Konstantin Kisin

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.

Instead, we measure GDP itself and itself alone.

That is the equivalent of measuring how prosperous your household is without accounting for the number of people living in it.

A household income of £100,000 per year is high by British standards at least, but what matters a lot more than that is how many people are in your household.

A single person living on 100,000 pounds is in a very different position to a family of five who are effectively getting 20 grand each.

The explanation for why labor and the Tories let immigration run rampant was best summed up by legendary investor Charlie Munger when he said, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

If all you care about is the headline figure, why not hand the bedroom to your in-laws to top up your prosperity with their pension?

When described like this, it sounds frankly insane.

Yet that is precisely what our politicians are incentivized to do.

They are judged on the country's total GDP.