Record Levels of Immigration Will Be New Normal for UK Says Report

DOVER, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 15: Inflatable craft and boat engines used by migrants to cross
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Oliver JJ Lane

The United Kingdom has seen an all-time-record year for immigration, yet the country should prepare for these previously unseen levels of arrivals to become the new normal because of the country’s “ageing population” and “skills shortages”, a think tank has urged.

“Britain’s ageing population and skills shortages will mean the country has an ongoing demand for migrant workers”, the Social Market Foundation (SMF) think tank has said, saying the country should prepare itself to make this year’s historically high levels of immigration the new normal. In all, the body said, the country needs to be “better prepared for an era of high migration flows” in a report which namechecked Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage as a particular obstacle to their progress.

Responding, Mr Farage told Breitbart that if anyone thought that Britons could be stopped from discussing mass migration critically, they would be proved quite wrong.

The reasons why the United Kingdom needs to throw its borders open and solicit more immigration given in the SMF report, even going so far as to create “skills partnerships” with human-export nations to train future migrants at home before importing them, will be familiar to anyone following migration politics across Europe. A statement covering the Foundation’s new report cites well-worn excuses including the United Kingdom having an ageing population — a veritable Ponzi scheme of a justification already known in Germany — and the nation being lacked in skilled people, despite questionable efforts by the government to fix that domestically as a first resort.

Jonathan Thomas, SMF Senior Fellow said: “Current high levels of migration could well be the norm rather than the exception. Over the longer term the UK’s deep historical connections with some of the most populated countries across the globe – India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Bangladesh – have the potential to create far more sizeable flows of people to the UK than the smaller and stagnating populations of the EU ever realistically could.”

The report follows a record year for immigration to the United Kingdom, with 1.1 million outlanders in a 12-month reporting period, leaving the country with a net half-million arrivals. As the SMF notes, “Credible academic forecasts predict a near tripling of the number of first-generation immigrants in the UK over the next three decades.” The high levels of arrivals this year, the SMF says, could be down to the UK operating “a relatively liberal immigration policy” since Brexit.

Commenting, Alp Mehmet, chairman of mass-migration-critical think tank Migration Watch UK, said: “The immigration industry are desperate to normalise uncontrolled borders. But they’ll have to get through the British people to do it. Nearly 60 per cent of the public want lower immigration and it would be outrageous if the government ignored them. Ministers must honour their pledges to deliver better border control.”

The SMF does appear to have given some thought to how to control public perception of long-term heavy immigration, though. As its press release notes, “immigrant workers must be shown to be ‘supplementing, not supplanting,’ the UK workforce”.

The report does acknowledge that immigration can be unpopular — or to put it in their language, “The political consensus favouring economic arguments for liberal migration policy is extremely fragile”. Naming Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage in particular as an enemy of this treasured consensus, the think tank’s spokesman said that this fragility “creates an opportunity for political disruptors, an opportunity seized by Nigel Farage and UKIP in the early 2010s. To avoid that risk, there must be compromise on all sides to reach a sustainable centre-ground position on migration.”

Mr Farage hit back at the report, telling Breitbart: “This is yet another attempt to use my name to demonise any debate on legal and illegal immigration. The consequences of our population change on the lives of ordinary people are huge — yet we are not supposed to discuss it. Well, we will!”

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