“one reason why much of the influx took place when David Blunkett was home secretary is that he was blind; he couldn’t actually see what was happening.”

*facepalm*

Yes, that’s right, David Blunkett was a border guard and the immigrants were all very quietly sneaking past him.

As I always ask, what is it about immigration that turns right-wingers into complete frothing loonies?

@2 – brown skin. I think thats really all there is to it

Sunny

There never has been “mass immigration from the Muslim world” in the UK.

Sorry Sunny, but that really is bilge.

The Muslim community has grown in a relatively short time to account for somewhere between three and four per cent of the general population. That can’t be done without mass immigration.

Your post also fails to properly distinguish between ‘migrants’ (people who come to Britain to work for a short time and then return home) and ‘immigrants’ (people who move permanently to Britain and generally take UK nationality).

Migrants from the EU, such as Polish builders who come for a year or so, are not….. whatever Ed Balls may think…. what most people who express concern about immigration mean when they talk about immigrants. Whether their reasons are racist or somewhat more sophisticated, what they are talking about is immigration from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Africa, the Arab world and the Caribbean. A heck of a lot of this in recent years has been Muslim immigration.

There has been Jewish immigration into this country stretching back to the 1880s, but according to the 2001 census, Jews were already outnumbered by Bangladeshi Muslims alone.

Among those granted citizenship rights in the UK, the largest groups are from Africa, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. For better or for worse, there has been massive Muslim immigration to this country and to deny as you do won’t help Labour get real. Ed Balls’s trick of foucusing on EU migrant workers is bilge too. How many Brits live or work abroad in other EU countries?

It is a bit ignorant of her. The eyes are only one sense that we use to suss out what is happening around us. If the eyes don’t work the other senses can still inform a person to make a solid, intelligent judgement on actions.

God, that woman’s so hateful, making those remarks about Blunkett’s blindness.

In other news, John McDonnell said …

The Muslim community has grown in a relatively short time to account for somewhere between three and four per cent of the general population.

Erm, only like over 50 years. And even then, most of that growth has come from people born in the UK.

If I had a personal website or tweet thing, I might tweet this thread without leaving a comment.

@7
Sunny – do the sums, please, or resign
Please, please, don’t make me sympathise with Melanie McDonagh by being even stupider.
It is factually true that there were Muslims in the UK fifty years ago – I knew two of them: but to say that the growth to 2 million has come from natural increase without mass immigration – even rabbits would find that hard work – is ridiculous
PS I knew literally thousands of people fifty years ago

Please, please, don’t make me sympathise with Melanie McDonagh by being even stupider.

Go on, hit me with the stats.

Figurin’ never was Sunny’s strong suit.

… As they developed in the 1960s, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities often owed their origins to a tiny number of early pioneers. So strong was the process of chain migratioon that a population of several thousand could be derived from a very small number of kinship groups [emphasis added] related to perhaps only a handful of villages. The original migrant would have been financed by a group of close kin and when successful that migrant would have used his savings to help one of his close relatives to join him. They would soon be in a position to sponsor other members of their kinship group whom they would also help with jobs and accommodation on arrival. A study* of the 2,000 strong Pakistani community in Oxford reveals that almost all the migrants there can be accounted for by just two chains, one of which began with a man who had settled in Glasgow during the second world war. 16

[Ian Spencer, British Immigration Policy since 1939, Routledge, 1997]

* See A. Shaw, The Pakistani comminuty in Oxford, Hurst 1994.

There is an interesting question buried inside this debate. It is almost certainly the case that migrants, to use it in the sense that ‘Flowerpower’ does @ 4, probably constitutes everyone that comes to the UK to work. Most folk, including Asians, arrive with the intention of departing. Is that a reasonable definition of a migrant? Sort of ‘make hay whilst the sun shines’ and go back home with your ill gotten gains.

But, what if you change your mind? What if you are successful here and find a new life that is better than the one you left. At what point do you move from the category ‘migrant’ to ‘immigrant’?

And what of your children. After how many generations are they to be recategorised from immigrant to naturalised.

( There is a football philosophy, hah!, that says if your granny was Welsh then you can play for Wales – is that to be the measure of our debate?)

And, if you see this country as better than the one you left, for whatever reason, does that make your decision a bad thing? Or a bad thing from the point of view of the indigenous population. I’d have thought that accepting a nationality was better than being born to it. But what the heck do I know?

A short point on why nationality doesn’t matter much.

Contrary to what is prevelant in some folks brains, the Blitz effected the whole of the UK. On the nights of the 13 and 14th March 1941 the whole town of Clydebank was destroyed by the Luftwaffe. Part of the defence of that town was provided by the sailors of the ORP Piorun, a Polish crewed destroyer, to whom a memorial still stands in the town.

(This, according to Wikipedia, is the same ORP Piorun that helped to sink the Bismark.)

We owed a debt of gratitude to these folk and it is pretty well disgusting that common cause has given way to narrow minded nationalism.

Don’t get me started on India’s contribution to saving democracy either!

What I am trying to say, perhaps badly, is that nationality is not that important. It is a bit of a contrary indicator, much like folk whose religion is Muslim and who can’t see outside that box either.

No-one needs to define themselves in a one dimensional manner.

You do not need to define yourself. You are not just ‘English’ when a World Cup arrives, you are wrestling with a dilemma that ought to exercise you quite a lot.

Whilst I hate American foreign policy – I think it is generally a pretendy imperialism – I have extremely good internet relationships with Americans. It took me quite a while to disentangle the good that they are, from the bad that they think they need to support. I think, once you try to address their ‘issues’ , on reasonable sites, they are persuadable. The point being that defining yourself by nationality is subject to, winnable, challenges.

It is a point that China Mielville made in an article once. He read specialist magazines, not for their content, but for the range of human emotions that are expressed in them.

There is a ‘gauge’ issue for model railways. They believe, most of them, that 4mm equals a foot. Heretics model in other scales to the foot.

For those concerned, track gauge, the measure of the 4’8″ ( and a half, I can’t seem to work out how to do that) becomes a debate in it’s own right. There are those that believe in OO, there are those that believe in EM and there are perfectionists that believe in P4. We are talking millimetres here.

There is that, albeit small, group of folk that consider that to be an important issue in their lives. Why are they wrong and why are they concerned?

I am not mocking these people. I am just pointing out that a debate will rage unto eternity about the relative merits.

I would assume that none of the participants in that debate see it as defining of themselves. What they do see it as, is important.

To them.

Perhaps because it matters to them. But what matters to you, and them, ought to be subject to review. If you become ‘stuck’ on a belief then you are no better, or worse, than a person that wants to build a model railway. For the criteria of difference, the criteria of exceptionalism is there to behold.

Which is, perhaps, an analogy for the attempts here to ‘rule the roost’ on what we should ‘take’ from the immigration debate. I think their are folk that come here that have an agenda I could not agree with, call them the OO folk.

We categorise ourselves at some risk to independent thought.

(Personally, I’d sponsor a Pakistani P4 follower, but the OO person would get short shrift. You can divide the world up any way you like. Respect to ‘Model Railway Journal’ by the way.)

[11] Just sticking with Oxford, that squares exactly with what Muslim (Pakistani and Bangladeshi) community leaders there told me in the 1980s. Honestly, Sunny, there are times when you out-Polly the Toynbee herself

I’ve been camping over a sunny weekend so my skin is brown. Is Melanie McDonagh my friend now?

I’m not sure where I should “go back” to. I must admit I fancy the Carribean.

Mike Killingworth,

Well, yes, what a pathetic contribution @ 14. Who is to be banned?

Sunny Hundal @ 10

Go on, hit me with the stats.

Okay, the table below shows the numbers & previous nationalities of some of the main groups of immigrants from Muslim countries/countries with a significantly large Muslim population:

India: 26,535
Pakistan: 20,945
Bangladesh: 12,040
Somalia: 8,140
Turkey: 7,205
Nigeria: 6,955
Iraq: 5,495

The Home Office doesn’t list immigrants by religious affiliation, so a bit of sensible estimation is needed. It seems likely that only about 5,000 of those coming from India were Muslim and maybe half to three quarters of of those from Nigeria. However, the stats may be hiding significant numbers of Muslims from countries such as Morocco, Algeria, etc. described only as ‘Africa’; and Indonesia, Malaysia etc. described only as ‘Asia’. But, leaving them aside and looking only at the countries and numbers shown above, it is clear that at around 60,000 Muslims were granted British citizenship in 2009 alone. That’s larger than the entire existing population of a town like Dewsbury. I call that ‘mass immigration’, don’t you?

(source: Home Office, British Citizenship Statistics, 2009).

oh, and I should add that in addition to the 203,000 granted citizenship in 2009, a further 214,000 were granted settlement or leave to remain.

@ 10 Sunny
The Office for National Statistics reports that according to the 2001 Census 4.9 million (8.3% of the UK population) were born overseas, well over twice the number and more than twice the figures in 1951. It has been recognised that the poor design of the 2001 form led to a large number of foreign nationals thinking that they did not need to complete it (which is why Westminster Council objected that they had more people paying council tax than the Census reported as living in that city) so it is virtually certain that the 4.9 million is an understatement.
One may assume that more than 1.5m of the 2.1m who were here in 1951 had died in the intervening 50 years also most of those who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s, around half of those who arrived in the 70s and a minority of later arrivals. So total immigration (net of those who subsequently left) over the period was of the order of 8 million.
ONS do not supply information on the religious affiliation of migrants and their website only gives total flows for 1995 to 2004 during which period immigration rose from just over 300,000 pa to just under 600,000.
There are four Commonwealth countries with large populations of which a majority are Muslim: Bangladesh, Malaysia, Nigeria and Pakistan but there are significant minorities in India (125 million is significant) and other African countries so using the figures for first-generation immigrants (excluding their children and grandchildren) from Pakistan alone to compare with the Muslim population is like comparing the number of buses in Glasgow with the population of Scotland to estimate the use of public transport. ONS kindly informs us that there were a little over one-third of a million still alive in 2001; grossing up for those who have died of old age would give more than half-a-million. One can only guess at the figure for Muslim immigrants from other Commonwealth countries but my guess would be that it would be similar, but probably a bit smaller.

@17 Flowerpower
I call two-thirds of a million “mass immigration”

But, John 77, there has been mass emigration too.

It is not a point worth arguing over, unless you have a stupid agenda.

You don’t, do you?

@ 21 Douglas Clark
My agenda is to get Sunny to think
Maybe *you* think that is stupid – I am not that pessimistic
Should I add getting you to think to my agenda?
I was referring to NET immigration figures and you replied “But, John 77, there has been mass emigration too.”

John 77,

I was referring to NET immigration figures and you replied “But, John 77, there has been mass emigration too.”

So what? Apart from the daft bastards that constitute the BNP we are always going to see inflows of folk that think that the UK is an exceptionally good place to live. And contribute to our wellbeing. Net inflows, net outflows, who cares apart from racists?

I’ll stick to Sunny – it’s easier

Politicians really ought to listen to proper comedians.

Douglas Clark @23

Net inflows, net outflows, who cares apart from racists?

I got banned off a Billy Bragg fans website for questioning such an idea – so I won’t bother here now … other than to say it’s a BS point of view.
What a load of old blx that argument is.