Konstantin Kisin

So please go ahead and share it with friends and family.

That's a great answer.

That's a great answer.

The Great British Delusion As regular viewers will know, for several years now I've been trying to persuade anyone who will listen that if you want to address the widely shared concern about the pace and scale of mass immigration, Britain's most salient political issue, it might be helpful to understand what's actually causing the problem in the first place.

The conventional explanation of mass immigration among critical commentators is that woke ideologues in the civil service and the political halls of power believe that bringing more people into Britain is an unquestionable moral good.

On the fringes of the right, some even murmur of the various theories of the so-called great replacement, which range in emphasis from elites bringing in compliant and desperate foreign workers to avoid providing good working conditions and fair wages to native workers

all the way through to Jews conspiring to replace white people with third world immigration.

Whatever the exact flavor this perspective comes in, the idea is that mass immigration is happening for primarily ideological reasons.

Likewise, advocates of mass immigration believe that anti-immigration sentiment is also motivated by ideology, hating immigrants or being racist, et cetera.

rather than reality.

What has been clear to me for some time, however, is that both of these claims are only partially true.

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.