The Last Soldiers for Mass Migration

Britain’s demographic revolution continues apace, as new population projections are released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). By 2032, net migration alone will add 4.9 million to the UK population — a 7.3 percent increase, to 72.5 million. That’s due to 9,914,000 foreign nationals immigrating here within a decade. However, like previous estimates by the ONS and Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), this is likely to be an underestimate. If net migration remains at record levels — rather than halving to 340,000 per year, as projected — then we could see more than 11 million foreign nationals immigrating to Britain by 2032.

This also obscures the true extent of demographic change. While births and deaths are both expected to be 6.8 million, there is an ethnic disparity between births and deaths. The total fertility rate for British-born mothers has fallen to 1.54 children-per-woman; but the rate for foreign-born mothers has risen to 2.03. One in three children is born to a foreign mother, and one in four to a foreign mother and father. In more than one in 10 local authorities, over 50 percent of children are born to foreign mothers. Babies born to West African women are up 32.5 percent; Indian women, 21.2 percent; and Bangladeshi women 12.6 percent.

Some still insist that this unprecedented change is a good thing. Fraser Nelson is one such man who has made promoting multiculturalism his modus operandi. Last year, he called the Boriswave of record annual third-world migration “an accident, not a conspiracy”. I must have missed the weather event which blew a million Indians to our shores over three years. In December, Nelson then accidentally caused the rape gangs scandal to receive global attention, after writing a tone-deaf final Telegraph column about Britain being an “integration miracle”. Sam Bidwell delivered the death-blow to Nelson’s credibility in The Critic: comparing him to an Imperial Japanese soldier stationed in a remote jungle in the Philippines, still clutching his rifle and refusing to surrender nearly thirty years after the Second World War ended. Bidwell raised numerous examples of sectarian ethno-politics, imported from the Indian subcontinent, to challenge Nelson’s notion that we’re all ready for a rousing rendition of John Lenon’s Imagine.

Unwilling to concede defeat, Nelson has now written in the Times that Britain’s sub-replacement birth rates being subsidised by immigrants is a good thing.

Nelson argues that,

“Only one major European nation is forecast to escape decline. The good news was confirmed this week — except no one, anywhere, saw it as good news. A third of this country’s babies are now born to immigrant mums, says the Office for National Statistics. New arrivals will make sure our working-age population growth proceeds at the normal, healthy pace. But the idea of 5 million more working-age Brits by 2050 has been treated as a kind of self-invasion, a crisis that our islands might not survive.”

What Nelson means by “decline”, or indeed by “working-age Brits”, begs many questions. He appears to think that if the raw population figures of Britain continue to rise, this is “good news”. Nelson admits that “Demography is destiny”, but fails to understand it is a qualitative, not a quantitative statement.

Considering pro-natalist measures proposed by the likes of Miriam Cates, and immigration restrictions which have put Reform UK at the top of every poll, Nelson writes: “even if all of this is done, we’d still need mass migration — to keep the working-age population growing in spite of our low (and declining) birthrate.” It was telling that Nelson deleted a tweet which called this a growth in the population of “Britain’s workforce”, and replaced it with “working-age population”. Because the truth is: they aren’t working. Only 15 percent of post-Brexit migrants came principally to work. Of those on skilled worker visas, the OBR admitted that 60 percent make less than the median British salary. (Both the Centre for Policy Studies and Centre for Migration Control estimate more than 70 percent.) 50 percent of “skilled workers” earn less than half the average salary — costing British taxpayers £151,000 each by the time they retire. If they live to life expectancy (81), they cost £465,000 each; and over £1 million by age 100. Karl Williams of the Centre for Policy Studies calculated that only 5 percent of visas issued in 2022 – 2023 were to likely tax-contributors — meaning 95 percent of migrants are net-dependents. For every £1 paid to the Treasury in tax by these high-earning immigrants, the more numerous net-dependents take out £1.60.

This modelling presumes these low-wage migrants arrive at age 25; but studies from Denmark and the Netherlands show second-generation non-EU/East-Asian immigrants repeat the economic patterns of their parents and are, on average, never net tax contributors either, while costing more through state-funded healthcare and education. They are also more likely to commit more crimes than Western Europeans, North Americans, East Asians, and native Brits. This is the population that Nelson is celebrating an increase of as “good news”.

And none of these economic concerns address the cultural issues that Nelson repeatedly marginalises and minimises. The mistake Nelson makes is thinking these forecast five million births to immigrant mothers are automatically British by virtue of being born in Britain. To Nelson, anyone born on the landmass of the United Kingdom is as indistinguishably British as those whose lineage can be traced back to Hengist and Horsa. This misconception is clear in how fluidly Nelson moves between calling these second-generation immigrants “working-age Brits”, and describing them as “an exemption from the politics of human shortage.” Human beings are not an undifferentiated mass, or fungible, swappable units. We are not widgets in a well-oiled machine. We are not purely driven by economic incentives, or resources to be redistributed to balance a spreadsheet. 

There is more to being of a place than simply having paper-citizenship or in gainful employment. People are members of a people. They are custodians of culture: the customs, traditions, and stories of a people, in a place, over time. We know cultures are the properties of peoples, because even civic nationalists apply a nationally-particular prefix to cultures. (e.g. “British values”) People think of themselves as belonging to the civilisation of their ancestors, which generated this culture — which is why many second-and-third generation immigrants are less patriotic toward their adopted country than their first-generation parents. Nations are tribes, formed of families with common religion and ancestry, who defend the civilisation built by their forebears, and who feel the weight of passing on that inheritance to their children. They are not, as Kemi Badenoch seems to believe, “a project” which can be tinkered with by any technocrat with a passing interest in optimising for efficiency. 

Immigrants understand this. Mohammed is now the number one baby name in England. To peoples with more potent religious convictions than those of the secularised West, this demonstrates piety and a commitment to spread their faith and culture across generations. Demographic change is a reliable proxy for imminent cultural change. The “problem with integration” Nelson notes in “parts of Blackburn, Oldham and Bradford that are 90 per cent Muslim” are all but guaranteed to be recreated by the birthrate trends he also praises. Therefore, if you find yourself asking, “Will this nation of Mohammeds abide by ‘British values’?”, you have either completely lost touch with reality, or are willfully denying the problem. (An observation which got me blocked by Nelson.)

Someone who does understand this is self-described “progressive”, Priti Patel. Like Bidwell, I invoked the Hiroo Onoda analogy when the shadow Foreign Secretary defended her immigration record during the Conservative leadership contest. After that tanked her credibility with the Tories’ few-remaining members, Patel decided to double-down on The Sun TV last week. 

For Patel, the jungle’s thickets are thinning. Only 3 percent of annual immigrants are doctors or nurses. (Many of whom commit “industrial-scale qualifications fraud”.) In 2024, Zimbabwean recipients of health and social care visas were outnumbered by their dependents 10-to-1; Nigerians, almost 4-to-1; Ghanaians, 2-to-1. As for skilled workers being the “best and brightest”: Indian (+250,000 and +488,000) and Nigerian (+141,000 and +279,000) nationals are responsible for the largest annual shares of inward migration and employment growth, but their monthly median earnings have declined in real terms. Add that to the figures cited above, and the argument for mass immigration as an economic necessity is farcical. And all of these migrants being “legal” doesn’t change their being a net-drain on the economy, and strangers to the culture.

Patel’s favourite defences of humanitarian visas (dwarfed by work and study dependents) and skilled workers are the motte she retreats to from her true motivation. As Mike Jones highlighted in The Critic, Patel asked the following question in a Foreign Affairs Select Committee meeting titled ‘Global Britain and India’:

“You have mentioned Prime Minister Modi a couple of times. He is the architect of the term “living bridge”, and effectively usage of the Indian diaspora community around the world, not only in the UK, but more broadly, has helped to strengthen ties with key countries. Do you think our own Prime Minister understands the significance of the living bridge and why, domestically, diaspora communities matter when it comes to bilateral relationships?”

Patel understands that the growing presence of an Indian diaspora in Britain can leverage demographic pressure as democratic pressure, and encourage Britain to make diplomatic concessions to the motherland. Rishi Sunak proposed a similar strategy in 2014, with ‘A Portrait of Modern Britain’ for Policy Exchange. Sunak painted a rosy picture of integration, writing that “Ethnic minorities are three times more likely than the White population to feel that ‘being British’ forms some part of their identity.” He noted that Indians, Britain’s largest foreign ethnic group, were more likely to vote Conservative — and told Al Jazeera that “it would be good for policy-makers and politicians to appreciate striking differences between communities”.

It seems that the tribal ethnic loyalties of new immigrants are acknowledged when they advantage immigrant-heritage politicians, but denied when noticed by the native population who do not consent to this rapid demographic change. Three-quarters of Brexit voters did so to reduce migration. The fact that Patel demands critics apologise to her, when she betrayed that mandate, is arrogant in the extreme.

If newcomers are not required to buy into our civilisation, and can instead live in ethno-cultural silos at odds with the host population, then Britain ceases to be a nation. We become a revolving-door for strangers to use as long as the economic prosperity, achieved by the people who came before them, pays out. That economic prosperity, too, relies on a culture, generated by a particular people. An economy is the net result of a people working in a place and time. Whereas Nelson and co. seem to believe that the economy can cast an ineluctable spell of power and prosperity over people, instead, if you change the people, you change the economy. I would like more for my home than to be an extraction zone for remittances with diminishing returns, thank you very much. 

This is the sentiment shared by the new right — across the UK, US, and Europe. The Times might be the last jungle Nelson can hide in. Under Charles Hymas and Sam Ashworth-Haynes, the Telegraph has dared to publish the migration data and rape gang stories that the government won’t talk about. No wonder Nelson departed for wetter pastures. After all, it was in the Times where William Hague announced we are in “the age of migration”, and endorsed Kamala Harris. Hard to imagine how you could be less in touch with the direction of political travel. Hague’s One Nation Toryism is a dying paradigm, after it delivered the Conservatives their worst election defeat in a century. No young right-winger wants anything to do with the blue Blairism which indebted them from birth, deprived them of home-ownership, and made straight white men public enemy number one.

Even Michael Gove, who endorsed Harris, has overseen a vibe shift at his outlets. The Spectator — which passed from Nelson to Gove’s stewardship last September — featured Bidwell on its front-cover this month. Bidwell often blames the Boriswave for a looming indefinite-leave-to-remain crisis — which Gove himself had a hand in. Likewise, Policy Exchange published a report by my friends Philip Pilkington and Paul Morland, warning of the economic doom-loop produced by subsidising sub-replacement birth rates with third-world migration. (As Nelson proposes.) At a Centre for Social Justice event in 2023, Nelson lambasted Pilkington for suggesting that a majority-first-generation-immigrant nation might have some cultural cohesion problems. Given all Nelson’s examples of successful multi-ethnic leaders, bar Sadiq Khan, have left office, it’s safe to say that Pilkington’s projections are playing out apace. 

Like all Damascene conversions, Gove’s would be welcomed as better late than never. But it looks like Nelson is determined to make ramparts of rubble, and deny the downsides of mass immigration. One antidote to birth-rate decline is to allow young people like me to bring up our children in a nation of neighbours, rather than of strangers. The only way to do this is to stop pretending that liberal multiculturalism is working, to stop mass immigration from distant lands, and to deport all foreign criminals. Belonging is not just a question of meeting pension pay-outs and reducing housing demand. It’s about making our nation a home again. And a home is only a home if the homeowners outnumber the house-guests, and can evict them when they rearrange the furniture.