The immigration debate. Here’s my two cents: it’s time to restrict the flow of immigrants.
I’d like to pre-empt the barrage of ‘facts’ about immigrants contributing more than they cost. These facts are always dubious and/or wrong, but no one wants to apply common sense to them out of fear of being branded a xenophobe or racist.
I taught in a primary school for a few months last year, I was teaching ES0L (English to speakers of other languages). I would confidently say that immigration is having a massive negative effect on our schooling system - children who arrive speaking little or no English are still subject to the same targets that any other child is. Therefore, a significant amount of time and resources goes into giving them one to one support so that they don’t fail their GCSEs and cause the school to drop in league tables. This is often at the expense of native English speaking children. In a class of 30, if there are several children who struggle with the language, then this will slow down the class for the rest of the children.
There is also the issue of communities. Too much immigration has allowed some communities to swell into large, self sustaining monocultural areas of people whose beliefs are not consistent with the rest of our countries. I am particularly talking about Muslim communities. Girls have been made to sit at the back of school classrooms in the uk in the last few years. This is unbelievable. In a recent survey, 0% of muslims said that being gay is morally acceptable. If a small number of people from different cultures arrive in the UK, its likely that they will be civilised and integrated, or else the number will be small enough to be acceptable (a democracy always has believers in radical thoughts). When the numbers swell, this integration stops happening as large, self sustaining communities form, and the balance is disrupted.
So, firstly, I think the UK should force the EU to end the freedom of movement laws so that we can finally limit the number of immigrants. I DO believe we should have immigration, I just think it should be in reasonable and controllable numbers. Secondly, I think some people should probably be deported. Anyone who is a first generation immigrant who is found to have committed benefit fraud, been involved with FGM (unless as a victim, obviously), attempted to enforce Sharia Law in any way, ordered a women to wear a veil etc should be sent back to the country which they came from, whether or not they are a refugee, out of a duty to protect the people living in our society from harmful influences.
Immigration is a good thing because it brings diversity, balance, and a set of people who are keen to work hard and who often end up to be successful business people. I don’t deny that many immigrants end up being higher rate tax payers and in this sense, as a whole immigrants ‘pay their way’. But it is idiocy to deny that large scale immigration does not have other harmful effects on society. Also, this is not an attack on individual immigrants, but on the political policy of immigration on the scale it is now. I also thinks its ludicrous that the soviergn government of our nation has no power over this because it has been agreed by beurocrats in Brussels on the back of treaties signed over 30 years ago. Why has the British left wing suddenly lost faith in democracy? Bring back the hard left!