Ah, this is the 'had enough of experts' position and better the view of the layman.

You dismissed the research papers because they do not look back far enough, but the immigration that Britain experienced in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20 centuries is not relevant. You say that you are interested in immigration immediately post WWII and then you express concern about immigrants arriving today.

"Like you academics are mostly on the left". Have you been in a university recently or ever? I can assure you that there are plenty of academics from the right. Oxbridge is full of public school educated upper middle class people that vote tory.

I think that in both cases the questioner was directed towards the data that they were looking for. There is a lot to see there and It would take weeks to read it all.

As regards the information about the Overrepresentation of BAME individuals in prisons. I would suggest that it is very difficult to up pick whether the cause is because these prisoners are immigrants, the children or grandchildren of immigrants or if they have just been let down by governments and society as regards housing, education, etc.

As you say, Lamey says that racism affects the lives of people who experience racism. That sounds like an honest and probable conclusion.

Not having a go at you but that is a very simplistic view. If your ideas came to fruition would you be happy to allow foreign convicted murderers/rapists/ paedos to enter unchecked? Believe me that will happen, as some try to enter now, I have seen them. There are many reasons for certain countries to require a visa, some political, some reciprocal, some for security reasons.

Edited by Spiderman (14 Sep 2021 7.32am)

Immigration in the past was not tiny.

Perhaps when we look at immigration in the past and numbers it is more useful to look at what percentage of the population they represent. The 50,000 Huguenots that came mainly settled in London and Kent. The population of London in 1715 was about 630,000 and by 1760 it had risen to 750,000 making it the largest city by population in Europe. By 1800 the population was I million.
This rapid growth was mainly a result of immigration from outside the UK and population movement inside the UK. This would suggest that Huguenots were about 7-8% of London’s population and by the time we get to 1800 the number of people with Huguenot ancestry would have been larger still. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the black population of London is estimated to have been between 5,000 and 10,000.*

*
[Link]
The above is a fascinating study of London’s population and clearly sets out how it has been diverse and multiethnic for many hundreds of years.
In 1851, over 38 per cent of Londoners were born somewhere else.

As you say the Huguenots were Protestants and that helped them assimilate. It is not clear though that this is the main reason that the Huguenots were welcomed and they thrived. The vast majority of immigrants that came to Britain from Jamaica were also Christians and they and their descendants remain more likely to be regular church attendants than other sectors of the population. Huguenots were in general educated people in possession of skills such as weaving that enabled them to quickly earn a living. Also, their technology was superior to that in Britain at the time.

Perhaps your experience as a school teacher was that you were a lone voice in a socialist enclave. My own experiences of school teachers both in my own education and the education of my daughter have been mixed. For myself, admittedly quite some time ago now, I would say that nearly all my teachers were mainly to the right, although that might be a reflection of the type of school that I attended. As for my experience as a parent, other than the majority of them be very charming I could not really say where their political allegiances lay. My daughter did call her history teacher a fascist when she learnt that he had stood as a UKIP candidate, but I put that down to youthful exuberance (her’s not his).

Edited by kuge (14 Sep 2021 12.20pm)

Maybe, but that could be ironed out with a database check. Not all of the ppl coming over on boats are criminals. The majority just want a better life, I don’t see anything wrong with that. Why should we be a closed shop for ppl willing to come and work hard and pay into the system.

The thing about racism is you either choose to pretend that it does not exist and that therefore any effect that it might have must also not exist or you take the position that an influx of immigrants will result in racial tension therefore we should curtail all immigration. You appear to want to have it both ways.

As regards Japan I agree that it will be very problematic for Japanese culture to absorb large numbers of people from outside Japan. There is however no other solution if the population is going to remain viable. Without immigration, they become like the Shakers who advocated celibacy and also discourage people from outside joining their society. What happened to them? I think that right now the latter is a likely as the former.

The Japanese have of course plenty of experience of immigration, but mainly as the immigrants. Millions of Japanese left Japan in the 19th and 20th centuries for North and South American and other parts of Asia. There are over 2 million Brazilians with Japanese heritage and 1.5 million in the USA. Also, there are large populations in Peru and the Philippines. The UK has around 66,000 immigrants or people of Japanese descent. Second or third generation Japanese, known as nikkeijin, in the 1980s returned to Japan in large numbers mainly to work in industries such as car making. Although now as industrial production in Japan is declining many have returned to Brazil and Peru where they feel their economic prospects are better.