Konstantin Kisin

Yes, some, as New Labour advisor Andrew Nether explained, wanted to, quote, rub the right's nose in diversity.

Yes, many in Britain as a whole, and in Westminster in particular, think that immigration is an axiomatic moral good.

The problem is, however, that this does not explain why a series of conservative governments, elected on increasingly vociferous promises to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands,

continued to ramp it up.

Facing the threat of Farage, who tore chunks out of the Tory vote year after year, they instead proceeded to set new immigration records, culminating in 2023 when net annual immigration exceeded 900,000.

It's also true that some people don't like immigrants.

But the idea that this motivates a significant portion of the opposition to mass immigration in a country like Britain is absurd.

According to that infamous far-right anti-immigrant rag, The Guardian, British people are statistically some of the most welcoming towards immigrants in the world.

Put simply, both sides are misunderstanding what's happening, often on purpose.

My view is that much of the concern about immigration comes from two practical realities.

First, mass immigration on this scale is necessarily displacing.

I've only lived in Britain for 30 years, and no one can tell me that the country and especially its major cities have not been completely transformed in that time.

Many of the people who live in London today are either unconcerned by or actively in favor of these changes.

But that's partly because most of the people who were concerned have left these cities.

Now multiply across every city in the country and many of their suburbs.

You don't have to dislike people to not want the area where generations of your family were born, lived, and died to become alien to you within the space of two decades.

In that same time span, the British people have been getting poorer.

As I keep saying over and over, Britain's GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007 before the Great Financial Crisis.

Ironically, this is also why parties of every stripe have brought in millions of people into the country.

We don't evaluate economic performance on GDP per capita.