But in order to confront these tendencies, it is necessary to have a thoroughgoing process of assimilation. This cannot, in my view, happen with an open door policy because the number of would-be immigrants is huge.

I do not accept the “arguments” for so called eco towns. If we did not have a soaring population there would be no need for them. I see your point that high rise living can be tolerable, & there’s no need to repeat the idiocy of the 1950s in mass producing council estates & making tenants live there.

But at the same time, I would not want to rip up planning regulations, as this would prove environmentally harmful in obvious ways. We have seen how property speculators behave. It is ugly, which is why I think there must be restrictions on out of town shopping centres as well as the sort of housing developments disfiguring cities such as this. The ideologues should stick to reading Spiked Online, & I’ll support policies which have a chance of working, such as Newcastle upon Tyne LDs’ housing policy which was announced a while back.

I also take the point about immigrants having a culture of hard work, social respect & generally better behaviour than is found amongst many Britons. But let’s kid ourselves, it’s rare that you’ll find a liberal in certain immigrant communities (Exceptions made for groups such as the Iranians of my acquaintance who have fled theocracy & who would quite merrily give Galloway & his fellow apologists the beating they deserve).

This is not some reductionist Islamophobic statement, since there are progressive Muslims & I am glad of it. But in their “civil war” against the reactionaries, they need the support of a secular state which is for integration & against cuddling up to whatever unrepresentative extremists it can find, New Labour-style. This requires a broad front against “faith” schools, ghettoisation, the automatic deference to the religious of whatever stripe, & so on. But all these would in my opinion be undermined by an open door policy. Such a policy would lead to huge levels of immigration, & no mistaking.

My instincts are welcoming towards newcomers. But I do not think that such a policy is tenable. I have really no idea which people to restrict, but I cannot simply stand idly by while the population of this country soars. I have been made to confront the issue for several reasons.

I feel as if I become alienated from people whenever immigration is mentioned, especially because most of those I meet are reactionary on the issue & vilify all immigrants indiscriminately.

But having said all that, there should still be a greater focus on ESOL & the removal of restrictions on asylum seekers’ work. As I said, it isn’t easy staking out my position but I have alighted on what I consider the least worst option.

Open doors immigration – if viewed entirely by logic – only contains one or two pitfalls, mainly in the problems of culture clash and overpopulation. Both can be corrected as long as the problems are understood. Culture clash (for example, the British public distaste for Arranged Marriages vs the Indian-Subcontinental view) is a hurdle, and like all hurdles it’s got to be tackled early on to avoid cracking your ankles. Overpopulation is a civic planning problem, and it’s solution lies in the construction of more properly made high-rise living and more “new towns” – much like what Post-War Britain tried between the late 40′s and early 80′s,but without the Labour-dominated rampant corruption.

Open Doors Immigration makes sense on a much more deeply philosophical and practical level, at least to me. Restricting migration is a surefire way of preventing cultural understanding and economic freedom – two key goals of the Party. Practically, the migrants are one of three kinds – low skilled workers of the kind that will happily work for minimum wage, highly skilled workers who want to ply their trade, and young families wanting to better their lives and those of their children.

When David Cameron was running about on his Blairite “Family Values” message, he was also deploring the mass entrance of the Polish, and was declaring that it was all the EU and Blair’s fault. As a keen church goer himself, maybe he might have been more pleased if he’d realised that the immigrants were devout Catholics – provided he’s not anti-Catholic – and therefore were perfect models of his Family Value message. Open Doors Immigration does not lead to an influx of undesireables.

I know it’s ideaological rubbish, but as a child of this era, where you grow up and the children of those other cultures are all around you, open doors immigration is my natural responce.

But at the same time, I do not believe in unrestricted migration, as there are undoubtedly millions of people wanting to come here & we simply do not have the physical space to accomodate them without damage to our environment, which as a green-minded person I will not countenance.

We should, in my opinion, allow asylum seekers to work & admit some even if their lives are not in danger. But only some, & we should not let adherence to libertarian dogma get in the way of operating some kind of selection process. A points-based system is clunking & silly but it’s the least worst option, certainly far better than admitting the massive numbers who would come here if they could.

Overpopulation is an issue that should concern us, & while it’s obviously a worldwide matter it should be borne in mind that people in the west tend to have a higher environmental impact.

Additionally, in order for small-government liberalism to work, we need some idea of coherence which does not rely on the state, such as the ties of local communities & a thriving civic society. There is nothing to prevent people of any nationality or race from being assimilated, but it is naive in the extreme to think it will just happen by magic or that it somehow won’t matter in the brave new neoliberal world in which we’re all just consumers thrown together by accident & nothing matters but a balance sheet.

It is hard for me to countenance restrictions on immigration because I like most of the immigrants I’ve met, but a points based system of some variety is what we’re going to have to have given that it’s hardly an unmixed blessing. It is a messy way to go about things, but a dogmatic libertarian policy would be a hideous failure.

“Ah. You mean white people. Why didn’t you just say?”

It’s true that, due to geography and history, the natives of these islands are white. That’s just the way they are – not something to be proud of but not anything to be ashamed of either.

But not all white people are native Brits. Anna from Stettin on the Lidl till may be white (and may be charming) but is not a native.

As for your fantasies about ‘dirty foreigners’, why can’t you engage with what I wrote, not with your telepathic interpretation of what I was thinking ?

“What I *don’t* accept is that someone can hold the views Laban espouses and be well-intentioned…”

I see. “Those who disagree with me are not merely mistaken, but morally at fault”.

But I’ll extend to you the courtesy you will not extend to me – I imagine that you ARE well intentioned. I just think you’re a little too free with your imputations of racism. I think mass immigration without integration, on a scale without precedent, is likely to lead to trouble of one sort or other, as it has in other ethnically, religiously or culturally divided parts of the world. But in the (approximate) words of the late John Wyndham “If I happen to mention that autumn follows summer, that does not mean that I want to get a ladder and pull all the leaves off the trees”.

(disclaimer – my late father was an immigrant, who to the end of his life spoke somewhat fractured English – which made him stand out somewhat on his otherwise monocultural County Durham council estate)

Given that there is strong evidence that the one of the builders of Stonehenge was an Italian migrant then the pure-bred Native Brits will be pretty thin on the ground.

My own personal view is that overall far more is gained than lost by immigration – I know I’m glad that we *do* have curry houses, and more to the point, having until fairly recently worked on a psychiatric ward, I know we wouldn’t have a functioning NHS without immigrants working as nursing staff. I’m not ‘defiantly insisting’ on anything, though.

*ANY* change to the status quo will have some negative effects, and it is always best to mitigate those effects in whatever way is practicable (how that could be done in this case I’m not sure). However, that in itself is not, in my view, a reason to limit people’s freedom of movement.

I do accept that people can have differing views on the matter without being racists or otherwise of bad faith (and I also accept that my opinion may be coloured by the fact that I have benefitted in many ways from the presence of immigrants in the UK, ranging from a wider range of available foodstuffs to being able to live in the same house as my wife, and have not yet suffered any negative effects). What I *don’t* accept is that someone can hold the views Laban espouses and be well-intentioned…

If I can take the liberty of trying to sum up your views in a (glib?) one-liner, you are sympathetic to those who lose out economically as a result of immigration, but not to those who claim to lose out culturally or socially. That, you say, sounds like racism. Well, I agree, it often can mean racism. But not always.

My old aunt told me of her life in the backstreets of Coventry in the sixties. First, one Asian family moved into her street. In those days, that was a sensation. A few racist white families immediately moved out. At that stage my aunt thought they were just idiots and that it was no loss.

The empty houses were all sold to Asians. That rattled more of the white residents, who in turn began to move away. Then, of course, the local amenities began to change, with chip shops giving way to curry houses. In those days, Brits didn’t eat curry, and many Asians didn’t try to speak English.

Suddenly my aunt found that her local community of friendship had broken up. She didn’t blame the Asians, but she didn’t think it had been right to let so many in so fast. More recently, others have said the same about Polish immigration. I think that’s what Chris Huhne was talking about when he spoke of “a pace of change issue and an absorption issue”. (To be clear, in my view this argument is only truly valid for really high immigration fluxes, such as the surge from Poland, and not for the gentler net influx that we have currently.)

Now, you may say that I’m unduly downplaying racism here. Well, it’s a tricky argument, but, even if you acknowledge the pervasiveness and destructiveness of racism, that doesn’t mean you must react by defiantly insisting on open borders. If you know, from sociological study, that rapid and large – scale cultural mixing often leads to violent racial conflict, what do you do about it?

If you let it happen, and people suffer from the resulting conflict, then sure, the violent racists are at fault. But, aren’t you also at fault?

First paragraph – talking about forced repatriation of people in an occupied country. I haven’t noticed millions of people in Britain being moved from their homes…

Second paragraph – “Is the market to determine everything?” – no. But if people arguing *against* immigration use economic arguments (“They’re taking our jobs”), it makes sense to argue against those arguments.

Third paragraph, talking about an invasion. A brutal dictatorship taking over your country is different from some people moving over and taking jobs as plumbers. Plumber != invading army.

Paragraph four – lots of children apparently have different skin colours than other children in Britain do. And?

Paragraph 5 I dealt with. Paragraphs six and seven – I don’t know of any country with completely open borders, but as far as I can tell the countries which have higher immigration rates also tend to be more prosperous. If I’m wrong, that would be a valid argument.

Your *own* points, unlike Laban’s, are completely valid. The freer the market, the more likely it is that some people will lose out badly (at least in the transition from less-free to more-free). Whether you think free markets are a good or a bad thing (and I suspect most people here don’t see it as a binary thing), I think any major social/economic change which causes people to lose their livelihoods must morally be accompanied by action to minimise that damage. If (say) plumbers are losing their jobs, then there should be programmes in place to help them find new jobs, help them retrain, help them meet their existing financial obligations… generally to ensure that they are damaged as little as possible. The fact that the provisions for that kind of thing that we have at the moment are horribly inadequate is the real problem, not immigration itself.

Ah. You mean white people. Why didn’t you just say?

“No, people born here *are* ‘Native Brits’. That’s kind of what ‘native’ means.”

You’re being deliberately obtuse – at least I hope it’s deliberate. Native Brit as in Native American. Or is my terminology out of date ? How about First Nations ? Indigenous peoples ?

I suppose a cry of ‘racist’ absolves you of the need to actually engage with the argument.

That is not to say that we have to reject immigrant inflows /outflows and free markets. But we have to look at the costs to those who suffer, as well as the benefits to those who don’t. If we’re not prepared to recognise that the “people scrapping over scarce resources” (Lynne Featherstone’s words) are being hurt, and that we need to help them, then we’re being inhumane and illiberal.

Andrew Hickey, you might or might not have correctly identified the sniff of racism in one of Laban Tall’s seven paragraphs. But how about not using that as an excuse for ignoring the other six paragraphs, which contained some pretty strong arguments on the social dislocation and violent conflict that mass global migration fluxes can cause? Notably and especially including, of course, mass migration and colonial settlement by white Europeans!

Clegg seems to think so; I think it’s unavoidable (though control of the curriculum and the economics of maintaining a high intake should moderate any excesses).

Immigrant, itinerant and ex-patriate communities all over the world have their own specialist schools, but not here.

Or if you think the state should control both the education system and the movement of people, then say that.

And at half-term 6 of them leave; but 4 more arrive. And three weeks later 5 more arrive. Etc etc etc