A Rare Sighting

Migrationwatch chairman Sir Andrew Green in the Scotsman.

"In England, the numbers have simply got out of hand. In Scotland, the reality is that immigration is largely irrelevant. Why? For the very simple reason that immigrants usually do not come to, and certainly do not stay, in Scotland.

Taking first the picture in Britain as a whole, not many people realise that until the early 1990s, more people left than arrived. That picture has changed dramatically in the past decade. Net migration has climbed rapidly to more than 150,000 a year. These are just the legal immigrants. An estimated 50,000 people were detected last year attempting to enter Britain illegally; nobody knows how many succeeded.

The picture in Scotland is quite different. In most years there has been a net outflow. Over the period 1992-2001, net immigration to the UK totalled 875,000, while there was a net outflow of 41,000 from Scotland. Thus, if experience is any guide, David Blunkett's suggestion that massive immigration into Britain will help Scotland's "problem" must rank among his less impressive contributions to the debate.

So where have all these immigrants gone? The short answer is London."

Of course he's right. The only immigrants to Scotland and Wales are English. Why ? Because as I posted a few months back

"If you were an asylum seeker headed for the UK, where would you like to go ? To Scotland ('Whae's Like Us') or Wales, with their strong Nationalist parties ? To Ulster, where Sinn Fein/IRA ('Ourselves Alone') are still killing people because their forebears were immigrants four hundred years ago ? Or to a country whose national flag should really be emblazoned with the word 'Sorry !'. No choice, really, is it ?"

In Wales the locals aren't too happy about it. With good reason. The Welsh language and culture are dying, killed by the A55 dual carriageway and the M4, enabling scallies to deal smack in Caernarvon's villages (Anglesey has a major heroin problem) and alternative types to colonise Cardigan and Presceli.

You can hear as much Scouse as Welsh spoken in the streets of Bangor. And a few years ago I was at a party in a remote village in a Welsh-speaking part of Pembrokeshire with more than a hundred other people. They were all English and living within 30 miles, drawn by the local Steiner school.