Mass migration will have huge consequences for our country

Speaking in the House of Lords during the recent second reading of the Rwanda Bill, our president and founder, Lord Andrew Green, delivered a speech in which he made reference to the unprecedented scale of legal migration and some of the consequences of a failure to revise wider immigration policy. What is at stake, he said, was the whole scale and nature of our society.  Both of which were being changed by massive levels of immigration. And all of it happening in the face of strong public opinion. He referred to the increase in the UK population by 8 million in the first 20 years of this century – of which, nearly 7 million was due to immigrants and their subsequent children. Over the same period the ethnic minority share of the population, doubled to over 20%. While a third of all births, involve at least one foreign born parent. “The whole nature of our country is being rapidly changed, despite strong public concern,” he said. In more recent years, net migration has shot up even further – much of it due to government changes to immigration policy. Indeed, we might infer that the outcome, which Migration Watch repeatedly warned would take place, was intentional. In 2022, the last available calendar year, net migration reached a record level of 745,000. A truly astonishing figure, by far the highest in our history, with enormous consequences for the whole scale and nature of our society. We have examined some of the consequences of these very high levels of immigration. In doing so we took, for the medium term, a lower figure of 600,000 for net migration, and assumed that the UK birth rate would remain close to the current level. The results indicate that our population would increase by some 20 million in the next 25 years. That’s to say, 15 cities the size of Birmingham. As we have often said, the implications for housing, health and education would be huge. In the education sector, for example, British children would become a minority in state schools in England in less than 20 years. A failure to reduce net migration will have very wide consequences for the scale, nature and, indeed, the continuing wellbeing and stability of our society.