Response to The Times Leader on Immigration

(Reproduced from the MigrationWatch website)

By Sir Andrew Green
Chairman of Migration Watch UK

12 May 2012

Dear Sir,

Your editorial “British Workers” (12 May) was right to point out that the flow of workers from EU states stems from treaty obligations and cannot be cut back by immigration policy. However, despite all the talk about Polish workers, it is important to understand that the EU is not where the real numbers are coming from.

For nearly ten years non EU immigration has been running at about 300,000 a year but only 100,000 have been leaving. This can and must be addressed by changes in the immigration regime. Net migration accounts for two thirds of the population growth that is placing such pressure on our public services at a time of financial stringency.

Yours sincerely,

It’s official, but swept under the carpet: 36% of new households will be a result of immigration so we will have to build, on average, 200 homes a day for the next 25 years just to house the extra population arising from immigration.

Even if house building were to increase by 25% over the current level to 200,000 a year, there would be a shortage of around 800,000 homes by 2033 – equivalent to the number of homes in Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Nottingham combined.

Commenting, Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migrationwatch UK, said:

“As we saw earlier this week political correctness has dictated that the construction and planning industry should not refer to the massive impact of immigration on housing. It is not, of course, the only factor in household formation but it is a major factor accounting for 36% of new households over the next 25 years. It is also one of the few factors that the government ought to be able to control.  It is high time that we faced up to the huge impact of immigration on housing and to the severe consequences for our environment of continued mass immigration”.

Check out the report by clicking here.

The effects of Tories privatising Britain are starting to hit home, and it’s the people who take the hit, not the rich or the bankers who created the problems.

Well, what did people expect when they voted Tory last year?  Were they taken in by the nice green tree in their new logo?  No more ‘nasty party’?  What a Con trick.

Under the Tories, ordinary people are treated like so much detritus:  human debris which is left behind after ‘market forces’ are given free rein in society.

Greatly reduced public services, awarding valuable public contracts to foreign companies, huge job losses… it feels like Thatcher all over again.

“Services for older people, services for disabled people are suffering. There has been a dramatic cut to information, advice and guidance, which is something that at a time of economic hardship we need more of, not less.” (ePolitix.com)

As for the so-called ‘big society’, and the very people and organisations expected by the Tories to fill the gap left in our public services:

“The capacity for the third sector to grow more volunteers is being reduced, as volunteer development budgets are being axed. This all combines to reduce the status of volunteering and to raise the question of what purpose the government intends the voluntary sector to serve.”   (ePolitix.com)

So much for cynical Tory claims that “we’re all in this together”.

Thousands upon thousands of newly-unemployed people will be forced to claim benefits while they search – probably in vain – for another job.   New jobs  will be hard to find in the private sector, and unlikely to be at the same level of pay. Result?  Growing ranks of long-term unemployed, exploited by Tory-voting bosses offering low pay and lousy conditions.   A cynic might say that some are “in this together” rather more than others.

And who do we have to oppose the Tories now?   Certainly not the Lib Dumbs, who will do anything to cling onto a bit of limelight for themselves.  We had high hopes for the beloved Vince, but even he’s a busted flush these days. 

No opposition from Labour, either.   None of their front bench is up to much now that men like Blair, Prescott, Milburn and others have gone.  “Blair?!”, you cry?   Well, after we failed to recognise the strength and ability of people like David Owen in the 80s and 90s, we did eventually find someone to take on the Tory enemy.

We can debate Blair’s various achievements or otherwise, but he did turn out to be pretty good at stuffing the Tories.      Now that the wrong Milliband has been elected as party leader (the gormless windbag pictured, right) we can expect the barren years of Foot and Kinnock to come back and haunt us, probably for another 18 years.   Tory toffs Dave and George must think all their Christmases have come at once.

A lot of young voters won’t remember Thatcher or the huge social rift she created in our society during the 1980s:  the years which embedded a deep layer of uneducated, unemployable thugs that we all complain about now.   Enterprising thugs whose only way of engaging with the economics of our society is to get a bigger attack dog and terrorise people on the street.  Sure, the Tories made all the right noises about enterprise and giving people better opportunities (as they always do), but the reverse happens when you allow the profit motive to rule your social policies.

Factor in the still-smouldering global economic crisis – with defaults by Greece, Ireland, Portugal and more to follow – and we have some long, hard years in front of us.  Much harder than people are expecting.

There are no lights at the end of the tunnel this time unless we stop the Tories in their slimy tracks.

Multiculturalism isn’t working because we haven’t created the right conditions for it to succeed.

I wish all ethnicities and religions peace and prosperity, but if people come to live here they must fit into our way of life, not we into theirs.   I integrate with immigrants every day: in my job, on the bus, in the supermarket, in my local area of Wandsworth or in the centre of London, and in the hospitals … and unfortunately many of the stereotypes seem to be borne out.

In my work, I see many Indian and other nationalities come here first by themselves, then bringing over their dependants (quite easy under the current visa system), then get pregnant and have more dependants. In addition, they pretend to be students and within a short time they stop attending classes and disappear. They can’t be traced as they have changed address.  They get reported to the UKBA and you never see published statistics on how many are ever traced and deported successfully.   The widespread belief is that the majority are never found and merely join the vast ‘black economy’ in this country.

If any do go through the motions of attending classes, they are often absent through ‘illness’ with scrappy and highly dubious-looking medical certificates from Indian ‘doctors’ or ‘medical centres’ in Wembley or Southall or somewhere similar.   These are only ever produced way after the event when threatened with being reported to the UKBA.  Whereas you and I would be off work for 1 or 2 days with ‘flu or backpain, these people seem to be signed off for a month or more by their ‘doctors’ to get over the slightest illness.

When they do attend, they are totally disinterested in studying and fail dismally. All they want to do is work, and they are supposed to have a 20-hour a week limit (new students now have a limit of 10 hours), but it seems obvious from their attendance patterns that they work longer than the maximum allowed. There are many employers of their own nationality who will flout the law on employing immigrant workers, as it’s cheap labour. Work always takes precedence over their ‘studies’, so they are constantly late for classes or fail to attend regularly unless threatened with being reported.  The whole system of student visas is therefore a joke.

So I go home every day on the bus and all around me there are people not speaking my own language:  Russians, Africans, Indians, Somalis – all life is there.

I go to the supermarket on Saturday in Wandsworth and have to pass through what is now called ‘Southside’.  Without fail, crowds of immigrant families are in the street, or in the mall, dressed in their black robes and with 6 kids for each mother. You usually get 2 or 3 of these families out together, making several groups of a dozen or more, with kids ranging from babies to teens.

They come out of their council flats and walk around without a care in the world – not just on Saturdays, but on any day of the week you may visit the shopping mall.  They always have lots of shopping bags filled with goods from Primark and wherever else they spend their money.  How they get the money and the council flats I can only speculate. They appear to be Somalis, a very distinctive-looking people, so are they ALL asylum-seekers?

I have to go to the hospital occasionally as I have had some health issues as a man approaching sixty.  I’ve worked all my life and now need to use an NHS service that I have been helping to pay  for over the last 45 years.  When I go to the local GP or the hospital, what do I see?  Queues of the same people I meet at work and in the supermarket and in the street:  Indians, Somalis, many other nationalities, but very few of my fellow English citizens by birth.  Certainly the proportion of immigrants in the waiting rooms, as you observe them come and go, is much higher than the immigration statistics would lead you to believe.

What do we have in the UK -  9%… 10% immigrants now?  In the GP’s or the hospital waiting rooms they must represent around 80% of the queue or more. I wonder how much THEY have paid into our tax and National Insurance system.  I can’t help feeling that I have worked all my life to give it away to these people.

I appreciate that some readers have what they consider balanced and fair views about immigration.  As for my own views, I am not a racist and never have been. The colour of someone’s skin is of no consequence whatsoever.

The rich, Tory-voting classes who need cheap foreign labour, will still want this flow of immigrants to continue. Their housing, transport, local communities or healthcare are not affected in the same way as they are for ordinary working people. The mealy-mouthed LibDems wouldn’t dream of picking on immigration as an issue for fear of being called racist. Labour has lost its way and is too scared of anything approaching a working-class policy or manifesto. Heaven forbid, in the age of the Miliblands.

I am not especially patriotic, the ‘refuge of a scoundrel’ and all that, but I do believe that we will lose whatever culture we have if we don’t stop immigration soon.

We need to wake up now.