basically this writer treats those groups as interchangeable, as the same thing.
Skilled migrants who have the ability do work that is not being met by locals because that skill takes a long time to learn, and pays well – Good. Citizens marrying outside the Nation, children of citizens born outside the nation, that makes total sense. The rest – that should be only based on a thorough demographic study proving immigrants are needed – and then the best should be selected.
Why does the West put the immigrant first, and their own people last?
“Why does the West put the immigrant first, and their own people last?”
Because we are ruled by a shower of lickspittle, bed-wetting spastics. Isn’t it obvious?
Rather because the establishment don’t want skilled workers who might compete with them and their families but cheap labour to clean their houses and work in their fields. Stuff the local workforce!
Surely we are all asking this quesion. Where do we find a govt with the answer?
Stephen Walsh
1 year ago
“Back in the country that welcomed them in the mid-Seventies, Braverman is a laughing stock: she is crass and insensitive and politically obtuse”. What does “them” mean in this context? There is a word for treating people differently, and attempting to stigmatise them, linked to their ethnic background. Suella Braverman wasn’t even born in the mid-Seventies. But her parents sought sanctuary in the UK precisely because it was different to the east African countries which were at that time expelling their relatively small but high performing British Indian origin populations. It had a western political culture, a strong collective identity, a common language and culture, a rules based immigration process, and an efficient legal system accessible to all regardless of ethnicity. Open borders can result in host societies losing their own defining characteristics.
Last edited 1 year ago by Stephen Walsh
Hugh Bryant
1 year ago
Immigration hasn’t ‘unquestionably’ benefited Britain. It has benefited the asset rich whilst pauperising wage earners and rent payers.
That’s the essential problem: the people who profit from immigration are not the ones who pay for it.
Indeed. The rich can live cosseted lives very far away from the impact of the policies they insist the rest of us have to put up with.
Arkadian X
1 year ago
Interesting article, but I find the conclusion unfair. You say,
“In Britain, [Braverman’s] incompetence manifests as chaos: in Dover, where migrant centres have been firebombed; in London, where migrants have been dumped alone in the streets; and in Westminster, where the Government shows no sign of solving this crisis.”
One way or another Braverman has been home secretary for 5 minutes. The fault, if you like, lies with her numerous predecessors and the Tory government in general.
What is Braverman supposed to do? Even acknowledging there is a problem causes (some noisy) people to scream in horror. If/when there is a change in government do you think things will change accordingly for the better?
Before he was DPP Kier Starmer was a QC who specialised in challenging the government’s attempts to deter illegal immigration. For instance, in 2002, he overturned legislation introduced by David Blunkett and passed by parliament to stop the payment of benefits to bogus asylum seekers. He got the High Court to override the law because it contravened the ECHR rules.
In short, the leader of the opposition is in favour of unlimited immigration into the UK. So no, a change of government will not make things better (God knows I would vote for them if I thought it would).
Matt, There is no doubt that the Labour party and the Tories are both as keen to fill the country up with cheap labour. In fact the Labour Party depends on the Muslim vote. Bring it on.
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
“Moderation in all things” is what the Ancient Greeks advised, and in this we have singularly FAILED.
The arrival of reasonable numbers of Huguenots in the 17th century and Jews in the 19th century was mutually beneficial, but the tidal wave of mass immigration that has occurred over the last fifteen years is simply unsustainable, and will ”end in tears”, and our grandchildren will rightly curse us.
The phrase “Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain” is such a blunt statement as to be meaningless.
It’s like saying, “having people in good health has clearly benefited the economy.”
The lazyness of this statement obscures the complexity that must be discussed. How much immigration is beneficial? Over what period of time? With what costs to the economy versus tax dollars accrued? In which sectors?
Without specifying hard numbers on these parameters the author is saying nothing in a roundabout way.
It’s a leftist thing. Say something nebulous with authority. Hard facts are not relevant or required when virtue signalling. To call into question the veracity of some activists mewlings invariably brings hostiles squawks of racism/phobia. This is as sure as night follows day.
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
What is neo Pythonesque about this unfunny farce, is that whereas every air traveller is subjected to asinine and pointless ” security checks” and having their shampoo confiscated, and belts and shoes removed, the self same people whom these checks were supposed to filter out ( but don’t as we cannot say that Islamists are the target!) are welcomed in, given money and homes!
Our government could, at the drop of a hat, put both specialist contractors and special forces on the case, undercover, and ” seek and destroy” the people trafficking criminals… but they do not… why!
22 SAS should NOT be wasting its time in Syria & Afghanistan, but should be ‘hunting down’ these so called people smugglers and destroying them at source.
After all who can possibly stop them? All it needs is the WILL!
I am a loss to understand writers of articles such as this. Many British citizens are living in damp, inadequate housing. Others are living in bed and breakfast accommodation because councils simply have nowhere else to put them. there are 5000+ homeless people in London alone. 7 million people are on NHS waiting lists and getting an appointment to see a GP is very difficult. Children are being bussed across their home counties to find a school place because refugee children have taken their place. In face of this, the author seems to imply that we should welcome even more people, many of them simply economic migrants who prefer Britain to other places. Where is his concern for British people living desperate lives in the country of their birth?
Pat Rowles
1 year ago
I could not help but think about how my own family once made the journey from Iran to Europe. But it was on a plane and not an illegal fishing boat, and they ended up not in a tent by the side of the road but in a house they bought in North London.
Yes, of course! It’s as if they’re the same thing, isn’t it?
Richard Craven
1 year ago
IT’S BECAUSE OF THE NUMBERS, YOU T1T. GET IT INTO YOUR THICK HEAD THAT WE HAVE A HOUSING CRISIS MORPHING INTO AN EMERGENCY, OUR PUBLIC SERVICES ARE OVERWHELMED, AND OUR C2DE’S ARE BEING PRICED OUT OF THE LABOUR MARKET. AND YOU SIT IN YOUR COSY HIPSTER OFFICE BLAMING BRAVERMAN FOR WANTING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Oh *that’s* the reply you mentioned above! I imagine you banging your head against the screen as you were typing. Nothing wrong with a bit of emotion in my opinion.
I would normally detest people who use all caps…but this issue has become so ridiculous, the duplicity of many of our politicians and home office workers so obvious…most of us would be in the position where turn the CAPS on and just rant at the idiocy.
Samuel Ross
1 year ago
Human scum, tricksters, traitors, trampsters, all huckstering their way into the lovely emerald isle of Britain. Okay, I’m kidding. Fact is, everyone wants to come to Britain, but there is a hard limit to how many people the island can support. Them’s facts, and you can’t argue with facts! 😉
jules Ritchie
1 year ago
Did anyone listen to Tony Abbott, once the PM of Australia and take his advice on how to handle illegal immigration? If you act deliberately and forcefully,you only need a short period before people smugglers lose their ability to sell their story of hope. If the media reports on the turn-backs and the deportations then the problem slowly melts away. Good luck to Suella Braverman, I wouldn’t have her job for quids as we say here in Oz.
There is a excellent discussion on how the Aussies dealt with their illegals problem on Triggernometry. The interview is with Helen Dale and is titled ‘Can We Solve the Migrant Crisis?’
Arnold Grutt
1 year ago
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially”
Some immigration, perhaps. But it would still be nice to find out what the author defines as a ‘benefit’.
By the way his immediate flushing with anger when told there was no WiFi is one reason that some of us are sceptical about the happy mixing of cultures. In my idea of ‘culture’ no one has a de facto right to be accepted into any private space, if the owner of that space does not wish it. No explanation is required, nor does any such explanation offered have to be ‘honest’. That to me is one of the cornerstones of British civilisation. It is not a ‘fault’ or ‘offensive’. Unfortunately ‘human rights’ has foisted people on other people, often forcibly, regardless of whether or not they want to mix with or become friendly with them (e.g. in legislation designed to outlaw all-male clubs or organisations) or employ them (e.g. through legislation about ‘diversity’ in ‘the workplace’).
Last edited 1 year ago by Arnold Grutt
Daniel Lee
1 year ago
Right. There’s no invasion. Third World economic migrants aren’t thronging every border in Europe to enter illegally. None of this is happening. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Note: We will not solve world poverty by evacuating the Third World to the First.
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 year ago
“Then there is the wider picture. Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially.”
That statement is simply not true on any level and this article is proof of that
You are so correct in this. The tax base can not support the extensive welfare system even for those oborn in the UK. It can never support the Illegal immigrants as well.
Alphonse Pfarti
1 year ago
If he’s looking for the ‘hordes of Albanians’, might I suggest investigating the supply chains for heroin and cocaine to our provincial towns? Presumably they’ll be less willing to talk than the one he finds here, of course.
I had to remind myself that Robert Fisk is no longer alive after reading this.
Toby B
1 year ago
These types of articles are nauseating. The ‘human story’ is designed to elicit sympathy for these people and therefore (I imagine) overcome our objections to taking in more of them. Of course there’s no consideration given to the effects on the UK or – horror of horrors – the actual wishes of the UK population. We’re just supposed to welcome them all. It’s ridiculous.
Sure, I expect some of these people smile and offer their soup. I don’t care. I really don’t. I expect a lot of them are nice people. That doesn’t mean they are entitled to live here. We’ve had far too much immigration already. Time to stop these ridiculous numbers coming in every year.
jules Ritchie
1 year ago
The author is having a joke surely…’ Suella is a laughing stock, crass… etc’. She’s been in the job for five minutes. Most illegals will never have heard of her. Give it a rest Patikarakos. What a joke!
James Kirk
1 year ago
This article belongs in The Guardian. A sympathetic nod to a pending wannabe drug dealer; no suspicion of fleeing murderers thieves or rapists hiding among those desperate and gullible enough to see UK as the promised land. A glance at an online newspaper should dispel that. Oh those wicked Calais restaurateurs, turning away latter day Josephs and Marys from the Inns.
This highlights several things. Are our homegrown criminals sunning themselves by a pool in the Med? We are so lazy we can’t pick our own fruit and veg. Are we sub contracting crime now? The upcoming gang wars will induce mass white flight when they spill over into Islington and similar.
If I tried to deposit €15,000 in my bank they’d like to know where I got it. Do these people do BACS, Paypal? I’d want to carry some self defence with that sort of cash.
How the most vocal EU remain types must hate this snapshot of their beloved empire. I do, I remember happy disembarkations for booze runs, family motoring, camping and caravan holidays back when the world was nice.
Yellowed bug-spattered headlights… GB stickers on bumpers; my father calling them ‘giblets’. Kinder days.
mark revelle
1 year ago
This article is about as intellectually rigorous as a marshmallow. Utter drivel. What is unherd doing printing this tripe?
If the author was paid for it he should give the fee to a good cause such as the Free Speech Union.
Mark, I am so glad that unherd publishes articles (tripe) like these. I have learned so much from the intelligent and well-informed comments which have followed.
Thank you every one for sharing your experience, knowledge and opinions. Brilliant comments!
Agreed Janny. Even if certain articles are relatively incoherent, the comments make up for it.
Dougie Undersub
1 year ago
The author didn’t find many Albanians because most of them come direct from Tirana by minibus on a package deal that delivers them to a waiting boat. If the weather dictates a delay, they wait in Germany or Belgium rather than in Calais.
Stephen Walsh
1 year ago
“Back in the country that welcomed them in the mid-Seventies, Braverman is a laughing stock: she is crass and insensitive and politically obtuse”. What does “them” mean in this context? There is a word for treating people differently, and attempting to stigmatise them, linked to their ethnic background. Suella Braverman wasn’t even born in the mid-Seventies. But her parents sought sanctuary there precisely because it was different to the east African countries which were at that time expelling their relatively small but high performing populations who had originated from British India. It had a western political culture, a strong collective identity, a common language and culture, a rules based immigration process, and an efficient legal system accessible to all regardless of ethnicity. Open borders can result in host societies losing their own defining characteristics.
Jamie Smith
1 year ago
” What I saw in Calais was many things, but it was not an invasion; it was stilted, wretched human flow.” Yes mate. What you saw was the preparations for an invasion.
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially.” Bullshit, Our culture and society was just fine in 1948 before the invasion began.Now it is not our culture. It’s some mongrel codswallop which benefits no one except the invader. We do not benefit from a constant flow of low wage workers pouring into our land. Even if we did, we would prefer to forgo such benefits and live as we, not you, choose, with our own values, our own culture and the sense of ourselves which served us for a thousand years.
Sorry your parents come from a s**t hole but it was their s**t hole.England is ours not theirs, not yours. People with steel in their blood are out on the streets, now, trying to make your homeland better for you. Grow some balls. Go there. Join them. It’s your fight.
Bryan Dale
1 year ago
Braverman has only been in charge for a few weeks and she faces resistance in her own party and from the left wing press. Her goal to send migrants to is the right one, but the Conservative government needs more courage to implement it.
Bob Pugh
1 year ago
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain” I question it!
F Hugh Eveleigh
1 year ago
A somewhat incoherent argument in that arguments put forward don’t complement each other but that aside I think the term ‘invasion’ used as it was by Ms Braverman metaphorically, is perfectly apt. If most of these Albanians are coming over so as to earn money in the drug trade (which will diminish us as a nation even more than we are already diminished) then it has to be stopped. Arrest of the smugglers would be a good start along with the destroying of all unaccounted for inflatable or seaworthy dinghies seen anywhere near the north French coast. France is then left with the problem of what to do and one hopes that the UK will at least assist in any solution on that score provided the French assist us to stop the traffic. We have to return to legal migration and if that puts temporary hold on most migration so be it. We are overwhelmed by illegals in cities and further afield in hotels and our social infrastructure is collapsing as a result.
Colin Elliott
1 year ago
Invasion: “an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity” or “an unwelcome intrusion into another’s domain.”
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain”, to which I will say ” Immigration in numbers far, far greater than ever seen in the past has unquestionably caused problems in Britain, an island already over-populated over much of its surface, especially in the South East.”
“The French try to stop them, but know they cannot.” The French allow them to get into boats, and help them to get away from shore, and then summon British vessels, which were built and are maintained for other purposes, to take them the rest of the way. If they allowed ALL migrants who make it to Britain to be returned, the trade would stop overnight. The patrol boats could then be used to catch those which prefer to land clandestinely, which do not make the news, while the unpaid RNLI crews would not be needed for a task which must be thoroughly demoralising.
The French allow us to return them all. Doh why would they? Would you? We’re quite lucky they make any sort of effort at all.
Of course we used to be able to insist til the ‘hostile’ regime decided to leave the Dublin Agreement in a wonderful example of Taking Back Control. Clowns.
nigel roberts
1 year ago
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially.” — Yes, if you fall for the Great Institutional Narrative. Not so much if you believe the evidence of your own eyes.
William Shaw
1 year ago
The majority of these illegal immigrants are young men who consider women to be possessions to be used and controlled.
Their culture is totally at odds with Britain’s.
Peter Drummond
1 year ago
Suella Braverman has barely got her feet under the desk, in that time she has indicated how she intends to approach this issue/problem.
The fault lies with the Home Office which, as John Reid so memorably put it, is ‘not fit for purpose”.
Peter Clark
1 year ago
I would object to the assertion that migrants have “obviously” benefited Britain culturally – what evidence can be posited for this? Is British culture “better” now than it was pre-war? On whose measure? How can we assess how it would have evolved in the absence of mass migration?
Bob Smith
1 year ago
‘my sympathy for most of these people’ Hopefully that does not extend to the ones intending to deal drugs when they get here. As for it not being an ‘invasion’ why should it not fit that description? After all, we changed the meaning of vaccine to suit our purposes.
jules Ritchie
1 year ago
This is a precis for a novel. Fiction at it’s core.
That novel was published way back and we need SB to give us deliverence from the unhappy ending. The final part of the story has Nigerian ships running up our beaches and people just walking into Britain unapposed. The story forgot that you don’t need a ship when an inflatable dinghy is cheaper.
How the Hell has mass migration been economically good for the UK, only a journalist could write such tripe. A long standing friend of mine was made redundant in 2011 and spent 5 months out of work, (he’d never been out of work since he left school in 1981). He applied for over 700 jobs and only got a handful of replies, then Brexit happened and 100 of thousands of people repatriated voluntarily to their homelands. If he wanted to change jobs tomorrow he could, he was one of many people who where in an identical position.
Vici C
1 year ago
It doesn’t matter how movingly this is written, it doesn’t matter if Braverman played the Albanian card, this is illegal, it is wrong and the British public were lied to.
Paul Devlin
1 year ago
Terrible article. That story about the wifi sounds like total nonsense
Albireo Double
1 year ago
40000 people have arrived illegally on our shores, are refusing to leave, and are demanding to use our limited and scarce resources.
This is the exact definition of the word “invasion”.
Last edited 1 year ago by Albireo Double
Allison Barrows
1 year ago
Aren’t the leaders of countries these people are fleeing embarrassed? Would you want to be president or king or premier of Albania or Senegal or Haiti or Syria or any of the countless wretched places where your citizens are crossing oceans to get away from you? Doesn’t it prove to the entire planet that you’re an incompetent, corrupt barbarian very bad at your job?
Some years ago, the editor of local newspaper, a silly rag of wire service reprints and local items written by college freshmen, used to swan about town like a puffed up poobah. One day, I asked him why the free weekly shopper had a circulation several orders of magnitude the size of his daily broadsheet. He was running his newspaper like a third world failed state, and now it consists of about eight pages. Even the car advertisers fled.
I’ve said it here before: it’s the 21st Century, H*ll Hole Rulers. Get up to speed with developed civilizations, apply the governmental and economic policies that work for them, and FIX your own d*mn houses.
Last edited 1 year ago by Allison Barrows
Colin Elliott
1 year ago
It is true that in theory, one needs an ID card in France, and the police may ask to see it, so gaining education, housing, healthcare is much easier in the UK.
Mrs May’s ‘hostile regime’ was an attempt to introduce some control indirectly, but this was of course mishandled by the Home Office and become a useful stick with which to beat the Conservatives, and another reason for paying compensation out of our taxes.
For many years, legal employment required a NI number, but these were handed out without question, because otherwise, it caused problems for the PAYE system. Currently, an employer is required to check identity, but of course, it’s actually quite useful for those in illegal trades to have undocumented workers, who become vulnerable to becoming ‘slaves’. It’s ironic that such illegal immigrants are actually entering slavery, especially if they have incurred a large debt to criminals in the process.
Martin Smith
1 year ago
“I walk out into the night and look back at the restaurant’s Moroccan name, marvelling at the cognitive dissonance.”
Why should someone living legally in France, running a business and building a life for his family, feel any particular affinity for someone he believes (even wrongly as in this case) to be an illegal immigrant seeking work in the drug trade and wanting to use customer facilities to further his nefarious intent?
Last edited 1 year ago by Martin Smith
ron kean
1 year ago
If the horse knew his strength it wouldn’t let man ride him.
Klive Roland
9 months ago
A necessary article, thank you. Counting the days until the next election when we’ll be waving goodbye to the current government.
j watson
1 year ago
I didn’t actually see the author using the phrase ‘mass’ migration but that hasn’t stopped some comments suggesting he did. He said ‘immigration’, but hey what’s a bit of hysteria.
It’s not a subject easy to distil in a few pithy sentences but some thoughts i) our birth rate in decline and having enough young workers paying taxes and looking after us as we age makes significant immigration a reality whether one likes it or not ii) NHS relied since inception on immigrant workers iii) care sector will even more – so get ready to be looked after by a kind immigrant in one’s dotage and hopefully they won’t know how you felt about them before your marbles got even more jumbled iv) despite some evidence to the contrary we’re actually a less racist country as a result of immigration and v glad of that.
This all said we do need sensible, competently delivered immigration policy. Not everyone can come, and many will humanely and sensitively have to go back. Unfortunately, competency is badly lacking.
j watson
1 year ago
I didn’t actually see the author using the phrase ‘mass’ migration but that hasn’t stopped some comments suggesting he did. He said ‘immigration’, but hey what’s a bit of hysteria.
It’s not a subject easy to distil in a few pithy sentences but some thoughts i) our birth rate in decline and having enough young workers paying taxes and looking after us as we age makes significant immigration a reality whether one likes it or not ii) NHS relied since inception on immigrant workers iii) care sector will even more – so get ready to be looked after by a kind immigrant in one’s dotage and hopefully they won’t know how you felt about them before your marbles got even more jumbled iv) despite some evidence to the contrary we’re actually a less racist country as a result of immigration and v glad of that.
This all said we do need sensible, competently delivered immigration policy. Not everyone can come, and many will humanely and sensitively have to go back. Unfortunately, competency is badly lacking.
Philip MINNS
1 year ago
Don’t want to get involved in the mudslinging about this article but I do admire the author’s reporting from Ukraine and Iran and find his report highly interesting, even if it’s not the whole story.
I find it difficult to accept the argument about mass migration being responsible for falling productivity. If this were the only explanation, then how to explain that European countries with far higher numbers of immigrants and/or asylum seekers, like France or Germany, have not suffered a similar fall in productivity ? Germany has changed beyond measure in the last twenty years because of immigration but it’s economy has kept humming along very nicely until recently.
If it is true that many immigrants want to come to the UK because they can find work without having any papers, then wouldn’t it be a good thing to register them properly and provide them with temporary papers while their case is being processed ? The bigger picture of course is that, contrary to all other European countries, there are no ID cards in the UK, which makes it more difficult to check who is legal and who isn’t. I seem to remember that a Labour government tried but failed to introduce ID cards some years ago. They would not be a miracle cure but they would be of some help in the current situation.
And If the author is right about Albanians cornering the drug trade in the UK, why do we never hear about it in the media ? Are the authorities (Home Office and Police) putting as much effort into cracking down on drug gangs and drug imports as they are detaining illegals or trying to stop them coming ?
Last edited 1 year ago by Philip MINNS
Kevin R
1 year ago
Excellent article thanks. I think many people in the UK forget their humanity when opinionating on this problem.
The detestable Braverman and her crew have already been offered a solution by Macron who has made it clear that he’s prepared to accept British staff on the ground in France to process asylum claims. Of course, it is manifestly not in the government’s interest to hurry this along because the migrant crisis in the channel provides a welcome distraction to the omnishambles of the tanking economy, dysunctional NHS, failed Brexit etc.
Well said. Was despairing until had scrolled to yours
Adam Bartlett
1 year ago
It’s a tragic situation alright. Appreaciate you’re not talking about climage migrants, but the CoP 27 crowd are talking in Egypt right now about the existing ~21 milllion climate migrants rising to about a billion by 2050. Gaia Vince has a good but maybe overly optimistic new book (‘Nomad centruy’) about how that could be accomodated in a humane & win win way.
I’m pretty confident the author hasn’t served in an army. It is amusing to see a picture of what is essentially an army field kitchen captioned with “This is not what an invasion looks like.” That is exactly what an invasion looks like: tents for cooking, tents for sleeping, tents for messing. A stilted, wretched human flow is exactly what a successful invasion becomes.
Now let’s get stuck into some numbers. A tricky subject for most opinion writers and one entirely ignored by the author who nonetheless makes some wild claims that can only be rooted in numbers. “Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically”. Let’s see shall we?
UK GDP per capita has collapsed since mass immigration took off. In 2007 it stood at $50,600. It has fallen to $46,300 last year. (I use dollars because it is the reserve currency against which everything is valued, including the commodities we depend on to survive. Even in Sterling terms it has stagnated. Both are unprecedented in the last 200 years.) This is the denominator effect: the number of people is growing faster than the productive parts of the economy. This should hardly be surprising when the productive capital assets of the UK economy have hardly grown.
The other part of the equation explaining why immigration is undermining real economic growth is actually included in the article. Ali. Not Ali personally. But Ali typifies someone desperate to get paid work and – thanks to his background – he will work for a pittance both inside and outside the formal economy doing low and no-skilled work. Ali is not improving productivity; Ali will fill a role that investment and productivity improvement would have filled like it had done in the previous 150 years of increasing labour costs. But not now. Thanks to stagnating labour costs, the economic miracle of rising living standards has been choked off by an infinite supply of labour both locally and globally.
Very well said. I have often claimed that mass migration is responsible for the “fall in productivity” that has happened in the last 20 years. This works on two levels: First, flooding the labour market with unskilled labour reduces the need for mechanisations that would improve unit capita productivity. Second, since the majority are unskilled, they are not able to perform high value tasks that require training and many years of education.
As such, there is a downward pressure on productivity from two forces, both of which are sizeable but never discussed.
So true. But as with Brexit, climate change/Net Zero and the Welfarist culture, independent free thinking analysis of mass migration simply does not exist within the University Fear Factories or Leftist State. Groupthink prevails and is ruthlessly enforced. So we have only read about the joys and cultural benefits of uncontrolled mass migration and an extra 10 million people. Even as the debate reached a crescendo with the 12000 Albanians on a beach farce, no one paused to reflect on the Manchester Arena revelations unfolding that same week. The Truth is buried here in the UK. Unherd makes us feel free. But we are not.
How long indeed before Zog & Co are arraigned before our Courts?
I really agree with your response to the article and it is striking to note the cost of unstructured immigration. “Ali” will work in the black economy, contribute very little, if anything, and it is dreadfully sad that this abuse happens. It is a form of modern slavery that the liberal/left don’t seem to accept. We simply cannot help everyone and our social services are crashing under their weight. What I would like to hear is some practical ideas to stop this invasion.
The only solution is to make it clear that no illegal immigrant will ever be offered asylum or the right to stay in Britain. If you allow anyone to enter illegally and stay, people will always chance their arm.
The way to do it is to arrest every arrival and charge them with illegal entry (as is currently law). Then detain them (preferably in an offshore facility so as not to overwhelm the domestic prison system) until they can be a) deported to their country of origin or b) transferred to Rwanda (or similar) where they can apply for asylum with our blessing.
We should only take in refugees on official schemes where asylum is offered before they travel here. We already take 10k from UNHCR refugee camps plus the HK, Afghan and Ukraine schemes. That is surely enough.
If this is deemed to not meet our international commitments, then override the commitments.
They can’t be charged with illegal entry, Matt, because surprisingly there is no such criminal offence. The remedy for unauthorised immigration is deportation but the combination of the Human Rights Act, Modern Slavery Act, activist lawyers and lefty opinion makes that almost impossible.
Worse, a recent Supreme Court ruling states that people landing on a beach from a rubber boat have to be treated as arriving passengers who just happen to have missed the entrance to Dover Harbour.
I don’t know whether ‘the law is an ass’, but it appears that Supreme Court judges certainly are.
As for the lawyers retained by people turning up on the beach or climbing out of lorries; they are, in my opinion, totally unscrupulous, and it is surely against the interests of the country that they should be financed by legal aid. This has to be paid for by taxpayers, and is therefore not a ‘human right’ as is free speech.
I believe it is illegal to set out in a boat with intent to cross the Channel without first informing and receiving permission from the relevant maritime authorities of both France and the UK.
Unfettered immigration to the US in the 19C formed the rookery slums, and sowed the seeds of the mafia and the Irish gangs.
Then the powers that be migrated the black population of the south to break the power of these communities
And you don’t even mention the effect mass immigration has on inelastic goods and services like housing, health, schooling etc. If 21st Century Britain was a “nightwatchmen state” like the USA in the late 19th Century, mass immigration might be a boon (though it might not be for the reasons you explain). But it isn’t. It is an expensive and complicated welfare state. Adding unlimited numbers of new people – most of whom will never become net tax contributors – to a system of rationed provision will lead inevitably to long waiting lists and severe drops in the quality of service.
As for housing, we cannot build a third of the number of new houses needed for new arrivals every year. Is it any wonder that prices are many times earnings?
Yes, well pointed out. The author fails to mention that not only is GDP per capita less now than it was10 years ago, but that other things, like average house prices, over that same period, have nearly doubled (and in London and the South East they have more than doubled).
This is before the messier affair of assessing the impact on healthcare, schools and infrastructure.
In short, in the last 10 years we have become a lot poorer and are housing affordability has halved. In that time we are told that the 5 million new migrants have been an “unquestionable good”.
There is no counterfactual argument I have seen which attempts to model house prices, wages and other goods in the absence of mass migration. And without this alternative case, it is impossible to make any case for a net benefit of migration.
Even the USA in the late 19th century restricted immigration, once it recognised the problems is caused, vetted those who entered for health, and it didn’t feel its had to pay for their welfare.
They know they will get work in the drug trade…. the UK really needs these people…
Truss thought it would make the GDP look better.
Well done. I’m afraid I didn’t manage to be as temperate in my response as you have been. Have an upvote with my compliments.
Well said Nell. And what David has failed to mention and possibly doesn’t even perceive as a problem, he being a male, is that these are all feral men, i.e. men without a society and/or community behind them. Men have ‘needs’ so men claim and history shows us how they satisfie those ‘needs’ when we look at the aftermath of war and natural disasters like earthquakes. The facts are appalling. When the social net work that holds men together, when it crumbles they become feral, then men f**k their way out of their despair. It’s not a secret. We women all know this and so do the men, although mostly in denial when confronted. War famine earthquakes are all followed by men seeing to their ‘needs’. These very nice good men in their tents in Calais are potentially dangerous to women, that’s a fact. Had you been a young or even middle aged female or possibly old female (regard the sacking of Berlin when the Russians arrived. Those men were fathers, brothers, sons, but they raped! As do many men when outside of social restrictions, i.e. feral men. Wondering around those camps alone you most likely would not have returned in the condition you arrived had you been female. Furthermore, these men are not from cultures that have an understanding of the freedom Western women have. They ‘know’ that Western women and girls are free to have sex as they wish. This being a very strange concept for these men, they mis-translate as free free for them to use. This is being played out across the country outside girls’ schools and night clubs. Added to that, the world has full knowledge of the ‘grooming’ a euphemism for rape gangs, and this country’s denial if it, and consequently our country’s seeming condolence of it. Yes, every other country knows about the Muslim rape gangs, every country except this one whereby most people unbelievably have never heard anything about this. This must read as offensive to nicely brought up men! But this is an elephant that sits in plain view, that most men cannot see, sadly including David P. .
Great comment, on a subject that many look away from. It’s happening right now in the Ukraine too.
Did i also detect an element of misogyny in the article regarding Suella Braverman? Whether or not, she is absolutely not regarded as a laughing stock outside the liberal lefty circles. I wish her luck in her attempts to stem the tide of what you rightly describe as feral men. The author should be more than just ashamed of himself for pandering to them. His conclusions are intellectually, but more importantly, morally bankrupt.
I’m not in the least bit offended Elaine, you speak a truth very rarely spoken.
We should stop apologising for speaking the truth. This is how we got into this mess in the first place. By speaking up and saying that this is not right, and it isn’t, you are doing everyone a favour Elaine. German women suffered unspeakable suffering at the hands of allied soldiers and their “needs”, back then the left swept it under the carpet so as to not distract from the holocaust. This was wrong back then and it is wrong now.
What I am discovering more and more is that women tend to be the big losers of this leftist agenda. Be it rape gangs or transactivists, or whatever comes around next. Women seem to cop it harder than men do and this is not acceptable. Women are our mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, aunts, cousins, neighbours, friends, colleagues, or even some of the people you encounter during your day. Keep speaking Elaine, and we are with you.
Peter, Thank you. Women do have an extra issue to deal with in wars, and in other situations when society breaks down. They, like men have the bombs, then the guns, but for women there is also the rape. It has always been so no matter who the army is. Rape and Pillage we learned about from our school books by Virgil, an odd choice of book for school children!. Still little did we know that the “Rape of the Sabine women” was not history but the usual when it comes to war, etc. As in another comment above, it’s happening in the Ukraine now. It must never be hushed up. Its good to read here of men who do not want it hidden. Again, thank you all who have supported my comment. It was so blatantly obvious that no women could have carried out the journey in which David P engaged.
There is also all the deserted wives and children back home. How many of these men will conveniently forget they have a family? how many women are in despair because the breadwinner has disappeared? I’m sure some will te-unite, but I am also sure many won’t.
GDP per capita has grown if at all much more slowly than before 2008-9, but the value of Sterling against the Dollar has fallen by enough to account for the dollar reduction in GDP. How does this square with your claim that it is a ‘denominator effect’?
To repeat myself, I also referred to Sterling GDP per capita – as you agree – stagnating for 15 years. Between dollar fall and Sterling GDP per capita stagnating, my original comment covers the span of numbers from the truly abysmal to the just awful: stagnation for 15 years is unprecedented in 200 years of economic history. Gross GDP has grown, per capita has not, which means it is a denominator effect coupled with productivity stagnation.
“Braverman is a laughing stock: she is crass and insensitive and politically obtuse. She warned of a looming “invasion”. What I saw in Calais was many things, but it was not an invasion; it was stilted, wretched human flow.
But she is not wrong when she says Albanians are coming over — often illegally and under false pretences — to engage in criminal activity.”
The author writes from direct experience of his subject matter but is totally biased and incoherent in his analysis. Braverman is only a laughing stock to those who enjoy seeing her shackled by refugee conventions and UK slavery legislation and a dysfunctional Home office Civil-service that is not fit for purpose. Why should she be sensitive and chose a more mealy mouthed description for the influx of Albanians and others who are coming illegally to “engage in criminal activity” as the author admits.
Of course she is not going to be able to resolve a long-standing problem that has festered for some years in a matter of months. It is going to take considerable time and effort against the entrenched attitudes of the Home office machinery to achieve a resolution to the complex problems of repelling the illegitimate migrants and speedily processing the few legitimate refugees that ought to be settled in the UK rather than elsewhere in the world. The author ought to at least pretend to give Braveman a chance of trying to resolve the difficult problems she faces in this area instead of dishing out gratuitous insults.
At present the UK has all the cultural enrichment from abroad that it can manage it doesn’t need to import more friendly hard working drug dealers.
It seems to me that the uk can not support the welfare bills these people will incur with the present taxation base but the left and the ‘compassionate class’ just don’t get this fact
They are like rebellious teenagers complaining about everything and believing themselves to be morally superior whilst expecting someone else to pay the bills.
Is that migrants or us, the home population, you are referring to?
Who is and who is not paying the bills for what? A cheap question requiring an expensive response, perhaps?
It is an invasion. Most are economic migrants and they are already in a safe country. There is no justification for their actions and they are not victims, they are willing customers of the people smugglers. I feel sorry for the hundreds of millions nay billions of people worldwide who have a lesser life than they might have in the UK but life isn’t fair, was never meant to be fair and never will be fair and we, the British people, do not owe everybody who wants it a better life. And that is the reality.
The term economic refugee that gets thrown around is just a call for open borders.
Yes, I agree. So do we simply let everyone who wants to come arrive here unhindered? The UK is 23,600+ sq kms. France is 543,000+ sq kms. How do we fit in all the people who believe it will be better for them to live in these states?
Something wrong with your maths. France is about twice the size of the UK for roughly the same population.
Think he’s one zero short of a data point.
France 210K square miles, Great Britain 90K square miles,
It’s worse than the areas make it look as I suspect most of the migrants intend to settle in the South East. I can’t see many schlepping to Wales or Scotland.
unfortunately our FM will tell them that there is a welcome in the hillside but us deplorables won’t have it. We have more than enough homeless and unemployed with out addng to the burden already imposed on the ratepayers. Suella Braverman’s descripton “It’s an invasion” is absolutely correct.
Moreover, why is it more profitable (easier?) to deal drugs in the UK than in France/EU?? Are our police that bad?
Please listen to yourself. Or if you can’t, try thinking about all those lovely TV programmes like “A Place in the Sun” or even whooping it up and gorging ‘all you can eat and drink” foreign holidays well above your pay grade at home.
There’s a world of difference between considering just who is really benefitting from mass migration of cheap labour and mouthing ugly contempt for fellow human beings whose rights you consider by nature inferior to your own.
Would also suggest thinking a little harder why it was only the UK government that pushed for early and greater FOM from new member countries and also did not bother to apply limitations to length and conditions of stay permissible by EU law.
How gangs of workers were often recruited by some UK employers also might also make one feel a little less superior and even inclined to redirect one’s anger on behalf of unprotected economic migrants and towards those who really benefit from the miserable situation affecting us all in our different ways.
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain”
I disagree. Some immigration has benefited the original Brits and their families but we would have been better off with NO immigration. We did not learn to make full use of our own people but instead got in cheaper, harder working immigrants who pushed even more of our native workforce out of work and into a semi permanent underclass.
Immigration has also massively increased the population both pushing up house prices and reducing the ‘green and pleasant land’. It has also weakened societal strength and caused massive criminal problems.
It might have been hard to learn to stand on our own 2 feet, rather than importing workers, but it would have been a much better long term policy. The problem is that the wealthy/establishment want their cheap workers, boosted economy now while the rest of us look for quality of life and a reasonable income.
Absolutely right
‘Diversity is Our Strength’
Here in Australia, the big companies love to bring in workers from overseas. They are not interested in training up Australian youth. Our Universities are not interested in supporting this concept either. They are more interested in bringing in overseas students who pay full fees. They only do this as a ticket into the country. My experience with these students is that they see themselves are entitled to stay here, they have little regard for local students, even less regard for our culture. Many Anglo Aussies are strung out on welfare for generations. They are becoming less literate, some even illiterate. It is very scary how we ignore our own people .
Large scale migration is a short term stopgap at best but the price paid on the locals is horrendous. The current climate towards Anglo Australians is unbearable. We are seen as racist invaders. Our cultural heritage is being torn down. Our kids are being taught that we are thieves and murderers. Migrants often claim discrimination when in fact they hate us. Our bureaucrats are so left wing that they consider only non white people to be culturally and linguistically diverse. “If people come from Europe, they don’t count” (Exact words from the meeting I was in! I fought against it and lost and no longer work for our public service anymore)
We see that white people are disappearing from our screens and being replaced by non-white people. Every couple in our ads are mixed race or non white. All in the name of diversity. This is only found in white cultures. The time has come to stand up for ourselves before it is too late. The writer of the piece, David Patrikarakos, is standing up for his people (or his mum’s) and good on him for doing so. But we should also stick up for our people as well, it is only fair. I forsee that the day is coming where it will be harder and harder for Anglo Aussies to get ahead and so it would be nice to have somewhere where I can exist.
To summarize the article: despite extreme political bias and an apparently desperate attempt to not find what Braverman was talking about, he found it easily anyway.
I don’t think we learned anything from reading this. Pretty puzzlingly low quality, given it’s in unherd.
It is illegal to enter Britain except through an official port with the correct paperwork.
All illegal immigrants should be arrested, detained and deported either to their country of origin or, in exceptional circumstances, to Rwanda where they can claim asylum.
We should make it clear in law that no international agreement will be applied and we should not pay a penny in legal aid to any foreigner.
We should sack any Home Office employee or Border Force agent who does not fall in line.
If parliament refuses to pass any required legislation or the Supreme Court blocks any part of the plan, Sunak must call an election and put the plan to the people.
The biggest challenge is that the people smugglers tell their willing passengers to discard their identity documents to make it impossible to deport them. Having just had a personal light bulb moment, the solution is to get Rwanda operational and then make it plain that anyone arriving on our shores without official identification documents will automatically be processed in Rwanda. Those that do have documents can then be processed and deported if not genuine asylum candidates. We must also change the law on modern slavery to shut down the excuse used by all of the Albanians that they are being trafficked.
I had that light bulb moment a few months ago Sam – it took me a while too. Rwanda and other incentivised countries need to be the final destination for illegal immigrants whose country of origin cannot be identified or where it can but it is unsafe to return them there (like a warzone).
But the problem isn’t only destroyed documents. Even when we can establish their country of origin, many countries take ages to supply us with the necessary paperwork for the repatriation. All the while the illegal immigrant is living in Britain and then when the deportation finally can take place, lawyers swarm in to say that they have now established a life in this country and are having their human rights infringed.
To solve this we need to keep all illegal immigrants in detention centres until they are deported. This really needs to be done offshore otherwise we overwhelm the domestic prison system. People have suggested Scottish islands, the Falklands, the Ascension islands and old cruise ships moored up somewhere. Or all of the above.
Either way you should never step foot in the UK, you should be held without any means of appeal until deportation to your own country or Rwanda becomes available.
If you want to claim asylum in this country, it needs to be through an official scheme and agreed before you a travel here. We take 10k or so a year directly from UNHRC refugee camps and thousands more Ukrainians, BMO Hong Kongers and Afghanis who worked with the British army. Surely that is sufficient.
Don’t forget the huge numbers of LEGAL immigrants who are brought over here every year from the sub-continent to marry their cousins.
My view is the total number of LEGAL immigrants – including work visas, family re-unions and refugees – should be half the number of new houses built in the previous year.
So that should have been 88k in 2022.
The actual number of legal immigrants in 2021 was 230k (plus probably 50k illegals).
“…In Britain, her incompetence manifests as chaos…”
Having a go at Braverman is fashion of the month: a pop at her of some description is pretty much mandatory it seems, to indicate you are amongst the right-on, even if you are then forced to acknowledge she may be right about some things. I know very little about Braverman, but one thing I do know is that she has been in position hardly any time at all, so what exactly is the basis of attributing incompetence to her? Her ‘crime’ is that she hasn’t managed to make any dent in a few weeks, into a problem no one has managed to solve in decades?
The author is in effect accusing her of inflammatory language when pussyfooting language has been shown to be completely ineffective for years on end. But I don’t care about language sensitivities, I care if can do a job or not, and only a decent period of time can yield that answer.
I agree, I can only hope she is up to what is demanded now Time will tell.Good luck to her – no one can envy her the job ahead.
Why is this allowed? It is a crime to illegally enter a Nation you have no permission to enter. Turning your immigration Policy over to Criminal Cartels – criminally wrong of the Government to do this; they should be charged for abetting a crime. It is expected that after tomorrow’s election, if/when the Congress flips Republican Biden will be impeached because he intentionally has the border open and well over 4 million illegals have entered. That is in violation of his oath of office to uphold the laws of the Nation.
”Then there is the wider picture. Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially.”
Sure…. I left London in the 1970s and have been returning since, it is depressing to have watched the changes in my old parts. I challenge your ‘Unquestionably’ – I question it. It could have greatly been positive – only there was almost no consideration given for the most part on Who this immigration is made up of. Some groups of immigrants fill the ranks of the professionals, some rather the opposite – and basically this writer treats those groups as interchangeable, as the same thing.
Skilled migrants who have the ability do work that is not being met by locals because that skill takes a long time to learn, and pays well – Good. Citizens marrying outside the Nation, children of citizens born outside the nation, that makes total sense. The rest – that should be only based on a thorough demographic study proving immigrants are needed – and then the best should be selected.
Why does the West put the immigrant first, and their own people last?
“Why does the West put the immigrant first, and their own people last?”
Because we are ruled by a shower of lickspittle, bed-wetting spastics. Isn’t it obvious?
Rather because the establishment don’t want skilled workers who might compete with them and their families but cheap labour to clean their houses and work in their fields. Stuff the local workforce!
Yes indeed, a new class of Helots or Serfs, such as that poor ‘Deliveroo’ chap slaughtered in Brixton, South London just a few days ago.
Charles, how do we vote them out?
Who?
Both Parties are as supine as each other on this issue, and always have been, sadly!
Not entirely sure if political change would be enough, would need real resolution and action on the French side too.
Was reading about this again the other day, and most of the gangs running the actual crossings are kurds. Also turkey has been very upset with Sweden about kurdish influences there, why does no one ever go after these kurdish gangs? Or highlight the issue? What’s going on with this anyone know?
How have the kurds ended up with so much influence in Sweden? And calais running the migrant boats?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11402585/amp/Inside-Albanian-people-smuggling-network-driving-surge-asylum-seekers.html
https://www.ft.com/content/44076fc9-9a93-4ea4-99ee-a66246a83518
Our border force has been caught turning its transponders off and collecting them from the French! Someone, somewhere with power and money is greesing the wheels to make this possible. Could this be why neither party is keen to tackle the issue?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9702259/amp/Exposed-Border-Force-tries-cover-missions-pick-migrants-Channel.html
The West needs their labour. I’m beginning to realise, call me slow, this this is not a mistake that has got out of control, it’s deliberate.
Surely we are all asking this quesion. Where do we find a govt with the answer?
“Back in the country that welcomed them in the mid-Seventies, Braverman is a laughing stock: she is crass and insensitive and politically obtuse”. What does “them” mean in this context? There is a word for treating people differently, and attempting to stigmatise them, linked to their ethnic background. Suella Braverman wasn’t even born in the mid-Seventies. But her parents sought sanctuary in the UK precisely because it was different to the east African countries which were at that time expelling their relatively small but high performing British Indian origin populations. It had a western political culture, a strong collective identity, a common language and culture, a rules based immigration process, and an efficient legal system accessible to all regardless of ethnicity. Open borders can result in host societies losing their own defining characteristics.
Immigration hasn’t ‘unquestionably’ benefited Britain. It has benefited the asset rich whilst pauperising wage earners and rent payers.
That’s the essential problem: the people who profit from immigration are not the ones who pay for it.
Indeed. The rich can live cosseted lives very far away from the impact of the policies they insist the rest of us have to put up with.
Interesting article, but I find the conclusion unfair. You say,
“In Britain, [Braverman’s] incompetence manifests as chaos: in Dover, where migrant centres have been firebombed; in London, where migrants have been dumped alone in the streets; and in Westminster, where the Government shows no sign of solving this crisis.”
One way or another Braverman has been home secretary for 5 minutes. The fault, if you like, lies with her numerous predecessors and the Tory government in general.
What is Braverman supposed to do? Even acknowledging there is a problem causes (some noisy) people to scream in horror. If/when there is a change in government do you think things will change accordingly for the better?
Before he was DPP Kier Starmer was a QC who specialised in challenging the government’s attempts to deter illegal immigration. For instance, in 2002, he overturned legislation introduced by David Blunkett and passed by parliament to stop the payment of benefits to bogus asylum seekers. He got the High Court to override the law because it contravened the ECHR rules.
In short, the leader of the opposition is in favour of unlimited immigration into the UK. So no, a change of government will not make things better (God knows I would vote for them if I thought it would).
Matt, There is no doubt that the Labour party and the Tories are both as keen to fill the country up with cheap labour. In fact the Labour Party depends on the Muslim vote. Bring it on.
“Moderation in all things” is what the Ancient Greeks advised, and in this we have singularly FAILED.
The arrival of reasonable numbers of Huguenots in the 17th century and Jews in the 19th century was mutually beneficial, but the tidal wave of mass immigration that has occurred over the last fifteen years is simply unsustainable, and will ”end in tears”, and our grandchildren will rightly curse us.
and Indian Hindus too!
The phrase “Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain” is such a blunt statement as to be meaningless.
It’s like saying, “having people in good health has clearly benefited the economy.”
The lazyness of this statement obscures the complexity that must be discussed. How much immigration is beneficial? Over what period of time? With what costs to the economy versus tax dollars accrued? In which sectors?
Without specifying hard numbers on these parameters the author is saying nothing in a roundabout way.
It’s a leftist thing. Say something nebulous with authority. Hard facts are not relevant or required when virtue signalling. To call into question the veracity of some activists mewlings invariably brings hostiles squawks of racism/phobia. This is as sure as night follows day.
What is neo Pythonesque about this unfunny farce, is that whereas every air traveller is subjected to asinine and pointless ” security checks” and having their shampoo confiscated, and belts and shoes removed, the self same people whom these checks were supposed to filter out ( but don’t as we cannot say that Islamists are the target!) are welcomed in, given money and homes!
Our government could, at the drop of a hat, put both specialist contractors and special forces on the case, undercover, and ” seek and destroy” the people trafficking criminals… but they do not… why!
22 SAS should NOT be wasting its time in Syria & Afghanistan, but should be ‘hunting down’ these so called people smugglers and destroying them at source.
After all who can possibly stop them? All it needs is the WILL!
Nicky has nailed it!!!
I suspect the passeurs pay better.
I am a loss to understand writers of articles such as this. Many British citizens are living in damp, inadequate housing. Others are living in bed and breakfast accommodation because councils simply have nowhere else to put them. there are 5000+ homeless people in London alone. 7 million people are on NHS waiting lists and getting an appointment to see a GP is very difficult. Children are being bussed across their home counties to find a school place because refugee children have taken their place. In face of this, the author seems to imply that we should welcome even more people, many of them simply economic migrants who prefer Britain to other places. Where is his concern for British people living desperate lives in the country of their birth?
Yes, of course! It’s as if they’re the same thing, isn’t it?
IT’S BECAUSE OF THE NUMBERS, YOU T1T. GET IT INTO YOUR THICK HEAD THAT WE HAVE A HOUSING CRISIS MORPHING INTO AN EMERGENCY, OUR PUBLIC SERVICES ARE OVERWHELMED, AND OUR C2DE’S ARE BEING PRICED OUT OF THE LABOUR MARKET. AND YOU SIT IN YOUR COSY HIPSTER OFFICE BLAMING BRAVERMAN FOR WANTING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Oh *that’s* the reply you mentioned above! I imagine you banging your head against the screen as you were typing. Nothing wrong with a bit of emotion in my opinion.
I would normally detest people who use all caps…but this issue has become so ridiculous, the duplicity of many of our politicians and home office workers so obvious…most of us would be in the position where turn the CAPS on and just rant at the idiocy.
Human scum, tricksters, traitors, trampsters, all huckstering their way into the lovely emerald isle of Britain. Okay, I’m kidding. Fact is, everyone wants to come to Britain, but there is a hard limit to how many people the island can support. Them’s facts, and you can’t argue with facts! 😉
Did anyone listen to Tony Abbott, once the PM of Australia and take his advice on how to handle illegal immigration? If you act deliberately and forcefully,you only need a short period before people smugglers lose their ability to sell their story of hope. If the media reports on the turn-backs and the deportations then the problem slowly melts away. Good luck to Suella Braverman, I wouldn’t have her job for quids as we say here in Oz.
There is a excellent discussion on how the Aussies dealt with their illegals problem on Triggernometry. The interview is with Helen Dale and is titled ‘Can We Solve the Migrant Crisis?’
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially”
Some immigration, perhaps. But it would still be nice to find out what the author defines as a ‘benefit’.
By the way his immediate flushing with anger when told there was no WiFi is one reason that some of us are sceptical about the happy mixing of cultures. In my idea of ‘culture’ no one has a de facto right to be accepted into any private space, if the owner of that space does not wish it. No explanation is required, nor does any such explanation offered have to be ‘honest’. That to me is one of the cornerstones of British civilisation. It is not a ‘fault’ or ‘offensive’. Unfortunately ‘human rights’ has foisted people on other people, often forcibly, regardless of whether or not they want to mix with or become friendly with them (e.g. in legislation designed to outlaw all-male clubs or organisations) or employ them (e.g. through legislation about ‘diversity’ in ‘the workplace’).
Right. There’s no invasion. Third World economic migrants aren’t thronging every border in Europe to enter illegally. None of this is happening. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Note: We will not solve world poverty by evacuating the Third World to the First.
“Then there is the wider picture. Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially.”
That statement is simply not true on any level and this article is proof of that
You are so correct in this. The tax base can not support the extensive welfare system even for those oborn in the UK. It can never support the Illegal immigrants as well.
If he’s looking for the ‘hordes of Albanians’, might I suggest investigating the supply chains for heroin and cocaine to our provincial towns? Presumably they’ll be less willing to talk than the one he finds here, of course.
I had to remind myself that Robert Fisk is no longer alive after reading this.
These types of articles are nauseating. The ‘human story’ is designed to elicit sympathy for these people and therefore (I imagine) overcome our objections to taking in more of them. Of course there’s no consideration given to the effects on the UK or – horror of horrors – the actual wishes of the UK population. We’re just supposed to welcome them all. It’s ridiculous.
Sure, I expect some of these people smile and offer their soup. I don’t care. I really don’t. I expect a lot of them are nice people. That doesn’t mean they are entitled to live here. We’ve had far too much immigration already. Time to stop these ridiculous numbers coming in every year.
The author is having a joke surely…’ Suella is a laughing stock, crass… etc’. She’s been in the job for five minutes. Most illegals will never have heard of her. Give it a rest Patikarakos. What a joke!
This article belongs in The Guardian. A sympathetic nod to a pending wannabe drug dealer; no suspicion of fleeing murderers thieves or rapists hiding among those desperate and gullible enough to see UK as the promised land. A glance at an online newspaper should dispel that. Oh those wicked Calais restaurateurs, turning away latter day Josephs and Marys from the Inns.
This highlights several things. Are our homegrown criminals sunning themselves by a pool in the Med? We are so lazy we can’t pick our own fruit and veg. Are we sub contracting crime now? The upcoming gang wars will induce mass white flight when they spill over into Islington and similar.
If I tried to deposit €15,000 in my bank they’d like to know where I got it. Do these people do BACS, Paypal? I’d want to carry some self defence with that sort of cash.
How the most vocal EU remain types must hate this snapshot of their beloved empire. I do, I remember happy disembarkations for booze runs, family motoring, camping and caravan holidays back when the world was nice.
Yellowed bug-spattered headlights… GB stickers on bumpers; my father calling them ‘giblets’. Kinder days.
This article is about as intellectually rigorous as a marshmallow. Utter drivel. What is unherd doing printing this tripe?
If the author was paid for it he should give the fee to a good cause such as the Free Speech Union.
Mark, I am so glad that unherd publishes articles (tripe) like these. I have learned so much from the intelligent and well-informed comments which have followed.
Thank you every one for sharing your experience, knowledge and opinions. Brilliant comments!
Agreed Janny. Even if certain articles are relatively incoherent, the comments make up for it.
The author didn’t find many Albanians because most of them come direct from Tirana by minibus on a package deal that delivers them to a waiting boat. If the weather dictates a delay, they wait in Germany or Belgium rather than in Calais.
“Back in the country that welcomed them in the mid-Seventies, Braverman is a laughing stock: she is crass and insensitive and politically obtuse”. What does “them” mean in this context? There is a word for treating people differently, and attempting to stigmatise them, linked to their ethnic background. Suella Braverman wasn’t even born in the mid-Seventies. But her parents sought sanctuary there precisely because it was different to the east African countries which were at that time expelling their relatively small but high performing populations who had originated from British India. It had a western political culture, a strong collective identity, a common language and culture, a rules based immigration process, and an efficient legal system accessible to all regardless of ethnicity. Open borders can result in host societies losing their own defining characteristics.
” What I saw in Calais was many things, but it was not an invasion; it was stilted, wretched human flow.” Yes mate. What you saw was the preparations for an invasion.
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially.” Bullshit, Our culture and society was just fine in 1948 before the invasion began.Now it is not our culture. It’s some mongrel codswallop which benefits no one except the invader. We do not benefit from a constant flow of low wage workers pouring into our land. Even if we did, we would prefer to forgo such benefits and live as we, not you, choose, with our own values, our own culture and the sense of ourselves which served us for a thousand years.
Sorry your parents come from a s**t hole but it was their s**t hole.England is ours not theirs, not yours. People with steel in their blood are out on the streets, now, trying to make your homeland better for you. Grow some balls. Go there. Join them. It’s your fight.
Braverman has only been in charge for a few weeks and she faces resistance in her own party and from the left wing press. Her goal to send migrants to is the right one, but the Conservative government needs more courage to implement it.
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain” I question it!
A somewhat incoherent argument in that arguments put forward don’t complement each other but that aside I think the term ‘invasion’ used as it was by Ms Braverman metaphorically, is perfectly apt. If most of these Albanians are coming over so as to earn money in the drug trade (which will diminish us as a nation even more than we are already diminished) then it has to be stopped. Arrest of the smugglers would be a good start along with the destroying of all unaccounted for inflatable or seaworthy dinghies seen anywhere near the north French coast. France is then left with the problem of what to do and one hopes that the UK will at least assist in any solution on that score provided the French assist us to stop the traffic. We have to return to legal migration and if that puts temporary hold on most migration so be it. We are overwhelmed by illegals in cities and further afield in hotels and our social infrastructure is collapsing as a result.
Invasion: “an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity” or “an unwelcome intrusion into another’s domain.”
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain”, to which I will say ” Immigration in numbers far, far greater than ever seen in the past has unquestionably caused problems in Britain, an island already over-populated over much of its surface, especially in the South East.”
“The French try to stop them, but know they cannot.” The French allow them to get into boats, and help them to get away from shore, and then summon British vessels, which were built and are maintained for other purposes, to take them the rest of the way. If they allowed ALL migrants who make it to Britain to be returned, the trade would stop overnight. The patrol boats could then be used to catch those which prefer to land clandestinely, which do not make the news, while the unpaid RNLI crews would not be needed for a task which must be thoroughly demoralising.
The French allow us to return them all. Doh why would they? Would you? We’re quite lucky they make any sort of effort at all.
Of course we used to be able to insist til the ‘hostile’ regime decided to leave the Dublin Agreement in a wonderful example of Taking Back Control. Clowns.
“Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially.” — Yes, if you fall for the Great Institutional Narrative. Not so much if you believe the evidence of your own eyes.
The majority of these illegal immigrants are young men who consider women to be possessions to be used and controlled.
Their culture is totally at odds with Britain’s.
Suella Braverman has barely got her feet under the desk, in that time she has indicated how she intends to approach this issue/problem.
The fault lies with the Home Office which, as John Reid so memorably put it, is ‘not fit for purpose”.
I would object to the assertion that migrants have “obviously” benefited Britain culturally – what evidence can be posited for this? Is British culture “better” now than it was pre-war? On whose measure? How can we assess how it would have evolved in the absence of mass migration?
‘my sympathy for most of these people’ Hopefully that does not extend to the ones intending to deal drugs when they get here. As for it not being an ‘invasion’ why should it not fit that description? After all, we changed the meaning of vaccine to suit our purposes.
This is a precis for a novel. Fiction at it’s core.
That novel was published way back and we need SB to give us deliverence from the unhappy ending. The final part of the story has Nigerian ships running up our beaches and people just walking into Britain unapposed. The story forgot that you don’t need a ship when an inflatable dinghy is cheaper.
SBS would be better… at sinking all the boats
How the Hell has mass migration been economically good for the UK, only a journalist could write such tripe. A long standing friend of mine was made redundant in 2011 and spent 5 months out of work, (he’d never been out of work since he left school in 1981). He applied for over 700 jobs and only got a handful of replies, then Brexit happened and 100 of thousands of people repatriated voluntarily to their homelands. If he wanted to change jobs tomorrow he could, he was one of many people who where in an identical position.
It doesn’t matter how movingly this is written, it doesn’t matter if Braverman played the Albanian card, this is illegal, it is wrong and the British public were lied to.
Terrible article. That story about the wifi sounds like total nonsense
40000 people have arrived illegally on our shores, are refusing to leave, and are demanding to use our limited and scarce resources.
This is the exact definition of the word “invasion”.
Aren’t the leaders of countries these people are fleeing embarrassed? Would you want to be president or king or premier of Albania or Senegal or Haiti or Syria or any of the countless wretched places where your citizens are crossing oceans to get away from you? Doesn’t it prove to the entire planet that you’re an incompetent, corrupt barbarian very bad at your job?
Some years ago, the editor of local newspaper, a silly rag of wire service reprints and local items written by college freshmen, used to swan about town like a puffed up poobah. One day, I asked him why the free weekly shopper had a circulation several orders of magnitude the size of his daily broadsheet. He was running his newspaper like a third world failed state, and now it consists of about eight pages. Even the car advertisers fled.
I’ve said it here before: it’s the 21st Century, H*ll Hole Rulers. Get up to speed with developed civilizations, apply the governmental and economic policies that work for them, and FIX your own d*mn houses.
It is true that in theory, one needs an ID card in France, and the police may ask to see it, so gaining education, housing, healthcare is much easier in the UK.
Mrs May’s ‘hostile regime’ was an attempt to introduce some control indirectly, but this was of course mishandled by the Home Office and become a useful stick with which to beat the Conservatives, and another reason for paying compensation out of our taxes.
For many years, legal employment required a NI number, but these were handed out without question, because otherwise, it caused problems for the PAYE system. Currently, an employer is required to check identity, but of course, it’s actually quite useful for those in illegal trades to have undocumented workers, who become vulnerable to becoming ‘slaves’. It’s ironic that such illegal immigrants are actually entering slavery, especially if they have incurred a large debt to criminals in the process.
“I walk out into the night and look back at the restaurant’s Moroccan name, marvelling at the cognitive dissonance.”
Why should someone living legally in France, running a business and building a life for his family, feel any particular affinity for someone he believes (even wrongly as in this case) to be an illegal immigrant seeking work in the drug trade and wanting to use customer facilities to further his nefarious intent?
If the horse knew his strength it wouldn’t let man ride him.
A necessary article, thank you. Counting the days until the next election when we’ll be waving goodbye to the current government.
I didn’t actually see the author using the phrase ‘mass’ migration but that hasn’t stopped some comments suggesting he did. He said ‘immigration’, but hey what’s a bit of hysteria.
It’s not a subject easy to distil in a few pithy sentences but some thoughts i) our birth rate in decline and having enough young workers paying taxes and looking after us as we age makes significant immigration a reality whether one likes it or not ii) NHS relied since inception on immigrant workers iii) care sector will even more – so get ready to be looked after by a kind immigrant in one’s dotage and hopefully they won’t know how you felt about them before your marbles got even more jumbled iv) despite some evidence to the contrary we’re actually a less racist country as a result of immigration and v glad of that.
This all said we do need sensible, competently delivered immigration policy. Not everyone can come, and many will humanely and sensitively have to go back. Unfortunately, competency is badly lacking.
I didn’t actually see the author using the phrase ‘mass’ migration but that hasn’t stopped some comments suggesting he did. He said ‘immigration’, but hey what’s a bit of hysteria.
It’s not a subject easy to distil in a few pithy sentences but some thoughts i) our birth rate in decline and having enough young workers paying taxes and looking after us as we age makes significant immigration a reality whether one likes it or not ii) NHS relied since inception on immigrant workers iii) care sector will even more – so get ready to be looked after by a kind immigrant in one’s dotage and hopefully they won’t know how you felt about them before your marbles got even more jumbled iv) despite some evidence to the contrary we’re actually a less racist country as a result of immigration and v glad of that.
This all said we do need sensible, competently delivered immigration policy. Not everyone can come, and many will humanely and sensitively have to go back. Unfortunately, competency is badly lacking.
Don’t want to get involved in the mudslinging about this article but I do admire the author’s reporting from Ukraine and Iran and find his report highly interesting, even if it’s not the whole story.
I find it difficult to accept the argument about mass migration being responsible for falling productivity. If this were the only explanation, then how to explain that European countries with far higher numbers of immigrants and/or asylum seekers, like France or Germany, have not suffered a similar fall in productivity ? Germany has changed beyond measure in the last twenty years because of immigration but it’s economy has kept humming along very nicely until recently.
If it is true that many immigrants want to come to the UK because they can find work without having any papers, then wouldn’t it be a good thing to register them properly and provide them with temporary papers while their case is being processed ? The bigger picture of course is that, contrary to all other European countries, there are no ID cards in the UK, which makes it more difficult to check who is legal and who isn’t. I seem to remember that a Labour government tried but failed to introduce ID cards some years ago. They would not be a miracle cure but they would be of some help in the current situation.
And If the author is right about Albanians cornering the drug trade in the UK, why do we never hear about it in the media ? Are the authorities (Home Office and Police) putting as much effort into cracking down on drug gangs and drug imports as they are detaining illegals or trying to stop them coming ?
Excellent article thanks. I think many people in the UK forget their humanity when opinionating on this problem.
The detestable Braverman and her crew have already been offered a solution by Macron who has made it clear that he’s prepared to accept British staff on the ground in France to process asylum claims. Of course, it is manifestly not in the government’s interest to hurry this along because the migrant crisis in the channel provides a welcome distraction to the omnishambles of the tanking economy, dysunctional NHS, failed Brexit etc.
Well said. Was despairing until had scrolled to yours
It’s a tragic situation alright. Appreaciate you’re not talking about climage migrants, but the CoP 27 crowd are talking in Egypt right now about the existing ~21 milllion climate migrants rising to about a billion by 2050. Gaia Vince has a good but maybe overly optimistic new book (‘Nomad centruy’) about how that could be accomodated in a humane & win win way.
All the more reason to make sure that all illegal routes into the country are closed shut before that lot try to come here.