Why Immigration?

Let's face facts; the UK, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is a great place to live.

Who says so? The nearly 600,000 people who come to live and work in the UK every year, the vast majority of whom are legal migrants. If this was such a bad place to live the out-migration figure would be a lot higher than its current 400,000

Initially, of course, the habits of some immigrants may seem unusual to the rest of us and we notice new shops and places of worship as well as signs in other languages. However to claim, as some have recently done, that the makeup of Britain's high streets is being radically altered by current immigration levels is patently untrue.

Slowly the new changes become a part of the tapestry of life and new populations establish businesses that are part of what makes our day to day lives British. What would our high streets look like without Marks & Spencer, our shopping baskets without Patak's or the pages of the FT without the likes of Courtaulds or GlaxoSmithKline?

It is hard to think of anything tangible, other than the weather, that is British that has not been brought in from somewhere else.