PROF ROBERT TOMBS: Mass Immigration is Destabilising Our Country

Last weekend, my cousin's charming child, not long out of medical school, married her sweetheart - a handsome young medical professional from an Indian household.

The Hindu wedding was incredible, vibrant and huge fun for everyone. Watching as young English and Indian individuals danced together, I showed that the day was an ideal example of multicultural combination as we all want it to be.

But it is alarmingly naive to take these benefits for approved and to anticipate that the conference of cultures will automatically result in universal love.

The UK has arguably the very best record of any nation in the method that, for hundreds of years, it has actually taken in immigrants and refugees from every corner of the world, offering a safe and civilised haven.

From the Huguenot Protestants who fled massacres in France during the 16th century, to the Jews leaving Nazi genocide throughout the Second World War, right up to the Ukrainian ladies and kids used shelter today, British tolerance and empathy have actually been a lifeline for millions.

Now that tolerance is being stretched to its limits. Mass migration, intensified by people-smuggling on a commercial scale, is destabilising our country.

We must not fall into the trap of supposing that, due to the fact that it has actually typically worked out fine in the past, Britain can soak up any quantity of demographic modification.

We have never seen escalating immigration on anything like the scale of the past twenty years, wites Prof Robert Tombs

History reveals that, even here, sudden influxes of migration have actually triggered turmoils that last for centuries. And we have never seen intensifying migration on anything like the scale of the previous 20 years.

Official figures from the Department for Education exposed on Thursday that white British kids are already the minority in one in 4 schools in England.

This transformation has actually been specifically marked in our big cities. At Rockwood Academy in Birmingham, for example, there was not a single white British pupil tape-recorded amongst the 1,084 who go to the school.

Recently likewise saw the publication of a report from Professor Matt Goodwin at Buckingham University, predicting that white Britons will be a minority of the population by 2063 - hardly more than a single generation.

By the end of the century, according to his figures, 60 per cent of the nation will have been born overseas or will have at least one moms and dad who is an immigrant. Already, more than 19 percent of Britons will be Muslim (compared with the present 7 percent). Goodwin's forecasts are based upon census information and figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

I presume these numbers badly underestimate the real rate of modification. They assume a stable increase and stable geopolitical conditions, when we have every reason to anticipate both of those factors will prove unpredictable.

An anti-immigration protester holds up a placard during a demo in Dover in 2020

Climate modification could have a terrible result on migration, if even one or 2 of the more alarmist theories are borne out.

Tens of countless individuals in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh might be made homeless if water level rise. Millions more would leave their homes if glacial melt in the Himalayas caused catastrophic flooding in India.

Civil wars in Sudan, Congo and Eritrea have already driven huge numbers of people to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. African nations from Nigeria to South Africa are in danger of tearing themselves apart, and the outcome would be a huge rush of individuals seeking to get away the battling.

These turmoils would be small compared to the after-effects of war between India and Pakistan, or in the Middle East. In those cases, Europe could see 100 million refugees or more.

Add to that the increase of organised crime and individuals trafficking. For all Sir Keir Starmer's bluster about 'smashing the gangs', he closes his eyes to the fact that this is a multi-billion-pound business - one that will not cease just since he makes speeches.

These are not petty crooks. They are international cartels, who have found a revenue stream that rivals profits from the drugs trade. The Government has no ideas at all about how to stop them.

The varieties of economic migrants making the risky crossing from France in overloaded rowboats are installing, sometimes topping more than 1,000 in a single day.

The cumulative effect is mind-boggling. According to your house of Commons library, 44,000 people arrived illegally in the 12 months to March - which figure, of course, represents only the people we understand about. A lot more have most likely slipped under the radar, landing undiscovered or concealed in lorries and containers.

But 44,000 corresponds to just 5 per cent of the immigration total for the year. Legal arrivals outnumber the prohibited ones by about 20-to-one.

Nothing in our long and fascinating island story has ever come close to this. Mass immigration, ushered in by New Labour under Tony Blair, is a careless experiment in market revolution that has actually never been attempted in Britain before.

But it has taken place somewhere else. And for indigenous populations, it has actually typically been dreadful.

When Europeans settled in the Americas, from the 16th century, they required their method on to the land. In Australia and New Zealand - nations that were much less densely inhabited - there was less massive violence but the impact on the aboriginal people was no less devastating.

Significantly, the British Empire never ever permitted migration to India, which had actually a big settled population. British topics were motivated to settle just in sparsely peopled areas: for example, Canada and wide-open parts of Africa such as Kenya.

But in every case, when this procedure started, it was quickly uncontrollable. More than six million Irish emigrants arrived in the US throughout the 19th century, a third of them in the space of less than a decade from 1845.

Almost as many Italians emigrated to America, many of them in between 1880 and the early 1920s. In a nation riven with racial divisions, the Italian and Irish communities battled to endure, frequently of course by effort, but also by political corruption and organised criminal offense.

Starry-eyed Left-wingers like to claim that Britain too is a 'nation of immigrants'. That's utterly disingenuous.

William the Conqueror, who showed up across the Channel in 1066 with his own flotilla of boats, brought only about 7,000 males. Yet that small army and the French-speaking Norman immigrants who followed ruined the native Anglo-Saxon culture and ruled over a whole individuals.

Almost every large Saxon building was destroyed, the ruling elite was changed, their residential or commercial property took and the language changed beyond acknowledgment. For centuries, Saxons were required to labour as serfs, despised as an inferior race by the colonising elite. Even Saxon saints were benched.

It took at least 400 years for the aftershocks of the Norman invasion to diminish.

Resentments ran so deep they are still visible in our folk legends: Robin Hood was thought of as a Saxon knight fighting Norman injustice. The idea of this 'Norman Yoke' inspired democrats well into the reign of Victoria.

Even today, nearly a thousand years later on, the Conquest might be embedded in our class system.

A 2011 research study found that Britons with names showing Norman descent - such as Mandeville, Lacy, Glanville or Percy - were on typical 10 percent much better off than those with Saxon artisan names such as Smith, Cooper, Baker or Shepherd, nearly a millennium after the Battle of Hastings.

To understand completely how terribly damaged a nation can be by unrestrained migration, we need just look at Northern Ireland. During the 17th century, 10s of countless Scottish protestants moved to Ulster. Though separated by the Irish Sea, these two nations are so close that on a clear day they are visible to each other.

This was a state task, started by the Scottish and English governments during James I's reign, and conceived as a way of ending mass hardship in Scotland by motivating people to live by farming in Ireland.

Well, all of us understand the outcome: it led to enmity and violence still prevalent today that has actually seen thousands eliminated over the centuries.

Not all the social inequality in Britain is the result of the Norman intrusion, of course, anymore than all Ireland's Troubles were the effect of a strategy to alleviate starvation in Scotland.

But when issues have complicated causes, people look for simple scapegoats - and migration will constantly supply one.

The UK population is now 69.5 million, according to the ONS. (Many believe it to be

substantially higher). That's a boost of ten million this century. Yet the birth rate is falling: in 2023 it reached its most affordable rate on record in England and Wales, at 1.44 kids per woman, compared to the 'replacement rate' of 2.1 - the number of kids required to keep numbers consistent.

If our growing population is not due to childbirth, it needs to be driven by migration.

The falling birth rate is not a new phenomenon. In 1938, it was predicted that the UK population would peak within 5 years at 41 million, and that it would then fall steadily for the next 3 decades, to 31 million by 1975.

In case, this ended up being nonsense, partly since the official stats did not anticipate the Second World War and the baby boom that followed.

But the predictions also failed to take account of the starts of immigration from previous nests, with many thousands getting here from the West Indies after 1948 - the 'Windrush generation' - and Pakistan and India following self-reliance and partition in 1947.

There were other rises, for example from East Africa after the rise of the despot Idi Amin who expelled 80,000 Ugandan Asians, amongst them the parents of former Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Crucially, the excellent majority of these immigrants were identified to incorporate into British life. If not currently English-speaking, they found out the language. They tried to find work or began companies. Many brought much needed abilities and dynamism.

But that is not the case today. A high proportion of legal immigrants concern do low-paid work, for example in care homes and the hospitality sector. Those who certify under the federal government visa scheme for knowledgeable employees or health and care employees can anticipate to be paid 80 per cent of the basic salary.

Those in the fishing market, for instance, get ₤ 12.82 an hour, instead of ₤ 15.88 for British workers. A similar disparity uses in numerous trades from welding to dance and choreography.

When will white Brits end up being an ethnic minority? Map exposes areas where they already are

This has a threefold effect: incomes are depressed, new arrivals live in comparative hardship, and many British individuals have actually left of the labour market. Resentments grow on all sides and the expense is unsustainable.

Many other migrants, it needs to be said, maximize our generous asylum system - including housing (in some cases in comfy hotels), food, complimentary NHS healthcare and even investing money.

The best source of bitterness, though, comes when immigrants decline to incorporate. Incredibly, lots of on the Left motivate this by trashing our culture and libelling our history - elevating every background other than the native one. It spells disaster for our future when immigrants are motivated to remain locked within their own neighborhoods and taught that the British have actually always been their enemies.

How unsafe this is, we can see by looking across the Channel, to France where 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from North Africa develop a consistent state of unrest. Riots are frequent, car-burning is a nationwide sport and extremist political leaders talk of're-migration' - the expulsion of individuals who 'do not suit'.

This will be Britain's future if the Government does not take control of the circumstance today. Immigration can benefit everyone, however only if it is strictly handled, democratically accepted and culturally incorporated.

Allowed to lack control, as the arc of history shows, it damages countries.