I think the real problem people are having is that a large amount of those immigrants are now no longer from the EU. But you have Brexit to blame for that.
A) people had an issue with immigration when it was mostly from the EU as well, one of the main drivers of Brexit
B) leaving the EU did not mean that non-EU migration had to go up
C) immigration going down for one or two years doesn’t change the fact that millions of people are in the UK that most British people didn’t want to enter in the first place over a period of 15+ years
D) net immigration going down still means lots of people are entering the UK from elsewhere, while people from the same culture (ie grew up in the UK) are leaving which still changes the culture of the country
Note: I’m not saying I personally agree with any of those points but it’s clear what the issues are if you’re prepared to listen. There is opinion polling on all of this.
Yeah this is just nonsense, not really worth dealing with for anyone even mildly serious. If you want to halt all immigration or deport all immigrants then you are on the wrong forum.
There certainly are forums for what you are suggesting though.
But we can look at the polling data going back decades now on this issue. People were not happy when it was 50,000 net migration. At one point it hit 950,000.
Obviously the issues that people are concerned about on housing, on transport, on education and more aren’t resolved by reducing the flow for a couple of years.
My point is simply that these feelings have existed for a long time and the government has generally gone against what the electorate have asked for. Are you prepared to concede that point?
If so, then I think blaming it on big tech is a major stretch since this all happened before they had as much command of our attention.
> My point is simply that these feelings have existed for a long time and the government has generally gone against what the electorate have asked for.
The electorate repeatedly asked for those policies by voting the parties that enacted them. If they had other opinions, they didn't express them in any way that actually matters.
That's a feature of first-past-the-post elections. The system deliberately prioritizes regional representation over public opinion. If you want a parliament that prioritizes public opinion, you need a different electoral system.
There has never been a British election where the majority votes cast have been for parties that pledged to increase immigration.
I take your FPTP point, but when has the winning party under FPTP had a manifesto commitment to increase immigration?
Let’s just face facts. We might disagree personally but a majority of people have always voted against immigration and it’s regularly a top 3 issue. Often the top issue!
People pay too much attention on what politicians say, and too little on what kind of people those politicians and their allies are.
My impression is that Reform and the Greens are the only mainstream parties with an actual opinion on immigration. The other parties approach immigration from a more technocratic perspective. They form policies based on expected outcomes, regardless of what the people with opinions think about that kind of immigration. (Except to the extent those opinions influence the outcomes.)
As long as people keep voting Tories, Labour, or Lib Dems, they are effectively saying that immigration is not that important issue after all.
In 2019, the Conservatives stood on a manifesto that promised, amongst other things, to ditch immigration targets (in favour of a more generous points-based system), to increase foreign recruitment of healthcare workers, and to introduce a new student visa which would attract "more students from all over the world" and encourage them to stay on and apply for work in the UK after graduation.
Read point 8 in your link - the 100,000 net target was from the previous (2015 and 2017) manifestos, but was never taken seriously and was ditched in favour of the looser points-based system in 2019.
Both the Tories and Labour shifted their position several times in the 2010s, but few people based their votes on it. The only real change in policy came with the Brexit referendum, which was widely interpreted as being a desire for a shift from European to Commonwealth immigration.
The recent wave of concern is a new thing, and it remains to be seen whether it will continue now that the Brexit migration surge has tailed off or whether the online shit-stirring will be enough to sustain it for longer.
If people prefer unskilled EU immigration to skilled non-EU immigration its says something about them.
People had a problem with EU immigration before Brexit so I do not think that is it.
I think most of the problem people have is with is to illegal immigration. The sentiment is "stop the boats". There are bizarre things happening in the asylum system. Do we need to consider claims made by people from the EU or the US? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/18/eu-citizens-hand... That is an extreme but there are lots of claims by people from safe countries.
I know, but the people complaining about immigration do not. I partly blame the media and social media, and partly politicians focus on net migration numbers.
There's being fed up with something and there's fomenting civil war. The huge wave of immigration, which has since subsided, happened under the Tories.
The most likely candidates are places like Bradford and Birmingham, which are still - according to wikipedia - 60%+ white british, that's without even considering british asian or other people born in and native to the UK.
Again, sorry, I can't find any sources to support your facts here, maybe I looked in a different place to you, so perhaps you could share your sources?
I’m not taking sides on the wider argument here, but I think it’s you who should check your sources? Copy pasting direct from wikipedia:
> The city of Bradford is 45.8% White according to the latest 2021 census data, with the White British population being 40.5%. 45.3% of the city's population is Asian, primarily from the Pakistani community
The difference we're seeing in numbers here is because the centres of cities are historically have a higher number of immigrants.
Fortunately, ONS did a specific report on "Bradford", which is the source for the wikipedia page I cited. The source link was broken on wiki, here it is though:
"In the latest census, around 437,800 Bradford residents said they were born in England. This represented 80.1% of the local population."
I chose Bradford because it's locally referred to (pejoratively, not by me) as "Bradistan". But despite that, according to ONS, 30% cite Muslim as their religion, which is more than "no religion" at 28%, but still lower than Christianity, at 34%
I encourage you to go check the sources for your sources, like I should have done (and you forced me to). If you look at this debate with an open mind, I believe you will find the majority of us rightly don't feel represented by the statement "Brits are legitimately fed up with immigration" any more. My bias' are that I'll almost always be pro immigration, within reason, but I completely recognise there have been times over the past 10 years where I've felt that position has been legitimately hard to defend. Now is not one of those times
The real issue is that every single time someone or something suggests immigration is a problem in the UK, it can trivially be reframed as an inequality issue.
To get back to the original topic, I think beneficiaries of inequality - like certain big tech players - are strongly motivated to keep the general public blaming anyone other than them for the problems caused by inequality.
edit: I just understood the census page a bit more, it's a generic report by area. You can put Birmingham in there too. It says basically the same: the overwhelming majority of residents are UK born and Christian or of no religion. Yes this is changing, slowly, like the world and populations change, slowly - not at a new or concerning rate.
The times are clearly changing, as they always do. Are you saying that it is “natural and sensible” to be racist and xenophobic? Perhaps it is. But perhaps we can do better.
Yes it is natural to prefer your own ethnicity and culture, which has existed for thousands of years. It is okay to say you want it to survive.
Japan, Korea, China, all have a strong preference for preserving their culture and ethnicity. Japan is 99% ethnic Japanese and has strict immigration laws. Yet they are also tolerant to outsiders who are visitors and we respect their right to govern themselves. I don’t think anyone regards the Japanese as a hateful people, yet by your definition they are indeed “racist” and “xenophobic”.
If the choice is to see your people replaced or be labeled “phobic”, then the obvious choice is to just accept the label and fight for your people.
It's natural to be a bit racist an xenophobic internally. We're all animals at the end of the day who are motivated to protect our in groups and people like us.
The same way as it's natural to have strong feelings of wanting to inflict pain and suffering on someone who's done wrong to us or people we care about.
Choosing not to do these harmful but natural things is called "being civil". Nobody has to be civil, but a civil society is that way because it makes uncomfortable consequences on people who aren't civil.
It is not sensible to be xenophobic and racist in a civil society unless you consider harming others and inviting uncomfortable consequences on yourself as sensible.
But you don't have to pretend. You can choose to be outwardly racist and xenophobic if you want, it just doesn't seem very sensible.
Maybe native Brits should make more babies? Or maybe the powers that be should enact changes to make native baby-making more compelling? Dunno what to tell you. Without immigration, the wheels fall off completely.
>Without immigration, the wheels fall off completely.
Do you recall the criticism that a blind commitment to economic growth at all costs is a social pathology that (among other adverse effects) prevents us from addressing climate change?
It is easier when that is the zeitgeist. If every other country in Europe has the same thing going on, it becomes easier to campaign on that sort of stuff. Suddenly the extreme parties don't seem that extreme, and people start to question whether or not previously extreme opinions are that extreme anymore.
well, first, you need to filter out the foreign influence before you tell people "Brits" and then you also need to adjust your history of brits importing immigrants from their colonies.
After you do that, then people might listen to you.
That’s on you to prove. Is this an “obvious” truth? Or is it just the narrative spun by the fascists and fear-mongers who, incidentally, own some of the biggest media platforms in existence?
Today, a man stabbed four people in islamophobic rage: a ghastly crime. Where are the riots in protest of racist UK natives?
I think you missed the point. Claiming legitimate voter unhappiness with some sort of conspiracy of foreign actors, is Politics 101. It's massive spin.
They have citizens rioting on their streets and yet somehow claim it's nefarious foreign actors.
If they are fed up with immigration they are stupid. “Gee we have declining birth rates and we want to deny this pool of labor that might correct course because they are brown.” The american empire was built on easy immigration. Turns out the tired and poor that we took in can build empires and win europe’s major wars for them.
Ah, friend, America was importing people from Africa. Indeed “import” is rather more apt in this case than the several other you’ve ignored (e.g. the mass immigration from Vietnam at the finish of that war).
What a horridly dull country it would be were your understanding nearer the truth; what a betrayal of its dream to wish it as you see it; how silly you would seem to your know-nothing antecedents so lumping “Europeans” as one (it is an irony that in their comparatively more nuanced racialism they at least understood a little more of that continent’s ethnic and cultural diversity).
Up until 1965 the US had strict origin requirements for where immigrants could come from and it was capped at a relatively low number throughout much of the 20th century.
Yes actually up until 1990 the US was overwhelmingly European ancestry, just go look at any demographic data from before 1990. Many states were 90+% white and indeed many were even higher.
The places with African slave descendants in the US were the main sources of “diversity” and were of course the ones with lower social trust and higher crime/poverty.
>has found the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, donate to charity, and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust each other only half as much as in the most homogeneous environments.
Not fear, a clear understanding of reality. It’s easy to understand that if you import a large number of Somalians, your country will change to be more similar to Somalia. It shows itself in statistics time and time again. Just take a look at any crime stats broken down by race in any country. Indeed look at even Sweden, they imported a large population of Syrians and Afghans and their gun violence rate has doubled in the last decade.
It’s no coincidence that the US was founded by European Christians and that it took on many of the best characteristics of those same European Christian societies (the ones who invented science, the enlightenment, the rule of law, etc). That is the real power behind the American Empire.
>Do you suppose your response to an ethnically or culturally different neighbor differs from some your ancestors’?
Likely I have very similar views to my ancestors. That is that our country and people have a right to continue existing as they have for thousands of years.
>morally superior
Our country does not owe anybody the right to live here, we reserve the right to allow or disallow anyone we want to move here and become a citizen, that is one of the main characteristics of a sovereign nation. If your criteria for immigration is purely “what is the most moral policy?” (An extremely vague idea, subject to interpretation by anyone), then your country will very quickly cease to exist.
You are fear mongering here. I do think immigration is double edged, but if you look at the statistics I posted it is very far from replacement level. If you would prefer to have immigrants from the EU instead, then something needs to be done about Brexit.
Ahh, so you want to lock down the border between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, because if you drop 1 million citizens of Ireland into London they also don't simply become British but are just Irish living in London.
The Welsh might have a comment about how much the British government tried to erase the native culture and people who lived on those isles for thousands of years before various foreigners came in on little boats. How are the native Cornish speakers doing these days?
The American Empire grew in no little part by specifically importing people from Africa to work as slaves.
I don't think it's a made up idea that immigration is a problem, some people clearly, definitely consider it a problem, and it can cause problems. But it's a problem that's been heavily worked on recently and has had a lot of success in solving in the UK over the past 2 years.
This is why it's completely barmy to suggest the average brit is fed up of immigration now, and I'm not sure why many people pointing that out are being heavily downvoted.
