Last weekend, my cousin's beautiful daughter, not long out of medical school, married her sweetie - a good-looking young physician from an Indian household.

The Hindu wedding event was amazing, colourful and huge fun for everyone. Watching as young English and Indian people danced together, I reflected that the day was a perfect example of multicultural integration as we all wish it to be.

But it is alarmingly naive to take these benefits for approved and to anticipate that the meeting of cultures will immediately result in universal love.

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

From the Huguenot Protestants who fled massacres in France throughout the 16th century, to the Jews escaping Nazi genocide during the Second World War, right up to the Ukrainian females and kids used shelter today, British tolerance and compassion have actually been a lifeline for millions.

Now that tolerance is being stretched to its limits. Mass migration, compounded by people-smuggling on an industrial scale, is destabilising our nation.

We must not fall under the trap of expecting that, since it has normally exercised fine in the past, Britain can absorb any quantity of demographic change.

We have never ever seen escalating immigration on anything like the scale of the previous twenty years, wites Prof Robert Tombs

History reveals that, even here, unexpected increases of migration have actually caused turmoils that last for centuries. And we have actually never ever seen escalating immigration on anything like the scale of the past twenty years.

Official figures from the Department for Education revealed on Thursday that white British kids are currently the minority in one in 4 schools in England.

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

Last week also saw the publication 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 percent of the country will have been born overseas or will have at least one parent who is an immigrant. By then, more than 19 per cent of Britons will be Muslim (compared to the present 7 per cent). Goodwin's projections are based on census information and figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

I presume these numbers terribly ignore the real rate of change. They presume a consistent influx and stable geopolitical conditions, when we have every reason to anticipate both of those factors will show volatile.

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

Climate change could have a destructive effect on migration, if even a couple of of the more alarmist theories are borne out.

Tens of countless people in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh might be made homeless if sea levels rise. Millions more would flee their homes if glacial melt in the Himalayas caused disastrous flooding in India.

Civil wars in Sudan, Congo and Eritrea have currently driven huge 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 outcome would be a massive rush of people seeking to leave the battling.

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

Add 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 fact that this is a multi-billion-pound business - one that will not cease just since he makes speeches.

These are not minor criminals. They are worldwide cartels, who have actually found an earnings stream that matches profits from the drugs trade. The Government has no ideas at all about how to stop them.

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

The cumulative result is mind-blowing. According to your house of Commons library, 44,000 people arrived unlawfully in the 12 months to March - and that figure, obviously, represents only individuals we understand about. A lot more have likely slipped under the radar, landing undetected or hidden in trucks and containers.

But 44,000 corresponds to just 5 per cent of the immigration total for the year. Legal arrivals surpass the prohibited ones by about 20-to-one.

Nothing in our long and remarkable island story has actually ever come close to this. Mass migration, introduced by New Labour under Tony Blair, is a reckless experiment in group transformation that has actually never ever been attempted in Britain before.

But it has actually happened elsewhere. And for native populations, it has actually frequently been dreadful.

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

Significantly, the British Empire never ever permitted migration to India, which had actually a big settled population. British subjects were encouraged to settle just in sparsely peopled locations: for instance, Canada and wide-open parts of Africa such as Kenya.

But in every case, as soon as this process began, it was quickly uncontrollable. More than six million Irish emigrants gotten here in the US during the 19th century, a third of them in the space of less than a decade from 1845.

Almost as numerous Italians emigrated to America, the majority of them in between 1880 and the early 1920s. In a country riven with racial departments, the Italian and Irish neighborhoods fought to make it through, typically of course by effort, however also by political corruption and organised crime.

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

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

Almost every large Saxon building was destroyed, the judgment elite was changed, their residential or commercial property took and the language altered beyond acknowledgment. For centuries, Saxons were required to labour as serfs, abhored 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 intrusion to go away.

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

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

A 2011 research study discovered that Britons with names indicating Norman descent - such as Mandeville, Lacy, Glanville or Percy - were on typical ten per cent better off than those with Saxon craftsmen names such as Smith, Cooper, Baker or Shepherd, nearly a millennium after the Battle of Hastings.

To comprehend fully how badly damaged a nation can be by unrestrained migration, we need only look at Northern Ireland. During the 17th century, tens of countless Scottish protestants migrated to Ulster. Though separated by the Irish Sea, these 2 nations are so close that on a clear day they are visible to each other.

This was a state job, initiated by the Scottish and English governments throughout James I's reign, and conceived as a method of ending mass poverty in Scotland by encouraging people to live by farming in Ireland.

Well, we all know the result: it led to enmity and violence still widespread today that has actually seen thousands eliminated over the centuries.

Not all the social inequality in Britain is the outcome of the Norman intrusion, naturally, anymore than all Ireland's Troubles were the repercussion of a plan to relieve starvation in Scotland.

But when issues have intricate causes, individuals look for easy scapegoats - and immigration will constantly supply one.

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

considerably higher). That's an increase of 10 million this century. Yet the birth rate is falling: in 2023 it reached its lowest rate on record in England and Wales, at 1.44 children per woman, compared with the 'replacement rate' of 2.1 - the variety of kids required to keep numbers stable.

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

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 progressively for the next three years, to 31 million by 1975.

In the occasion, this ended up being nonsense, partially due to the fact that the main statistics did not anticipate the Second World War and the infant boom that followed.

But the predictions also stopped working to appraise the beginnings of migration from previous colonies, with many thousands getting here from the West Indies after 1948 - the 'Windrush generation' - and Pakistan and India following independence and partition in 1947.

There were other surges, for example from East Africa after the rise of the despot Idi Amin who expelled 80,000 Ugandan Asians, amongst them the moms and dads of previous Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Crucially, the terrific majority of these immigrants were determined to incorporate into British life. If not currently English-speaking, they discovered the language. They tried to find work or began companies. Many brought much required skills and dynamism.

But that is not the case today. A high proportion of legal immigrants come to do low-paid work, for instance in care homes and the hospitality sector. Those who qualify under the government visa scheme for knowledgeable employees or health and care employees can expect to be paid 80 percent of the standard wage.

Those in the fishing market, for instance, receive ₤ 12.82 an hour, as opposed to ₤ 15.88 for British employees. 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 currently are

This has a threefold result: earnings are depressed, new arrivals live in relative hardship, and lots of British individuals have dropped out of the labour market. Resentments grow on all sides and the cost is unsustainable.

Many other migrants, it needs to be stated, maximize our generous asylum system - including housing (often in comfortable hotels), food, complimentary NHS health care and even spending money.

The best source of animosity, 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 indigenous one. It spells catastrophe for our future when immigrants are encouraged to stay locked within their own communities and taught that the British have constantly been their enemies.

How dangerous this is, we can see by looking throughout the Channel, to France where second and third generation immigrants from North Africa develop a consistent state of discontent. Riots are frequent, car-burning is a nationwide sport and extremist politicians talk of're-migration' - the expulsion of people who 'do not suit'.

This will be Britain's future if the Government does not take control of the circumstance today. Immigration can benefit everybody, however only if it is strictly managed, democratically accepted and culturally incorporated.

Allowed to run out of control, as the arc of history programs, it ruins countries.

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

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