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Two things became abundantly clear as we listened to The King’s Speech. The vacuous proposals to deal with both legal and illegal immigration will result in both remaining very high while asylum applications shoot up.
It seems Sir Keir Starmer is poised to grant what we at Migration Watch believe to be an amnesty by any other name. Some 90,000 migrants that most members of the public regard as having come here illegally will be allowed to apply for, and doubtless be granted, asylum. The Tories’ Illegal Migration Act 2023, which barred new Channel migrants from seeking asylum, will be disapplied, while the Rwanda scheme is no more. As if to underline the direction Sir Keir intends to take, he told a gathering of European leaders at Blenheim Palace on Thursday that Britain would never withdraw from the ECHR.
Moreover, there was nothing in the King’s Speech on how the catastrophically high legal migration would be reduced. This was two days after we learned from official figures that the population of England and Wales jumped by a staggering 610,000 in the year to June 2023 – the biggest rise for 75 years – and almost entirely due to migration. Such an unprecedented rise comes on the heels of a rise of 8 million between the 2001 and 2021 censuses of which 7 million was due to immigration and children born to immigrants. The government is desperately hoping that official projections suggesting that net migration will fall to around 350,000 per annum within the next two or three years. But as we have often pointed out, even reducing net migration of 350,000 a year, the population of the UK would increase by 9 million people by the mid-2040s.
It is no wonder that the ethnic minority share of the population is now moving towards 25%. With such relentless population increase and rapid demographic change due to immigration, we must face the prospect of children born today to an indigenous British couple finding themselves in a minority in the country of their parents and forebears by the time they reach their late forties.
Furthermore, out of control immigration and uncontrolled borders are resulting in a diversity which, far from being a strength (the mantra of progressive social engineers for 20 years), weakens and destabilises our society by gnawing away at the cohesion that has held it together for generations. It also manifests itself in the shocking disorder and mayhem we have witnessed this week in Harehills, an ethnically diverse area of Leeds. We also saw it in the intra-communal violence in Whitechapel, East London, where rioters took to the streets in solidarity with the unrest raging in Bangladesh, which so many migrants from that country living here still regard as home. This is not what people have ever voted for and it has to stop.
As we have been saying for some time, “no cap, no control.” A cap is essential if net migration is to be reduced to below 100,000. Indeed, we would like to see it reduced to considerably less than that.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every Friday and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every Friday as soon as it is released