Last weekend, my cousin's beautiful child, not long out of medical school, married her sweetie - a good-looking young medical professional from an Indian family.
apartmentguide.com
The Hindu wedding event was spectacular, vibrant and substantial fun for everyone. Watching as young English and Indian people danced together, I reflected that the day was a best example of multicultural integration as we all want it to be.

But it is alarmingly naive to take these advantages for approved and to expect that the conference of cultures will instantly result in universal love.

The UK has perhaps the very best record of any country in the manner in which, for centuries, it has actually taken in immigrants and refugees from every corner of the planet, offering a safe and civilised haven.

From the Huguenot Protestants who fled massacres in France throughout the 16th century, to the Jews leaving Nazi genocide during the Second World War, right approximately the Ukrainian women and kids offered shelter today, British tolerance and empathy have actually been a lifeline for millions.

Now that tolerance is being stretched to its limitations. Mass immigration, compounded by people-smuggling on an industrial scale, is destabilising our country.

We should not fall under the trap of supposing that, due to the fact that it has usually worked out fine in the past, Britain can soak up any amount of demographic modification.

We have never seen intensifying migration on anything like the scale of the past 20 years, wites Prof Robert Tombs

History shows that, even here, sudden influxes of migration have caused turmoils that last for centuries. And we have never ever seen escalating immigration on anything like the scale of the past 20 years.

Official figures from the Department for Education revealed on Thursday that white British children are currently the minority in one in four schools in England.

This improvement has actually been specifically marked in our huge cities. At Rockwood Academy in Birmingham, for instance, there was not a single white British pupil taped among the 1,084 who attend the school.

Last week likewise saw the of a report from Professor Matt Goodwin at Buckingham University, forecasting that white Britons will be a minority of the population by 2063 - hardly more than a single generation.

By the end of the century, according to his figures, 60 per cent of the nation will have been born overseas or will have at least one moms and dad who is an immigrant. By then, more than 19 per cent of Britons will be Muslim (compared to the current 7 percent). Goodwin's forecasts are based upon census data and figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

I think these numbers badly underestimate the true rate of modification. They presume a steady increase and steady geopolitical conditions, when we have every reason to expect both of those aspects will show unstable.

An anti-immigration protester holds up a placard throughout a demonstration in Dover in 2020

Climate change could have a terrible impact on migration, if even one or 2 of the more alarmist theories are substantiated.

Tens of countless individuals in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh could be made homeless if sea levels increase. Millions more would leave their homes if glacial melt in the Himalayas caused devastating flooding in India.

Civil wars in Sudan, Congo and Eritrea have actually already driven massive numbers of people to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. African countries from Nigeria to South Africa are in risk of tearing themselves apart, and the result would be a huge rush of individuals looking for to escape the combating.

These upheavals would be small compared with the aftermath of war between India and Pakistan, or in the Middle East. In those cases, Europe could see 100 million refugees or more.

Contribute to that the rise of organised criminal offense and people trafficking. For all Sir Keir Starmer's bluster about 'smashing the gangs', he closes his eyes to the reality that this is a multi-billion-pound company - one that will not cease just due to the fact that he makes speeches.

These are not minor lawbreakers. They are global cartels, who have found a revenue stream that rivals benefit from the drugs trade. The Government has no concepts at all about how to stop them.

The varieties of economic migrants making the perilous crossing from France in overloaded dinghies are installing, often topping more than 1,000 in a single day.

The cumulative result is mind-boggling. According to your home of Commons library, 44,000 individuals arrived unlawfully in the 12 months to March - which figure, obviously, represents just individuals we understand about. Many more have most likely slipped under the radar, landing undiscovered or concealed in lorries and containers.

But 44,000 corresponds to simply 5 per cent of the migration overall for the year. Legal arrivals surpass the illegal ones by about 20-to-one.

Nothing in our long and fascinating island story has ever come close to this. Mass immigration, introduced by New Labour under Tony Blair, is a reckless experiment in market revolution that has never been attempted in Britain before.

But it has taken place somewhere else. And for indigenous populations, it has actually typically been dreadful.

When Europeans settled in the Americas, from the 16th century, they required their way on to the land. In Australia and New Zealand - nations that were much less densely inhabited - there was less large-scale violence but the result on the aboriginal people was no less destructive.

Significantly, the British Empire never allowed migration to India, which had a big settled population. British topics were motivated to settle only in sparsely peopled locations: for instance, Canada and wide-open parts of Africa such as Kenya.

But in every case, when this process started, it was quickly unmanageable. More than six million Irish emigrants shown up in the US throughout the 19th century, a third of them in the space of less than a years from 1845.

Almost as numerous Italians emigrated to America, the majority of them between 1880 and the early 1920s. In a nation riven with racial departments, the Italian and Irish communities fought to make it through, frequently obviously by effort, but also by political corruption and organised criminal offense.

Starry-eyed Left-wingers like to declare that Britain too is a 'country of immigrants'. That's utterly disingenuous.

William the Conqueror, who showed up throughout the Channel in 1066 with his own flotilla of boats, brought only about 7,000 males. Yet that little army and the French-speaking Norman immigrants who followed ruined the native Anglo-Saxon culture and ruled over an entire individuals.

Almost every big Saxon structure was destroyed, the judgment elite was changed, their residential or commercial property took and the language altered beyond acknowledgment. For centuries, Saxons were forced to labour as serfs, disliked as an inferior race by the colonising elite. Even Saxon saints were demoted.

It took a minimum of 400 years for the aftershocks of the Norman invasion to subside.

Resentments ran so deep they are still visible in our folk legends: Robin Hood was envisioned as a Saxon knight combating Norman injustice. The idea of this 'Norman Yoke' inspired democrats well into the reign of Victoria.

Even today, nearly a thousand years later, the Conquest might be embedded in our class system.

A 2011 study discovered that Britons with names indicating Norman descent - such as Mandeville, Lacy, Glanville or Percy - were on average 10 percent much better off than those with Saxon artisan names such as Smith, Cooper, Baker or Shepherd, practically a millennium after the Battle of Hastings.

To comprehend totally how severely damaged a country can be by unrestrained migration, we require only look at Northern Ireland. During the 17th century, 10s of thousands of Scottish protestants migrated to Ulster. Though separated by the Irish Sea, these 2 countries are so close that on a clear day they show up to each other.

This was a state job, started by the Scottish and English governments during James I's reign, and conceived as a way of ending mass poverty in Scotland by motivating people to live by farming in Ireland.

Well, all of us know the outcome: it resulted in enmity and violence still common today that has seen thousands eliminated over the centuries.

Not all the social inequality in Britain is the outcome of the Norman invasion, obviously, any more than all Ireland's Troubles were the repercussion of a strategy to ease hunger in Scotland.

But when problems have complicated causes, individuals look for simple scapegoats - and migration will always provide one.

The UK population is now 69.5 million, according to the ONS. (Many think it to be

significantly higher). That's a boost of 10 million this century. Yet the birth rate is falling: in 2023 it reached its most affordable rate on record in England and Wales, at 1.44 children per woman, compared to the 'replacement rate' of 2.1 - the number of kids needed to keep numbers stable.

If our growing population is not due to childbirth, it needs to be driven by immigration.

The falling birth rate is not a brand-new phenomenon. In 1938, it was forecasted that the UK population would peak within 5 years at 41 million, and that it would then fall gradually for the next 3 decades, to 31 million by 1975.

In case, this ended up being nonsense, partly due to the fact that the official statistics did not expect the Second World War and the baby boom that followed.

But the forecasts likewise stopped working to take account of the beginnings of immigration from previous nests, with many thousands getting here from the West Indies after 1948 - the 'Windrush generation' - and Pakistan and India following self-reliance and partition in 1947.

There were other rises, for example from East Africa after the increase of the despot Idi Amin who expelled 80,000 Ugandan Asians, among them the parents of former Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Crucially, the great majority of these immigrants were identified to integrate into British life. If not currently English-speaking, they learned the language. They tried to find work or started businesses. Many brought much needed skills and dynamism.

But that is not the case today. A high proportion of legal immigrants concern do low-paid work, for instance in care homes and the hospitality sector. Those who certify under the federal government visa scheme for knowledgeable workers or health and care workers can expect to be paid 80 per cent of the basic income.

Those in the fishing market, for example, receive ₤ 12.82 an hour, as opposed to ₤ 15.88 for British workers. A comparable inconsistency uses in numerous trades from welding to dance and choreography.

When will white Brits become an ethnic minority? Map exposes neighbourhoods where they already are

This has a threefold impact: wages are depressed, brand-new arrivals live in comparative hardship, and numerous British individuals have actually left of the labour market. Resentments grow on all sides and the expense is unsustainable.

Many other migrants, it needs to be said, make the most of our generous asylum system - including housing (in some cases in comfy hotels), food, totally free NHS healthcare and even spending money.

The greatest source of resentment, however, comes when immigrants decline to integrate. Incredibly, lots of on the Left motivate this by trashing our culture and libelling our history - elevating every background except the native one. It spells catastrophe for our future when immigrants are motivated to stay locked within their own communities and taught that the British have actually constantly been their opponents.

How dangerous this is, we can see by looking throughout the Channel, to France where 2nd and third generation immigrants from North Africa create a constant state of discontent. Riots are regular, car-burning is a national sport and extremist political leaders talk of're-migration' - the expulsion of people who 'do not fit in'.

This will be Britain's future if the Government does not take control of the situation right now. Immigration can benefit everyone, however only if it is strictly handled, democratically accepted and culturally integrated.

Allowed to run out of control, as the arc of history programs, it damages nations.

Professor Robert Tombs is the author of The English And Their History

FranceIndia