LAST WEEK the Office for National Statistics bulletin informed us that our population will grow by five million by 2032 and ten million by 2047, driven entirely by immigration. This was my comment in a Migration Watch press release:
I wrote a commentary in last Wednesday’s Daily Mail in which I said that I am a first-generation immigrant myself.
You can read the article here. I wrote: ‘My parents and I came to this country in the 1950s from our native Cyprus, then still a British colony.
‘My parents came because they wanted to embrace this country’s values and culture.
‘However, that is not the case for a great many immigrants today who, under the much-trumpeted value of multiculturalism, cleave to their own values while politicians beat us over the head with the repeated mantra that diversity is our strength.
‘They can say it as often as they like, but the reality is this is not a belief held by a vast swathe of the electorate. Indeed, the failure of both Labour and the Conservative parties to control immigration – legal and illegal – was the overwhelming reason many voters turned to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK at last year’s election.
‘In a recent survey, more than 70 per cent of those polled said they wanted an end to uncontrolled immigration.
‘This is not xenophobia or racism. It is simply the view of a population who are sick and tired of not being listened to.’
In Thursday’s edition of the Telegraph, an interesting report had the headline ‘Britain reliant on foreign mothers to stop fertility rate falling through the floor’. This almost makes it sound as if it’s by design. The paper spotted that while the fertility rate of foreign-born mothers has increased in the last couple of years to 2.03 per woman, UK-born women’s fertility rate has fallen to 1.54, a 31 per cent difference.
As we at Migration Watch have been saying repeatedly, this means that migration is now the sole reason for rapid population growth. The higher birth-rates of foreign-born mothers, and even more, the high level of foreign immigration, simply means that the ethnic minority proportion of the population will exceed 50 per cent (in other words become the majority) sooner than previously thought – the mid-2060s.
A little nugget was uncovered by the perspicacious Karl Williams at the Centre for Policy Studies: in the first six months of 2024, more than 78,000 health and care visas were issued. Just 15,650 of these were to actual workers while 63,000 were to their dependants. Four dependants for each minimum-wage worker. The top five nationalities accounting for the visa were India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and Ghana. It gives an inkling as to why legal migration is so out of control, and why we doubt that net migration will fall to anything like the 340,000 per annum from 2029 that the ONS has been advised will happen.
Then on Thursday came the Border, Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. The most pointless piece of legislation imaginable. It will achieve nothing. It most certainly will not smash the gangs; the boats will continue streaming across the Channel. The legislation is tantamount to issuing an open invitation to carry on regardless.
You can access the Home Secretary’s House of Commons statement by clicking here. The statement was breathtakingly vacuous, reflecting the vacuity of the Bill. The Rwanda Act will be repealed – of course. Yvette Cooper’s statement includes this cringeworthy sentence: ‘The Bill sets out new, transformative measures to provide law enforcement agencies with stronger powers to pursue, disrupt and deter organised immigration crime.’
These gems too. The legislation will be:
‘Creating new offences for supplying, offering to supply or handling items suspected of being for use in immigration crime, for example the buying, selling and transporting of small boat parts’;
‘Creating a new preparatory acts offence for collecting information to be used by organised immigration criminals to prepare for boat crossings’;
‘Creating new powers to enable the search for and the seizure of electronic devices’.
And this: ‘These new counter terror-style powers, including making it easier to seize mobile phones at the border, along with statutory powers for our new Border Security Command to focus activity across law enforcement agencies and border force will turbocharge efforts to smash the gangs.
‘The Bill makes it an offence to endanger another life at sea, to act as a deterrent to boat overcrowding and reduce further tragic loss of life among those making the perilous Channel crossings.’
At the same time the Bill will water down border laws introduced by the Tories only two years ago designed to block illegal migrants from obtaining citizenship and to force them to submit to scientific age checks.
Seriously, Home Secretary? You really believe this Bill is going to smash the gangs, stop the boats and deter migrants from trying to cross the Channel illegally to claim asylum? Dream on, ma’am.
