Immigration is Britain’s Jizya

New ONS figures show that annual net migration halved from 806,000 to 431,000 in 2024. The provisional estimate for total migration has fallen from 1.326 million in 2023 to 948,000 in 2024. Emigration is up by 11%, to 517,000 — largely driven by European (218,000) and British (77,000) nationals. They were replaced by 544,000 (81%) new non-EU arrivals — continuing the trend of unprecedented, culturally distant demographic change since immigration laws were liberalized after Brexit. Work visas for non-EU applicants fell by 49% (-108,000); work dependents by 35% (-81,000); and study dependents by 86% (-105,000).

While the Labour government and its unimpressive cheerleaders such as Mike Tapp are taking a victory lap, nothing they did since the July general election led to this. Loathe though I am to attribute competence to the last Conservative government, the fall in student and care worker dependent visas are due to their efforts to mitigate a disaster of their own making. Labour’s proposed changes to the immigration system have not yet gone into effect. Also, net migration running at >400,000 is nothing to brag about. It’s like defecating in the bathtub, then cheering when you switch to just urinating instead. The tub is still filling up, and you’re still sitting in it.

Douglas Murray has written that immigration is always a question of quality, quantity, and pace. Allow me to add “desire” too, given, when the government bothers to consult them, the British public have voted to reduce immigration in every election since 1974. 90% of constituencies wanted less migration before the last election, and that’s when underestimating net-migration by a factor of 10. While immigration has reduced in quantity and slowed in pace, it has not improved in quality, nor gained new democratic assent. And attitudes are unlikely to change, given the profile of new arrivals. 157,000 Indian, 76,000 Pakistani, 70,000 Chinese, and 52,000 Nigerian nationals comprised the largest share. Zimbabweans, the fifth largest group in 2023 (36,000), seem to have stopped coming after they could no longer admittedly game the system by bringing 10 dependents for every one health-and-social-care worker. But the likelihood that this year’s intake will be an economic boon to Britain is still low, as 95% of visas issued to the same nations in 2023 were to net-tax recipients.

Discussing the problem in purely economic terms, however, is insufficient. It’s bad enough that Britain is becoming a mercantile way-station, subjected to dizzying levels of demographic churn. But the longer it continues, the less the chance that the British host majority can reverse their fortunes through democratic means. How can a home remain a home once the guests outnumber the homeowners? But the fact that these imported tribal minorities are less culturally diffuse presents another challenge. Our politicians fail to grasp an imperial theory-of-mind emanating from the third-world. This is especially true when Britain’s democracy is hijacked by tribal minorities, who elect politicians and make policy on ethnic and religious grounds. The British government has been subjected to ethnocentric lobbying efforts aimed at liberalizing its immigration policy, particularly for Africa and the Indian subcontinent. In a previous essay, I wrote about how the Hindutva exert democratic pressure abroad using Indian diasporas as “living bridges”. The same is true for their sworn enemies from the subcontinent.

I have documented for Courage Media how the British state has been pressured, from without and within, to acquiesce to the demands of Muslim activists. Whether deprioritizing Islamic terror, hosting iftars in Parliament, or enforcing de facto blasphemy laws — all of these feats have been achieved by Islam’s advocates. Multicultural appeasement has recreated an inverted Ottoman millet system: allowing Muslim enclaves to be effectively self-governing, operating Sharia courts, while also enjoying insulation from any criticism via hate-speech laws enforced by the British state. The sheer and continuing volume of immigration from the Muslim world serves to manufacture increasing demand for these sectarian measures.

Is this a deliberate colonial endeavor, or just conformity to Britain’s attractive, yet suicidal, economic incentives? In Islam, emigration is an unspoken sixth pillar. As Tom Holland wrote in his book, In the Shadow of the Sword, Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina (the hijra) is “cast as a duty incumbent upon all believers … a call to arms that is all-embracing, universal and unbounded by time or place”. Doctrinaire, mosque-going Muslims are surely aware of this. The duty to evangelize Allah’s final revelation, found in the Qur’an, could act as much as a push factor for immigrants, as Europe’s generous welfare state is pulling them here.

In this light, the taxes paid to subsidize unproductive immigrants’ stay begins to look like a Jizya imposed upon the British public. This is especially true when economic inactivity is most pronounced among Muslim communities. A third (33%) of ethnically Pakistani and Bangladeshi adults in Britain are economically inactive. They comprise some of the 494,000 foreign-born people who are unemployed in Britain. Many will also be second- and third-generation immigrants, as not pulling one’s weight is an intergenerational trait in these communities. Data from Denmark and the Netherlands demonstrates that immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey, and their descendants are, on average, never net-tax contributors across their lifetime. Each costs the British taxpayer £465,000 in their lifetime. It is a predictable pattern that our immigration system refuses to account for, because to draw reasonable qualitative distinctions between peoples and cultures would be called racist.

British taxpayers continue to bear the cost of these majority-Muslim migrants, so that their politicians can maintain pristine anti-racist luxury beliefs. Resentment builds when Muslim activists lecture advocates for immigration restrictions that it is “British values” to accommodate limitless numbers of hostile foreign dependents who hold their culture and heritage in contempt. We don’t want to hear about what “the Christian thing to do” is from someone who denies the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, and whose sacred text says Jihad against unbelievers is “the ultimate triumph”. This is Da’wah: weaponized sophistry, appealing to vulnerabilities in Britain’s compassionate liberal character, to ensure Muslim immigration continues apace.

The insistence that all those crossing the Channel are vulnerable, destitute refugees doesn’t pass muster either. 85% are male, and earn £500 per week as unlicensed food-delivery cyclists while staying in 4-star hotels at taxpayers’ expense. One hotel had the fire brigade called six times because batteries in the migrants’ e-bikes caught alight. The immigrants themselves are not shy about their intentions either. When interviewed amidst the refuse and prayer mats in Calais’ illegal migrant camps, or loitering in high-streets awaiting their next Deliveroo order, these men are honest about being mercenaries who feel entitled to a share of Britain’s vanishing largesse. One does not learn to say “Give me house” in English unless one expects the demands to be met.

Many regard Britain’s women and children as commodities, too. In 2023, I helped break the story that smuggling gangs film British women without their consent, in states of drunkenness and undress, to advertise their services to North African clients. In 2025, the majority of men crossing the Channel hail from Afghanistan and Eritrea — and commit sex offences at a rate 20 times higher than British men. Advertising our wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters as the spoils of conquest doesn’t sound like vulnerability to me.

It should horrify but not surprise us that the dignity of women and the innocence of children are alien concepts to cultures which rejected the moral revolution of Christianity. Whereas Christ taught that the kingdom of God belongs to children, and St Paul wrote that women and men are given equal moral consideration, Muhammad told his warmongering followers that “slave-girls” and “bond-women” are “war booty also permitted to you” as that which “the right hand possesses”. This belief, that white Kafir girls deserve any sexual abuse visited upon them, has been the justification given by multiple perpetrators part of Pakistani grooming gangs. Morality is ethnocentric, extended only as far as the Ummah. This clannish in-group loyalty (asabiyah) is compounded by high rates of consanguinity in Muslim communities — with 46% of Pakistanis in Bradford married to a blood relative. When Britain imports the Muslim world, it imports the practice of violent, predatory men using women and children as receptacles for their pleasure.

This £5.2 billion smuggling trade is facilitated by Hawala, an honor-based 8th century Islamic finance system. Muslim traffickers collaborate with illicit businesses (Hawaladars) in Britain to transfer money without the migrants themselves making payments. The entire illegal migration enterprise would not function without Muslims placing the duty to emigrate and their loyalty to family, clan, and Ummah above British law. In February, the National Crime Agency issued a warning to Hawaladars that they could be breaking the law by engaging with this trade. But a stern lecture is not enough. Nothing short of banning the parallel Islamic courts and economy operating in this country, exploiting its tolerance for freedom of religion, will stop the problem.

Foreign states know this, and are taking advantage. Three Iranian nationals, given the right to remain in Britain after arriving illegally via lorry and small boats, have been charged with spying on behalf of Tehran and plotting terrorist violence. Two others were arrested and remain unnamed. The National Crime Agency recently secured the conviction of Asghar Gheshalghian, who ran a Hawaladar from an Iranian carpet shop in Wood Green, North London. How many other emissaries of terror states are working to subvert Britain using immigration?

It seems that successive British governments have been wholly unprepared to understand our immigration system is a vulnerability exploited by a hostile civilization with imperial designs on us. There are simple and sensible solutions to the problem. Stop subsidizing the creation of sectarian ethnic enclaves, wholly apart from, and at odds with, the host majority, by banning anyone born abroad from claiming taxpayer-funded welfare benefits and social housing. Discontinue the preferential treatment of ethnic minorities and Muslims through DEI policies, the Public Sector Equality Duty, “antiracist” policing, and hate-speech laws. Enforce the law against illicit businesses and Hawaladars, including cash-only barber-shops, kebab houses, mobile-phone repair shops, and vape vendors. Ban deleterious practices like cousin marriage, face veiling, and Halal slaughter.

All of these measures will be decried as illiberal, but they will cause an organic outflow of those unwilling to and incapable of conforming to British culture. If these laws are met with criminal defiance, then those breaking them should be imprisoned or deported as with any other crime. But the passage of these laws must be preceded by sufficient courage shown by politicians, who understand how Britain’s immigration system is being exploited by ideologues interested in conquest, not coexistence. Some MPs — Rupert Lowe, Katie Lam, Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Nick Timothy — have put their heads above the parapet. More must be brave enough, if Britain is to prevent its Lebanonization.