The first thing to understand about immigration is that Great Britain NEEDS immigrants. There are a number of reasons why:

• Demographics. We have an ageing population who didn’t have enough babies. As they retire and die there is nobody to replace them and nobody to do the jobs and to pay the taxes that finance the pensions. So we need to import replacements.
• Skill shortages. Our execrable education system has produced far too few STEM graduates and far too many liberal arts graduates, so we have plenty of people qualified to flip burgers and a huge shortage of people able to do constructive stuff. Jaguar Land Rover, Dyson etc can’t find enough engineers. So they import them.
• Generating wealth for the nation. If a top New York banker moves to London with his contact book he will generate millions of pounds for the British economy every year. We have attracted a lot of such people. And remember that it is only the rich (and illegal immigrants!) who, net of benefits, pay any tax at all. So they are very valuable to us.

This is why the last Labour government opened the floodgates and sent out search parties to get as many immigrants as possible. However there were a number of problems to their indiscriminate approach:

• Social cohesion and the British way of life are quite resilient and we are accustomed to waves of immigration. The Huguenots, European Jews fleeing Hitler, Ugandan Asians, the Windrush generation from the Caribbean and so on. But this time we have brought in far too many far too quickly and social cohesion has broken down in many towns and cities.
• Diversity and multiculturalism. Leftie dogma for lack of integration. So millions of people come here and can choose not to integrate in areas of behaviour that they decide (tolerance of others, speaking English, contributing to the economy) but can choose to integrate in areas of behaviour that they decide (receiving benefits, receiving tolerance in practicing their religion, large scale sexual abuse of our children).
• Low grade of immigrants. We only need so many illiterate subsistence farmers from the Indian subcontinent, for instance, yet we imported lots of them. What these sort of people can contribute to our economy is a moot point. Certainly they are good at collecting benefits.

Now let’s look at why people come here. After all it is a huge and traumatic change in their lives. Basically they can be divided into reasons of push (bad things happening where they are from) and pull (good things here). This is why it can often be wrong to call people economic migrants, the factors driving them to make the move will usually be many and varied. Let’s look at some:

• Our ridiculously over generous benefits system. Fill in forms and get money. Fill in more forms get money. Simultaneously work in the black economy. Nothing is ever checked, we don’t have enough officials. As a nation we are fools. In Estonia, for instance, unemployment benefits are paid for a maximum of 270 days and only to people have worked at least 180 days within the previous 12 months when they start. We should learn.
• Excessive taxation elsewhere. Socialist French President Hollande introduced punitive income tax. So as a result London became the fifth biggest French city. Brilliant for us, all these high earning people who France had paid to educate choosing to contribute to the British economy and to pay their taxes here.
• English is the world’s second language. Nearly everyone on the planet knows a few words. French and German people have to learn English to travel in Africa, Asia etc. So immigrants coming to Europe will prefer England because they can already communicate a bit.
• Existing communities already in the UK. If you are from, say, Somalia, you can come to Britain and live in the Somali community and the only changes are the colder weather and the free money. The same applies to Afghans, Bangladeshis, Albanians, Iranians, Syrians and very many other nations.
• The draw of London. The world’s greatest city. Why would a banker live and work in Frankfurt when he can do the same in the most amazing metropolis that has ever existed? So London has become a world city rather than a British city. And it pays for the rest of Great Britain.
• Horrendous conflict. Quarter of a million people, mostly civilians, killed in Syria out of a population of 23 million. Resulting in more than 9 million refugees. More than 3 million have fled to Syria’s immediate neighbours Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. 6.5 million are internally displaced within Syria. Meanwhile, approximately 150,000 Syrians have declared asylum in the European Union. And maybe 3,000 have reached Calais. All as a result of our meddling in their business.
• Our booming economy. Under the genius George Osborne the British economy is creating more jobs than the whole of the rest of Europe put together. There are well over a million job vacancies here now and fewer than 800,00 job seekers. Most people coming to Britain want to work and to build a life, so all these jobs are a huge draw.

Now we need to look at who comes to live in Britain:

• Europeans exercising their rights under EU freedom of movement. Nearly all of these people come here to work and to build a life, they integrate very well and often marry Brits. Some, from France, Italy, Spain and Greece are escaping socialism. Some, from Poland etc are here for the jobs and the higher wages. Europeans coming to Britain tend to have far lower rates of unemployment than native Brits do and are legendary for their hard work and skills (all this applies to Eastern Europeans more than to Club Med Europeans). Everyone wants a Polish plumber or cleaner. There are two main problems. The first is the remittance of earnings back home, which takes many billions out of the British economy. The second are the Roma (Romani) people who tend to be parasitic on society with incredibly high levels of crime. There are now very approximately 100,000 of them in the UK. But the 650,000 in Spain, the 500,000 in France, the 200,00 in Greece and so on across Europe can all get here very easily.
• Muslims. We already have far too many of these and they are a problem. They tend not to integrate and often to actually oppose the British way of life. They are 5 to 10% of the population (this increasing incredibly rapidly) and are vastly more likely than native Brits to be not working or paying tax (in the formal economy) and to be parasitic on the state benefits system. They have created large Ghettos around Britain which are no longer British. They come from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Albania, Ethiopia, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq etc. They tend often to follow primitive tribal practices such as female genital mutilation, forced marriage and honour crimes.
• The rest. Not so many. From USA and other former Empire countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Also Chinese, Russians and South Americans. These tend to come here to work, to contribute to our economy. And mostly they are very welcome, they integrate well and contribute to the rich diversity that is British life.

So if we look at the people who are here in Britain let us take a look of what we have got.

• Native Brits. Born here or born overseas to British parents.
• Naturalised Brits. Basically immigrants who pass certain criteria, do a test and have a ceremony. 125,800 did so last year.
• Europeans. The EU is one big happy super state so EU citizens can come and go just as easily as a Sussex person going to Kent.
• Visas for other foreigners. 162,000 work related visas were issued last year (57,000 of whom were Indians!) and 223,000 student visas. Education is a big export industry for Britain and the consensus is that these visas have gone from being far too easy to obtain to being far too hard to obtain.
• Asylum seekers. 24,257 applications last year. Down from 84,132 under Labour in 2002. Approximately two thirds of asylum seekers are rejected, so the number accepted is very small in the overall scheme of things, around 8,000 a year. But Britain is notoriously bad at deporting the failed applicants, so most get to stay here anyway.
• Illegal immigrants. The vast majority of these are people who have come here legally, usually via a major airport, and who have not bothered to go home. A very much smaller number are smuggled in via a lot of different routes. Calais is a minuscule contributor to the numbers. Nobody knows how many there are already here, government and press use the handy made up figure of one million. Supermarket sales statistics suggest it could be as high as 16 million. It is somewhere in between. Mostly Muslims. Mostly working in the black economy.
• Visitors. 1.9 million visitor visas were granted last year. And very many visitors don’t need visas. Tourism is a huge industry for us so we have to strike a balance between not deterring genuine visitors whilst preventing it being a mechanic for illegal entry. Huge number of Chinese tourists who want to come here go to other countries instead because of the difficulty in getting British visas.
• Foreign diplomatic staff. About 25,00 of them. They can and frequently do break our laws with total immunity.

It is worth pointing out that illegal immigrants are economically often a good thing. They are working in the black economy so they avoid our tedious employment and minimum wage laws. Which means that they provide huge labour flexibility at the bottom of the market. They do not pay income tax but they do pay VAT and excise duties whilst not receiving benefits, so they are largely net contributors to the overall government finances. Unlike the vast majority of workers.

Next it must be obvious that the Calais migrants are often the very best of people. They are mostly escaping the horrors of the Syrian civil war. Out of more than 9 million Syrian refugees only a few hundred thousand make it to Europe in a year, most of whom end up in Germany, Sweden, Greece, France etc. The UK quota for accepting them is zero. We have a scheme to take the most vulnerable and so far have taken around 200. Calais receives a very few thousand Syrians a year, a small fraction of a small fraction of the overall numbers. To pay to get to Calais they need to have been rich people; doctors, lawyers, businessmen etc when Syria was peaceful, then there is the £1,200 each that lorry drivers charge for the channel crossing. And they have to be enterprising, getting across the border to Turkey, then to Greece and then right across Europe. We should admire these people, they are far more committed and resourceful than most people who currently live in Britain. But we don’t want them because they are Muslims and because if we let in a few thousand now then tens of thousands would follow them. Then many more. But approximately 30 to 40 of them successfully reach England every day.

Finally if we let people come to Britain it is just the thin edge of a very big wedge. Firstly (wrongly) we let people then bring their families here, which can be a lot of people. Then we allow family members to go back home to find spouses (again wrong) often in forced marriages, who we then let in. With their families. So one new immigrant can often become hundreds and then thousands of people. Entire populations of illiterate, backwards peasant villages coming to enjoy our benefits system. Basically the first person in is a Trojan Horse.