Race, immigration and diversity in Britain

Leo McKinstry:

Net inward migration into Britain is estimated to be running at more than 200,000 a year, though because the government wilfully refuses to establish proper embarkation controls, the true figure could be far higher. Every year, for instance, 2.5 million visitors and students from Asia and Africa come to Britain, but no one knows how many leave because there is no check on departures. Indeed, unpublished Home Office figures put the number of illegal immigrants in Britain at over 500,000. Nor does the government have any grip on the problem of abuses in the asylum process: 85 per cent of asylum-seekers stay here whether granted asylum or not.

The influx of immigrants has resulted in a significant demographic change:

As a result of the explosion in immigration, British society is changing rapidly, especially in our biggest cities. In inner London, 55 per cent of all births are to foreign-born mothers.

Many of these new arrivals have become an economic burden:

According to the Department for Work and Pensions, an astonishing 61 per cent of Bangladeshis in Britain are either unemployed or economically inactive, compared with just 23 per cent of the white population, while 45 per cent of Africans are unemployed. Overall, 41 per cent of ethnic minorities are without jobs — hardly the dynamic contribution so often portrayed in state propaganda. And ethnic minorities are far more likely to be welfare claimants than their white counterparts: 28 per cent of all ethnic minority groups and 34 per cent of blacks receive income-related benefits, compared with 18 per cent of whites. When it comes to housing benefit or income support, blacks are twice as likely as whites to be claimants.

Immigration has also led to an increase in urban crime:

According to the British Crime Survey, 31 per cent of all street robberies in Britain are committed by criminals of African-Caribbean origin, while at least 60 per cent of all muggings in London are perpetrated by blacks. Only last week it was reported that shootings in Brent have gone up by 22 per cent in the last 12 months — this in a borough that was recently paraded as a success story in driving down gun crime. Black and ethnic minority groups account for 24 per cent of the male and 31 per cent of the female prison population, despite the fact that white defendants are more likely to be found guilty in court.

Immigrants may also become a threat to Britain's democracy:

As the recent vote-rigging scandal at Birmingham City Council shows, Third-World practices in intimidation and corruption have now become a part of British democracy. Just as worryingly, the politics of race has poisoned some of our urban constituencies. It is telling that the Liberal Democrats won recent by-elections in Leicester and Brent because of their anti-war, pro-Islamic stance but lost in the mainly white North-East seat of Hartlepool. The pro-immigration lobby attacks the Tories for their nastiness, but what could be nastier than the hostility of some Muslims towards the black Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, Oona King? George Galloway, the Respect party’s candidate in Bethnal Green — who has spent much of his time campaigning for Muslim support by flying to Bangladesh — said that King’s support for the Iraq war meant she had colluded in the killing of 100,000 people ‘including a lot of women who had blacker faces than hers’.

Galloway’s racial hierarchy of victimhood should have no place in a mature democracy like Britain. But that sort of thinking is widespread as a result of unrestricted immigration and the creed of multiracialism. It is fashionable to sneer at the witch-hunters of the 17th century who created a climate of hysteria and panic over supposed religious heresy. But our political elite has done exactly the same today in its obsession with race. Ideology has triumphed over objective facts. Righteous unreason is destroying our society.

So much for the benefits of immigration and multiculturalism.