I am an immigrant. I emigrated from the United States to the United Kingdom on the 12th of December 1971.
I had studied for a year in Britain 18 months before and fell in love with the country and one of its citizens and moved back despite the dreary weather and traffic jams.
I did not flee a Middle Eastern War. I did not turf up at Heathrow claiming political persecution. I did not risk my life to cross the English Channel in freezing weather. Nor was I fleeing from poverty or conflict. In fact, if I had stayed in America I would probably be enjoying a comfortable country club existence.
Nevertheless, I feel an affinity with African, Asian, Hispanic, or any person from any race or country who left their homeland to seek a new life. It is not easy to leave the safety net of cultural familiarity, family and friends.
If you are born to a country your acceptance is automatic. As an immigrant you have to constantly prove your worth and justify your decision to uproot your entire life and start afresh. At the end of the day, you, more than a native-born person must feel that you have contributed something.
I feel I have succeeded. I started an international news agency which launched the careers of well over a hundred journalists. My children are all a credit to me as are the 200 boys—many of them now young men– who have passed through my scout group over the past 25 years.
I am not boasting. In fact, I don’t regard myself as particularly unusual. Immigrants in every country have outstanding records of contributing to their adopted homelands.
Think about it. By their very nature immigrants have proven through their actions that they are risk takers. They are adventurers. They are focused, determined and prepared to work hard to achieve their aims. Such people are assets to any community lucky enough to have them.
Many people worry that immigration places undue pressure on housing, health and public services. But these concerns are only part of the story. Immigrants also businesses, pay taxes, create jobs and help support an ageing society. According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) immigrants to the UK are twice as likely to set up their own businesses then native-born Britons. In the US, immigrants last year accounted for 25 percent of all start-ups even though they make up only 14 percent of the population.
You need only look at the careers of immigrant entrepreneurs such as South African Elon Musk (Tesla), Anglo-Greek Ariana Huffington (Huffington Post) and Russian Sergei Brin (Google). Between them they have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and delighted their American investors who have used their dividends to build expensive homes in gated communities overlooking manicured golf courses.
Back to Britain, where the Migration Advisory Committee reported last year that immigrants on a skilled worker visa generated a net surplus for the exchequer of about $20,000 per immigrant. This compares to $1,000 for the average UK-born Briton. Unskilled workers also made a net contribution, but this is largely because they are mainly young men at the physical peak of their working lives.
Opposition to immigration is not just based on cash (which is clearly a canard). There is also a strong argument that immigrants undermine native values. It is true that people bring customs across borders. My family, for instance, make a point of celebrating the traditional American holiday of Thanksgiving. Every year we invite our British friends and thank them for making us welcome. Some have adopted the custom. I make no apology.
Successive waves of immigrants have all been vilified as cultural contaminants. In the US, the Irish and Poles were attacked as heathen Catholics. Italian immigrants were accused of stealing jobs. The Chinese and Japanese were lumped together as “The Yellow Peril.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French Huguenots swelled the population of Britain by a staggering ten percent. Their craft skills are credited with laying the foundations of Britain’s industrial revolution.
Britain has changed since 1971. Immigration is a big part of the change. Brexit was, in large part, a revolt against immigration—or at least the belief that immigration waw out of control. The arrival of small boats crossing the Channel has reinforced that perception. Governments have every right—a duty—to control their border. But controlling immigration is not the same as condemning immigrants.
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”
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13 Comments
Nobody should be risking their lives in the English channel as France is a safe country.
The economic arguments in regards to immigration and the benefits it brings communities is a difficult one looking at my home town where I grew up. It’s barely recognisable with the changes inward immigration has brought, and there hasn’t been the economic uplift that goes with that, contrary to what’s been repeatedly said.
Thankfully, I’ve moved out long ago.
@Chloe
“Nobody should be risking their lives in the English channel as France is a safe country.”
If the person concerned came originally from a country which was in the past a French colony there might be other people from that country already in France who might in some ways be opposed to the would-be immigrant to UK. For that would-be immigrant to UK France might not be a safe country at all.
I believe that immigration has become a major issue for two reasons: the scale of legal immigration over recent decades and the issue of those seeking to bypass our immigration laws to get into the country.
I didn’t fully appreciate the impact of the scale of immigration until a friend told me that she had decided to move her primary one son after only a month because he was crying about going to school because most of his class were speaking to each other in Lithuanian and he felt really isolated.
I am not an immigrant (born and bred in Yorkshire) but I am very conscious of how immigrants (or the children, and now possibly grandchildren, of immigrants) enable and enhance my lifestyle. They deliver my morning paper, drill, fill and maintain what’s left of my teeth, dispense my prescriptions, clean my car, run my favourite restaurant, provide about half of my NHS treatment, about two thirds of the choir and , until recently, the vicar of the church I attend, my regular hiking companion, the helpful tech wizard at our local library and probably lots more besides. Grateful thanks to them all.
Thank you for your contribution to this timely and often emotionally-charged debate. My thinking from my experiences is that we have become over-reliant on immigration to an unnecessary and unsustainable extent, which has been justified by employers and even Tory MPs by claiming that British workers are ‘idlers’, as a considerable number of immigrants work for longer, for less. This has meant that we have completely abandoned focusing on training and supporting those in ‘left-behind’, ex-industrial towns, who have become the most ardently against immigration. I think a hostile environment for immigrants makes it harder for them to integrate though, and allows them to live in limbo, and thus become othered more easily. Immigration must be controlled (it is a democratic demand), but it is also imperative for systematic support and requirements to ensure integration, such as language skills and civic involvement. This will help create a sense of greater cohesion.
I believe that record levels of immigration without effective integration is massively contributing to the social backlash and xenophobia we are seeing, especially where public services are strained due to a decade of cuts.
This is spot on: “Governments have every right—a duty—to control their border. But controlling immigration is not the same as condemning immigrants.” However, if the former is not done properly, then the latter becomes all the more likely as we are seeing. What is worrying is how ducking questions on immigration, or not having an agenda for it, because we may find it uncomfortable, is only emboldening the right. I don’t think the simplification of this argument by claiming it is propagated by the media and a problem does not exist does any good – it is a universal phenomenon, as we are also seeing in South Africa. The trend is weak integration, inequality, and insecurity, which we must address. Control and fairness is not mutually exclusive! And tapping into the underlying causes is important too.
Part of the problem preventing sensible discussion about immigration is that thanks to scaremongering by the right wing press and political parties, the British public consistently overestimate real levels on inward migration, think it’s currently rising when it’s actually falling, and over-estimate the percentage of inward migrants who are asylum-seekers:
https://www.britishfuture.org/britain-thinks-net-migration-is-rising-when-it-has-actually-fallen-by-more-than-three-quarters/
And the Labour Government has been far too timid in challenging that narrative, and often reinforces it.
@Nick Baird
I think the explanation is more likely down to misunderstanding the difference between the rate of migration and the number of migrants in the country. (it’s a little bit like people being confused when they are told that the rate of inflation is falling when they still experience prices rising.)
So, the total population increases each year, mainly due to net immigration. People are confused when they are then told that ‘net migration is falling’ – they should be informed that ‘the rate of net migration is falling though the overall number of migrants in the population continues to increase.’
Reform and Conservative’s opposed the nation of sanctuary policy in Wales which aims to improve integration. These parties, and those who understand and the policy and oppose it, aren’t serious. They just want to attract attention and votes through misinformation.
That being said, I remember a school project which looked at whether Leicester was a good example of multiculturalism or whether it was just different cultures living side by side. Meanwhile George Galloway has somehow become an MP within not too distant past by being a politician who cares more about the Middle East than they do about the UK.
If immigration has to be described as good or bad it’s undoubtedly good, but, to say something everyone already knows, it’s often more complex and, as one example, policy promoting integration often focus on it being a punitive exercise, increasing judgement and division, rather than genuinely welcoming.
Thank you Tom. As an immigrant who built a business here, this resonated, particularly the line about controlling immigration not being the same as condemning immigrants. I would add that the real failure has been the absence of a plan: attracting high skill talent, filling genuine gaps in the NHS and wider economy, and unmanaged drift are three very different things, and we have too often had the third. The workers contribute in all cases; the failure lies with governments that have not known what they were trying to achieve. Get the plan right, with integration built in, and the public argument becomes far easier to win.
All the figures on Immigration are more than a Year out of date, there are figures which are only 6 Months behind but they are Projections. What we know from back then is that Net Immigration has fallen off a cliff, a fall of more than Four Fifths since the peak. If it had gone on falling at the same rate then we would now be facing Net Emigration & a falling Population. Most people don’t know that because Rising Immigration is News & falling isn’t.
The Population predictions have also been transformed, currently its predicted to be flat for a few Decades then falling slowly after that.
Its up to progressives to give the Public the Facts & to pressure the Media to do the same.
“ Most people don’t know that because Rising Immigration is News & falling isn’t.”
To be fair, I think it probably would be newsworthy if net immigration fell to ‘the tens of thousands’ as David Cameron famously suggested as a target. However, even the recent 170,000 net migration figure for 2025 is still well above that level so is not really newsworthy yet despite being significantly lower than in previous years.