Immigration is Good

Today I watched a recording of last night's BBC programme called 'The Truth About Immigration' so whatever the BBC said must be true. In case you didn't watch it I'll give you a brief summary. Almost half of us think that immigration is bad for our economy. It isn't. 31% think that immigration is good for the economy but even half of them want to see immigration cut.

Nigel Farage reckons that Enoch Powell was "wrong in the sense that he felt that black and white would find it difficult to mix, but unfortunately he's been proved to be right because the sheer numbers that have come into Britain have led to segregation and led to ghettoisation and we now see significant parts of our big cities where people don't even speak English". So Nigel could easily miss out the Enoch was wrong bit and justify Enoch's opinions about the colour of skin being the cause for people not mixing. Of course life is not this simple. Colour of skin doesn't mean that a language cannot be spoken. Colour of skin does not mean that integration is not possible.

If we accept a relationship between ability to speak a language and the colour of skin then what is Nigel's unstated threshold? For some people this could be two. Nigel is wrong to make this a language and a race issue and panders to xenophobia. I wonder how Nigel deals with people speaking Welsh in Wales.

Immigrants don't come to the UK in order to take up benefits. They come here to work and they do jobs that we can't or won't do. Those who criticise the amount of immigration to this country have to accept that they are supporting a move that will hit us all in our pockets. This means that Labour and Tory politicians don't say that immigration is good because this would lose them votes. Yvette Cooper for Labour reckons that the impact that immigration has had on different parts of the population has not been fair (that's bad). There will be anecdotal evidence for this but I can't help thinking that immigration has been more than fair. It has strengthened our economy and kept our NHS going along with countless other organisations. Immigration is good for most of us.


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