The post you are reporting:
Of course immigration has brought a lot of good to this country - no-one would dispute that.
Not everyone who fails to take the leap of faith that immigration is an undiluted force for good is however a racist bigot. Indeed many are getting fed up with being portrayed as such, even if only by implication, or being shot at from a position of assumed unassailable moral supremacy by leftist bien pensants. Neither do they take kindly to condescending suggestions that they are thick or incapable of grasping the issues!
It actually takes more moral courage in my opinion to adopt the cautionary stance on immigration because you know full well that at some point someone will conjure an allusion to the Far Right and throw it at you.
Why is it that anyone who out of no more sinister motive than having a heart for his/her country/town/region/whatever gets this treatment?
I remember the furious debates during the Blair years when anyone trying to point out the elephant in the room, that immigration was getting out of control, would be shot down in the aforementioned way. Archly superior radio phone-in hosts, no doubt secure in their leafy upmarket enclaves, would patronise anyone who phoned in who had a working class accent and whose views differed from their own on-message complacency. Let us not forget that the Labour Party itself admitted that it got it wrong about immigration, after so many warning voices had been howled down. Talking of complacency, that administration arrogantly dismissed claims that allowing free movement of Poles on EU accession would lead to a mass influx into the UK, on the grounds that when Spain and Portugal entered the EU the predicted mass migration failed to materialise. So what happened? The biggest peacetime migration in Europe since World war Two, that's what.
I repeat that immigration is necessary and brings, er, benefits to this country but to make sweeping simplistic statements like "immigration is good" is naive and too sweeping. I can name one massive negative - the way that Dover's reputation was trashed for a generation after the influx of the late 1990s.
Moreover I have long suspected that a lot of people are intimidated into being "on message"on the immigration issue and end up arguing the opposite of what they really feel because they think it's de rigeur to do so, often attacking people who are voicing views they secretly agree with.
Personally, I long ago lost patience with the hypocrisy and point-scoring that invariably infects the immigration debate.
Finally, as has been pointed out above, we are a small overcrowded island - England is the most densely settled country in Europe. I find it hard to believe that anyone can seriously not be concerned on a basic animal level about the relentless increase in this density.
And to get back tot he original point, whether the Telegraph's figures are correct or not, pace Ross' link, we have been debating on on the assumption that they were. We live in an economy that is labelled global - whatever that means. If expat Brits have the right to claim benefits in all other developed countries (you would hardly expect it in a Third World nation) then I would not have a problem with the issue under discussion. But do they? I suspect not, which is plainly wrong and unfair.
