Last weekend, my cousin's charming daughter, not long out of medical school, wed her sweetheart - a handsome young doctor from an Indian household.

The Hindu wedding was incredible, vibrant and substantial fun for everyone. Watching as young English and Indian individuals danced together, I reflected that the day was an ideal example of multicultural combination as all of us wish it to be.

But it is dangerously naive to take these benefits for approved and to anticipate that the meeting of cultures will immediately cause universal love.

The UK has arguably the best record of any nation in the method that, for centuries, it has taken in immigrants and refugees from every corner of the world, using a safe and civilised haven.

From the Huguenot Protestants who left massacres in France throughout the 16th century, to the Jews getting away Nazi genocide throughout the Second World War, right approximately the Ukrainian ladies and children offered shelter today, British tolerance and compassion have been a lifeline for millions.

Now that tolerance is being extended to its limitations. Mass migration, intensified by people-smuggling on a commercial scale, is destabilising our country.

We must not fall under the trap of expecting that, because it has actually generally exercised fine in the past, Britain can soak up any amount of group change.

We have actually never seen intensifying migration on anything like the scale of the past 20 years, wites Prof Robert Tombs

History shows that, even here, sudden influxes of migration have triggered upheavals that last for centuries. And we have actually never ever seen intensifying immigration on anything like the scale of the previous 20 years.

Official figures from the Department for Education revealed on Thursday that white British kids are currently the minority in one in 4 schools in England.

This transformation has actually been especially marked in our big cities. At Rockwood Academy in Birmingham, for example, there was not a single white British student recorded amongst the 1,084 who attend the school.

Last week also saw the publication of a report from Professor Matt Goodwin at Buckingham University, predicting that white Britons will be a minority of the population by 2063 - barely more than a single generation.

By the end of the century, according to his figures, 60 percent of the nation will have been born overseas or will have at least one parent who is an immigrant. By then, more than 19 percent of Britons will be Muslim (compared to the present 7 per cent). Goodwin's forecasts are based upon census data and figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

I think these numbers badly ignore the real rate of modification. They assume a steady influx and steady geopolitical conditions, when we have every factor to anticipate both of those aspects will show unstable.

An anti-immigration protester holds up a placard during a demonstration in Dover in 2020

Climate change could have a devastating impact on migration, if even a couple of of the more alarmist theories are borne out.

Tens of millions of individuals in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh might be made homeless if sea levels rise. Millions more would leave their homes if glacial melt in the Himalayas triggered disastrous flooding in India.

Civil wars in Sudan, Congo and Eritrea have actually already driven enormous numbers of individuals to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. African countries from Nigeria to South Africa are in risk of tearing themselves apart, and the outcome would be an enormous rush of people looking for to leave the fighting.

These turmoils would be minor compared to the aftermath of war in between India and Pakistan, or in the Middle East. In those cases, Europe could see 100 million refugees or more.

Contribute to that the increase of organised criminal activity and people trafficking. For all Sir Keir Starmer's bluster about 'smashing the gangs', he closes his eyes to the truth that this is a multi-billion-pound service - one that will not cease just because he makes speeches.

These are not minor bad guys. They are worldwide cartels, who have discovered a profits stream that equals benefit from the drugs trade. The Government has no ideas at all about how to stop them.

The numbers of financial migrants making the perilous crossing from France in overloaded dinghies are mounting, sometimes topping more than 1,000 in a single day.

The cumulative effect is mind-blowing. According to your home of Commons library, 44,000 individuals got here unlawfully in the 12 months to March - which figure, naturally, represents only the individuals we understand about. Much more have most likely slipped under the radar, landing undetected or concealed in trucks and containers.

But 44,000 equates to simply 5 percent of the immigration total for the year. Legal arrivals outnumber the unlawful ones by about 20-to-one.

Nothing in our long and fascinating island story has ever come close to this. Mass migration, introduced by New Labour under Tony Blair, is a reckless experiment in group transformation that has actually never ever been attempted in Britain before.

But it has happened in other places. And for native populations, it has typically been dreadful.

When Europeans settled in the Americas, from the 16th century, they forced their method on to the land. In Australia and New Zealand - countries that were much less largely populated - there was less large-scale violence but the impact on the aboriginal people was no less destructive.

Significantly, the British Empire never ever enabled migration to India, which had a big settled population. British subjects were motivated to settle just in sparsely peopled areas: for circumstances, Canada and wide-open parts of Africa such as Kenya.

But in every case, when this process started, it was soon uncontrollable. More than 6 million Irish emigrants gotten here in the US during the 19th century, a third of them in the area of less than a years from 1845.

Almost as lots of Italians emigrated to America, many of them in between 1880 and the early 1920s. In a country riven with racial divisions, the Italian and Irish neighborhoods battled to make it through, typically obviously by difficult work, however also by political corruption and organised crime.

Starry-eyed Left-wingers like to declare that Britain too is a 'nation of immigrants'. That's utterly disingenuous.

William the Conqueror, who arrived throughout the Channel in 1066 with his own flotilla of boats, brought just about 7,000 males. Yet that small army and the French-speaking Norman immigrants who followed ruined the native Anglo-Saxon culture and subjugated an entire people.

Almost every big Saxon building was destroyed, the ruling elite was changed, their residential or commercial property seized and the language changed beyond recognition. For centuries, Saxons were required to labour as serfs, abhored as an inferior race by the colonising elite. Even Saxon saints were benched.

It took a minimum of 400 years for the aftershocks of the Norman intrusion to diminish.

Resentments ran so deep they are still noticeable in our folk legends: Robin Hood was envisioned as a Saxon knight combating Norman injustice. The concept of this 'Norman Yoke' inspired democrats well into the reign of Victoria.

Even today, almost a thousand years later on, the Conquest may be embedded in our class system.

A 2011 study discovered that Britons with names suggesting Norman descent - such as Mandeville, Lacy, Glanville or Percy - were on typical 10 percent better off than those with Saxon artisan names such as Smith, Cooper, Baker or Shepherd, nearly a millennium after the Battle of Hastings.

To understand totally how severely harmed a nation can be by unrestrained migration, we need just look at Northern Ireland. During the 17th century, tens of thousands of Scottish protestants moved to Ulster. Though separated by the Irish Sea, these 2 nations are so close that on a clear day they are noticeable to each other.

This was a state project, initiated by the Scottish and English governments during James I's reign, and developed as a method of ending mass poverty in Scotland by motivating people to live by farming in Ireland.

Well, we all understand the result: it caused enmity and violence still widespread today that has actually seen thousands killed over the centuries.

Not all the social inequality in Britain is the result of the Norman intrusion, of course, anymore than all Ireland's Troubles were the repercussion of a strategy to ease starvation in Scotland.

But when problems have intricate causes, individuals look for easy scapegoats - and migration will constantly supply one.

The UK population is now 69.5 million, according to the ONS. (Many believe it to be

substantially greater). That's an increase of ten million this century. Yet the birth rate is falling: in 2023 it reached its most affordable rate on record in England and Wales, at 1.44 children per lady, compared with the 'replacement rate' of 2.1 - the variety of children required to keep numbers steady.

If our growing population is not due to giving birth, it needs to be driven by immigration.

The falling birth rate is not a new phenomenon. In 1938, it was predicted that the UK population would peak within 5 years at 41 million, which it would then fall gradually for the next 3 years, to 31 million by 1975.

In case, this turned out to be nonsense, partly because the main data did not expect the Second World War and the baby boom that followed.

But the forecasts likewise stopped working to appraise the starts of immigration from previous colonies, with numerous thousands arriving from the West Indies after 1948 - the 'Windrush generation' - and Pakistan and India following independence and partition in 1947.

There were other surges, for instance from East Africa after the increase of the despot Idi Amin who expelled 80,000 Ugandan Asians, amongst them the moms and dads of previous Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Crucially, the terrific bulk of these immigrants were identified to incorporate into British life. If not already English-speaking, they found out the language. They looked for work or began services. Many brought much required abilities and dynamism.

But that is not the case today. A high proportion of legal immigrants concern do low-paid work, for instance in care homes and the hospitality sector. Those who certify under the government visa scheme for experienced workers or health and care workers can expect to be paid 80 per cent of the standard wage.

Those in the fishing industry, for circumstances, get ₤ 12.82 an hour, rather than ₤ 15.88 for British workers. A similar inconsistency applies in many trades from welding to dance and choreography.

When will white Brits become an ethnic minority? Map reveals neighbourhoods where they already are

This has a threefold impact: wages are depressed, new arrivals live in relative poverty, and many British individuals have dropped out of the labour market. Resentments grow on all sides and the expense is unsustainable.

Many other migrants, it needs to be stated, maximize our generous asylum system - including housing (sometimes in comfy hotels), food, totally free NHS healthcare and even spending money.

The biggest source of animosity, however, comes when immigrants decline to integrate. Incredibly, many on the Left motivate this by trashing our culture and libelling our history - elevating every background except the indigenous one. It spells disaster for our future when immigrants are motivated to remain locked within their own neighborhoods and taught that the British have actually always been their enemies.

How dangerous this is, we can see by looking across the Channel, to France where second and third generation immigrants from North Africa develop a continuous state of unrest. Riots are frequent, car-burning is a national sport and extremist politicians talk of're-migration' - the expulsion of people who 'don't suit'.

This will be Britain's future if the Government does not take control of the circumstance today. Immigration can benefit everyone, however just if it is strictly handled, democratically accepted and culturally incorporated.

Allowed to lack control, as the arc of history shows, it ruins nations.

Professor Robert Tombs is the author of The English And Their History

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