The Immigration Debate Is Over ━ The European Conservative

As the civil unrest that erupted in Labour constituencies after the son of Rwandan migrants allegedly murdered three girls in Southport subsides, pundits race to regain lost rhetorical ground on immigration. Maya Goodfellow gaslit the Guardian’s few remaining readers by declaring that there are no “legitimate concerns” about immigration. Another favourite of the BBC, communist outlet Novara Media asserted that “We don’t need to talk about immigration.” But these status quo apologists understand something their critics do not. While Reform UK’s Richard Tice has courageously called out Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s two-tier justice system, his belief that a “proper debate” and another referendum on immigration is the solution is misguided. We have abundant evidence cataloguing the crimes, costs, and cultural decay caused by mass immigration. Why relitigate its non-existent merits?

Each day brings a new headline about how “a man” has stabbed a child in Leicester Square, or murdered a woman and defiled her corpse in Dartford, or murdered a teenage girl in Crawley, or murdered a woman in Manchester. Sometimes, it’s “a woman” who has murdered her landlord and killed his cat. Like the Parnell Square stabbing in Dublin last year, the perpetrators are often “of no fixed abode”—a media euphemism for foreign vagrants. One would be hard pressed to argue that importing the world’s unproductive homeless enriches Britain. 38% of Britain’s 4000 or so homeless in 2023 were foreign nationals, with the overall population increasing by 120% since 2010. Yet, successive governments have refused to remove them. Kurdish migrant Brwa Shorsh, who shoved a postman into the path of an oncoming tube in February, had 12 convictions for 21 prior offences—yet remained in Britain to sleep on its streets. Like Clapham alkali attacker Abdul Ezedi, given asylum after three failed applications, Shorsh was also a convicted sex offender. What benefit is conferred upon the host population by having them here? 

This is not to suggest that British natives commit no crimes; only that increasing immigration from outside Western Europe has increased the crime rate. This fact is indisputable, but inadmissible for the stubborn adherents to multiculturalism. The Global Organised Crime Index found the UK was first in Western Europe, and second on the continent as a whole, for crimes committed by foreign actors in 2023. This coincides with a lenient justice system which, on 64,000 occasions, spared offenders with around 50 prior convictions any prison time. We do not know the number or the national origins of these criminals. The Office for National Statistics, the Home Office, and the Ministry of Justice conduct a conspiracy of silence by refusing to publish data on crimes committed by ethnicity or nationality. We could set immigration policy in accordance with which foreign nationals commit the most crimes. However, the civil service has refused to comply with ministers’ requests to publish “league tables” with the data they collect, but hide from the public. 

Instead, we are forced instead to infer patterns of behaviour from immigrants in other European countries. This is reasonable, given new arrivals are encouraged by liberal politicians in multicultural societies to hold tight to their native customs. In Denmark, immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey, and their descendents, are 13% of the population but commit 25% of violent crime, and comprise almost 50% of the prison population. They are 2.5 times more likely to commit violent crimes than native Danes. 

This conspiracy of silence extends to reporting. Last week, it was reported that sexual harassment incidents on Britain’s railways have increased by more than 50% since 2021. Sexual offences against women and girls have risen by 10% over the same period. Immigration was not mentioned once as a compounding factor. What is the use of journalists if they refuse to ask necessary questions? Government, too, obfuscates the problem by blaming “misogynistic influencers” like Andrew Tate instead, on the basis of which Home Secretary Yvette Cooper will bring in new counter-terrorism legislation proscribing “extreme misogyny” online. Just as when Sir David Amess was murdered by a second-generation-Somali Muslim called Ali Harbi Ali, migrant crime is invariably used to manufacture consent for legislation which censors and criminalises speech by the besieged native population. 

Immigrants also commit different kinds of crime to native Brits. Outside Europe, East Asia, and the Anglosphere, the worth of a woman or child is purely instrumental to the power or pleasure of the most violent man. Hence why Islamic honour-based violence has risen by 60% in two years and by 193% since 2016. When Britain sees a 75% annual rise in acid attacks on women, which formerly only occurred in the Middle East, south Asia, and Africa, we might be forgiven for supposing that we are dealing here with an imported pastime. 

Violence against women and girls is not only a phenomenon within immigrant households. Anti-white rape gangs in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford have groomed over 4,000 girls. A 2020 Home Office review found the Pakistani perpetrators were three times more likely than white Britons to commit child sexual offences. A GB News investigation found that 1 in every 2,200 Muslim males, and 1 in 1,700 Pakistanis, have been prosecuted for child sex offences between 1997 and 2017. 

Rather than tailor immigration policy accordingly, the annual increase in illegal entrants presents another avenue for predators to exploit British women and girls. The BBC reports that a record 18,467 people or so have broken into Britain via the English Channel already in 2024. Accommodation costs have reached £15 million a day, with the asylum system costing an annual total of £14.4 billion. 130,000 illegal and predominantly male migrants have made this journey since figures were first collected in 2018. Most are from Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Eritrea, Syria, and Iraq. Other asylum applicants come from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh—all recipients of British foreign aid, as well as stretches of the map where there is no ongoing war. Most of these countries’ expats commit sex offences at higher rates than Brits or native Danes in Denmark.

But we need not guess their intent: they telegraph it before arriving. In a story that I provided to GB News, North African trafficking gangs use videos of British women, filmed without consent, in states of drunkenness and undress, to advertise their services on Instagram. Foreign criminals regard our wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters as the spoils of war. The government knows about this, and does nothing. What more is to be debated here?

The point being made is that every one of these criminals does not need to be here. Every one of their victims would be alive, unmolested, if not for government policy. Every crime committed by an immigrant is both an avoidable tragedy, and a result of choices made by politicians, civil servants, lawyers, and NGOs. 

‘Mental health’ is the excuse often given for the crimes of first- and second-generation immigrants. Instances include Anthony Esan stabbing Lt Col Mark Teeton by Brompton Barracks, Kent, and Valdo Calacone murdering three in Nottingham in June of last year. It is fashionable for two reasons. Firstly, because blame may be placed on the state for insufficiently funding ‘mental health services.’ Secondly, because these services propose that murder is not a moral crime requiring punishment, but a lapse in sanity easily remedied by education and therapy. Discussions about ‘mental health’ do not violate the egalitarian anthropology of our liberal institutions. One may observe, as the NHS did in 2016, that black men are diagnosed with schizophrenia ten times more than whites (3.2% versus 0.3%). But such factors are radioactive to account for in liberal immigration policy.

The term ‘knife crime’ is frequently used, too. This has prompted the liberal establishment to play whack-a-mole by proscribing various types of blade. Conversely, conservatives urge the return of stop-and-search—abandoned for disproportionately profiling the demographics most likely to be both victims and perpetrators. But Sikhs and boy scouts have carried knives for centuries without machete duels breaking out in Essex seaside towns. Daggers do not appear in the hands of non-indigenous youths like apparitions before Macbeth. ‘Knife crime’ is not caused by knives, any more than omnipresent policing was necessary before increased ethnic diversity. Why should the native, law-abiding population need to pay the price of a police state, when simply ceasing to import foreign criminals would solve the problem?

Some suggest this is a necessary price to pay for the economic benefits conferred by mass immigration. Like the last soldier to surrender stationed on a remote Japanese island, the former home secretary, Conservative leadership candidate, and self-described ‘progressive’ Dame Priti Patel continues to defend her record as the architect of unprecedented levels of Third World immigration. She insists that mass immigration is an economic necessity, asking if we would turn away more students, doctors, and nurses?

Firstly, only 3% of immigrants that arrived in 2023 were doctors or nurses. Just seventeen 17% of NHS staff are foreign-born, which explains why it functioned just fine before 1997. The need for this small share of immigration could be eliminated too, by lifting the cap on medical school places for British students and providing competitive salaries to retain home-trained talent. The cap was imposed for fears of ‘overproducing’ doctors and ‘devaluing the profession’—something which importing doctors 2.5 times more likely to be reprimanded for malpractice, or Nigerian nurses committing “industrial-scale qualifications fraud,” somehow does not. Neither is importing staff improving the quality, availability, or price of care. Costs keep climbing, abuse is rife, and a study of 70,000 of the 350,000 visas issued in 2023 found they filled only 11,000 positions. 

While health and social care visa applications have fallen 76% since January 2024 due to a ban on bringing dependents, skilled worker visa applications have risen by 50% in the same four-month period,— nullifying the restrictions. Since 2011, the foreign-born share of the UK workforce has risen from 14% to 21%. 74% of all new jobs in that time were given to immigrant workers. 

Has this made us wealthier? Patel’s Home Office originally set the skilled worker salary threshold at £25,600—lower than the average salary in the UK. She also changed the composition of migrants: from 80% EU pre-pandemic, to 80% non-EU since 2021. Data from Denmark and the Netherlands shows that these Indian, Nigerian, and MENAPT (Middle Eastern, North African, Pakistan, and Turkey) immigrants are, in aggregate, never net tax contributors across their lifetimes. Disconcerting for those who insist that the problem is purely one of integration is that their children, the second-generation immigrants born in the host countries, are not net contributors either. They retain the culture, criminal proclivities, and work patterns of their parents. Non-EU migrants and their descendents in the Netherlands were an annual cost of €27 billion between 2016 and 2019; €400 billion net between 1995 and 2019. By contrast, Western European, East Asian, and Anglosphere migrants were annual net contributors to the tune of €1 billion. 

Rival leadership contender and former immigration minister, Robert Jenrick MP, painstakingly sourced data on economic contributions and benefits claimants by nationality in the UK in a report for the Centre for Policy Studies. Just like with crime, HM Revenue & Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions refuse to publish this data.

Only 15% of non-EU immigrants since 2021 came principally to work, meaning the remainder are net-taxpayer detriments. 72% of those on skilled worker visas earned a median salary lower than the mean earnings of full-time workers. His report co-author, Neil O’Brien MP, has noted that, despite the biggest growth in employment in absolute terms among nationals of India (+488,000) and Nigeria (+279,000), their monthly median earnings have seen a cash decline in real terms. When all growth in private sector employment between December 2019 and 2023 was due to a 1.2 million increase in employment for these less-productive non-EU nationals, no wonder our GDP per capita growth has stagnated since 2008.

The housing debate has become a lost battle for pro-migration YIMBYs. Even the Bank of England admits that house building cannot keep pace with imported demand. Jenrick and O’Brien calculate that 89% of why housing demand dwarfs supply is due to immigration. Rents rising at their fastest rate on record is driven by 67% of private renting stock in London housing foreign occupants. Meeting demand would require that 18 new Birminghams be built by 2046, purely for new migrants. 

This seems to be Labour’s plan. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is pledging to replicate the hideous Milton Keynes many times over across the country, setting aside 40% of the housing stock as “dispersed accommodation” to ensure that every borough in the UK gets their “fair share” of asylum seekers. Given that 48% of social housing in London is occupied by migrants—and as many as 72% of Somalians depend upon it—British taxpayers can anticipate no end in sight to foreign dependents being battery-farmed at their expense.

And this is the point. Mass immigration increases violent crime, depreciates GDP per capita, decreases employment opportunities, and pushes house prices out of reach for native Brits. There is nothing left to debate about the matter. Any politician seeking to increase immigration, or to deflect from the documented detrimental effects, should be blamed for impoverishing Britain and endangering its people. Any journalist or commentator saying otherwise is lying. The inaction of the Conservatives over 14 years and now Labour under Starmer must be taken as an endorsement of this state of affairs.

But it is not enough to lambast them as hypocrites or ‘the real racists’ until the next election rolls around. Opponents must press the advantage with vote-ready legislation and expose the government as wilful accomplices to the avoidable harms inflicted by criminal migrants. Politicians need not fear a lack of public support. Savanta polling found that 64% of respondents blamed immigration policy for recent civil unrest, while YouGov reported it as high as 67%. Within a month, Starmer’s already shallow support has evaporated. His unpopularity must be highlighted by critics as proof of his agenda’s illegitimacy. 

The immediate deportation of any illegal entrant or foreign criminal to their country of origin is palatable to public sensibilities. It is both the safe and correct thing to do, as is lowering overall numbers of migrants, applying a higher means-test for foreign entrants, and blacklisting countries with barbaric cultural practices and high crime rates. We can withdraw from immigrants any ability to access social housing, unemployment benefits, and other state subsidies. Those who cannot support themselves, their families, and be of benefit to Britain will return home of their own accord without causing a fuss. If not, any subsequent fraud or criminality will become a pretext for deportation.

To continue with this culture-blind mass immigration policy is a cruelty to those with nowhere else to go. The harms are so evident at this point, there is nothing left to debate. Those seeking to tie you up in conversation are just trying to delay the day that action is taken. We can no longer afford to put that off, if we want to recover a livable country from the rubble of decades of government mismanagement.