thats more to do with the trend of people living by themselves in smaller units and in larger houses. three times as much housing is used for white people than for ethnic minorities or immigrants.
its yet another right wing myth that has been debunked, that britian is full and this is due to immigration.
I never said "Britain is full because of immigrants" - most of the population growth took place in the 18th/19th/early 20th centuries during and after the industrial revolution. I'm just saying that
most of the growth happening now is to do with immigration.
I appreciate what you're saying about people living apart more, this is certainly true. And yes, plenty of rich, mainly white people live in massive old houses, but as I said above, new houses and flats being built are very small, and in London for instance most 3- or 4-story Georgian/Victorian houses are divided up into flats. So whatever trend there was for large houses has certainly been reversed by now.
no-one is suggesting removing border controls, although its a bit fucking rich for previous immigrants to want to pull up the drawbridge imo. its a huge landmass, not a night club with a capacity of a few hundred. and like i said, you might not have done this, but the far right DOES focus on skin colour as it seems perfectly acceptable for rich white people to migrate here.
I really don't know about Britain being a "huge landmass", you know. I mean France has the same population (a bit less even, I think) and almost 2.5 times as much land area. Not that France doesn't have social problems of its own, but competition for land and homes is obviously much less severe than it is here. And France is a fairly densely populated country in the scheme of things, compared to the US, say, let alone Australia or Canada. Surely these are the countries that should be welcoming immigrants with open arms? Yet Australia's immigration policy is notoriously hard-line. Even in Europe there are some relatively sparsely-populated countries, like Sweden. Plus it's hardly as if the population is evenly distributed; most of it is squashed into a few of the larger English cities.
Anyway, ignoring that for the moment, yes I can of course see how this kind of argument could easily be given a racist slant, and thanks for acknowledging that I'm not. In fact, if you compare a wealthy Australian or American who's going to come here and live in a big house, drive a car and so on with some guy from Bangladesh or Somalia, or even Poland, it makes more sense to let the latter person in rather than the former from a land-/resource-use perspective.
the NHS would collapse tomorrow if we got rid of all those immigrants "filling our country up"
Which raises a quite different question about the likely effect this is having on the provision of health care in the developing countries that supply us with so many of our doctors, nurses and pharmacists...
Edit:
This is precisely the problem. Immigration debate has been couched for so long in terms of race that it's become reflex for many on the left to support it, no matter what. And to accuse anyone who questions it of racism, or indeed picking their views from the pages of the Mail and Express.
Yes, exactly: you get right-wing people indiscriminately against immigration, and leftists indiscriminately in favour (because any other position is "racist", by definition) with neither side able to understand that there may be both advantages *and* disadvantages sometimes, like this is too complicated an idea or something.
