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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.
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