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

The Hindu wedding event ceremony was amazing, vibrant and big fun for everybody. Watching as young English and Indian people 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 alarmingly naive to take these advantages for granted and to anticipate that the meeting of cultures will immediately lead to universal love.

The UK has perhaps the finest record of any country in the manner in which, for centuries, it has actually taken in immigrants and refugees from every corner of the planet, using a safe and .

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

Now that tolerance is being extended to its limits. Mass immigration, compounded by people-smuggling on an industrial scale, is destabilising our country.

We must not fall under the trap of expecting that, since it has actually usually exercised fine in the past, Britain can absorb any amount of group modification.

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

History shows that, even here, abrupt increases of migration have actually caused upheavals that last for centuries. And we have actually never seen escalating immigration on anything like the scale of the past 20 years.

Official figures from the Department for Education exposed on Thursday that white British kids are already the minority in one in four schools in England.

This transformation has been particularly marked in our big cities. At Rockwood Academy in Birmingham, for instance, there was not a single white British pupil taped among the 1,084 who go to the school.

Recently likewise 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 - hardly more than a single generation.

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

I suspect these numbers badly ignore the real rate of change. They assume a steady influx and steady geopolitical conditions, when we have every reason to anticipate both of those factors will prove unpredictable.

An anti-immigration protester holds up a placard throughout a demo in Dover in 2020

Climate modification might have a destructive result on migration, if even a couple of of the more alarmist theories are substantiated.

Tens of millions of individuals in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh might be made homeless if water level increase. Millions more would flee their homes if glacial melt in the Himalayas caused devastating flooding in India.

Civil wars in Sudan, Congo and Eritrea have currently driven massive numbers of people to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. African nations from Nigeria to South Africa remain in risk of tearing themselves apart, and the result would be an enormous rush of people seeking to escape the battling.

These upheavals would be minor compared to the after-effects of war 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 fact that this is a multi-billion-pound service - one that will not stop even if he makes speeches.

These are not petty criminals. They are international cartels, who have discovered an earnings stream that measures up to make money from the drugs trade. The Government has no ideas at all about how to stop them.

The numbers of financial migrants making the treacherous crossing from France in overloaded rowboats are installing, often topping more than 1,000 in a single day.

The cumulative effect is overwhelming. According to your home of Commons library, 44,000 people arrived illegally in the 12 months to March - which figure, naturally, represents just individuals we know about. Many more have most likely slipped under the radar, landing undetected or hidden in lorries and containers.

But 44,000 corresponds to simply 5 per cent of the migration overall for the year. Legal arrivals surpass the illegal ones by about 20-to-one.

Nothing in our long and interesting island story has actually ever come close to this. Mass immigration, ushered in by New Labour under Tony Blair, is a reckless experiment in group revolution that has actually never been tried in Britain before.

But it has happened in other places. And for indigenous populations, it has actually 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 densely populated - there was less massive violence but the result on the aboriginal individuals was no less terrible.

Significantly, the British Empire never permitted migration to India, which had a big settled population. British topics were encouraged 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 procedure began, it was soon unmanageable. More than six million Irish emigrants arrived in the US during the 19th century, a third of them in the space of less than a decade from 1845.

Almost as numerous Italians emigrated to America, the majority of them between 1880 and the early 1920s. In a nation riven with racial divisions, the Italian and Irish communities battled to survive, typically of course by effort, but also by political corruption and organised criminal activity.

Starry-eyed Left-wingers like to claim that Britain too is a 'country 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 men. Yet that little army and the French-speaking Norman immigrants who followed destroyed the native Anglo-Saxon culture and subjugated a whole individuals.

Almost every large Saxon building was demolished, the ruling elite was changed, their residential or commercial property took and the language changed beyond acknowledgment. For centuries, Saxons were required to labour as serfs, abhored as an inferior race by the colonising elite. Even Saxon saints were demoted.

It took at least 400 years for the aftershocks of the Norman intrusion to decrease.

Resentments ran so deep they are still noticeable in our folk legends: Robin Hood was envisioned as a Saxon knight battling 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 research study found that Britons with names suggesting Norman descent - such as Mandeville, Lacy, Glanville or Percy - were on typical ten per cent much better off than those with Saxon artisan names such as Smith, Cooper, Baker or Shepherd, practically a millennium after the Battle of Hastings.

To comprehend completely how terribly harmed a nation can be by unrestrained migration, we need just look at Northern Ireland. During the 17th century, tens of countless Scottish protestants moved to Ulster. Though separated by the Irish Sea, these 2 countries are so close that on a clear day they are visible to each other.

This was a state task, started by the Scottish and English federal governments throughout James I's reign, and developed as a way of ending mass hardship in Scotland by encouraging individuals to live by farming in Ireland.

Well, we all know the outcome: it resulted in enmity and violence still prevalent today that has seen thousands killed over the centuries.

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

But when issues have complicated causes, people look for simple scapegoats - and migration will constantly provide 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 kids per woman, compared to the 'replacement rate' of 2.1 - the number of children needed to keep numbers steady.

If our growing population is not due to childbirth, it should be driven by immigration.

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

In the event, this ended up being nonsense, partly because the main data did not prepare for the Second World War and the baby boom that followed.

But the forecasts likewise failed to take account of the beginnings of migration from former nests, with many thousands getting here from the West Indies after 1948 - the 'Windrush generation' - and Pakistan and India following independence and partition in 1947.

There were other rises, for instance from East Africa after the increase of the despot Idi Amin who expelled 80,000 Ugandan Asians, among them the parents of former Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Crucially, the excellent bulk of these immigrants were determined to incorporate into British life. If not currently English-speaking, they learned the language. They searched for work or started organizations. Many brought much needed skills and dynamism.

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

Those in the fishing market, for instance, receive ₤ 12.82 an hour, as opposed to ₤ 15.88 for British workers. A similar disparity applies in lots of trades from welding to dance and choreography.

When will white Brits become an ethnic minority? Map exposes areas where they currently are

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

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

The best source of bitterness, though, comes when immigrants decline to incorporate. Incredibly, lots of on the Left motivate this by trashing our culture and libelling our history - raising every background except the native one. It spells catastrophe for our future when immigrants are motivated to stay locked within their own communities and taught that the British have always been their enemies.

How unsafe this is, we can see by looking across the Channel, to France where second and 3rd generation immigrants from North Africa produce a continuous state of discontent. Riots are regular, car-burning is a nationwide sport and extremist political leaders talk of're-migration' - the expulsion of individuals who 'don't fit in'.

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

Allowed to lack control, as the arc of history shows, it destroys countries.

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

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