Anthony Browne

At Open Democracy. (you may have to pass the 'donate here' page on first visit).

It is vital to emphasise that mass immigration and the remarkably intolerant ideology of multiculturalism are exclusively western phenomena. Indeed, the striking thing about the global immigration debate in the west is its determined parochialism. If people in India, China, or Africa were asked whether they have a right to oppose mass immigration on such a scale that it would transform their culture, the answer would be clear. Yet uniquely among the 6 billion people on the planet, westerners – the approximately 800 million in western Europe, North America and Australasia – are expected by the proponents of mass immigration and multiculturalism to abandon any right to define or shape their own society.

This liberal hypocrisy was perfectly illustrated in 2002, when the British government gave full UK passports to 200,000 people living in British overseas territories, such as St. Helena, Montserrat and the Turks & Caicos islands. The inhabitants were allowed to live in Britain, but there was no reciprocal right for British people to live there.

The justification for this one-sidedness was given in the House of Lords by the foreign office minister Valerie Amos:

“The right of abode is non-reciprocal. The territories which fall within the scope of the Bill are for the most part small islands. In consultations on the content of the Bill the governments of the territories concerned made clear that granting British and European citizens the right of abode in their territories would risk fundamentally altering the social, cultural and economic fabric of the territories.”

Britain too is a small island, yet other British government ministers tell the British people that they must embrace mass immigration, and that it is simply racist for British people to oppose the altering of their country’s social, cultural and economic fabric. What makes the Caribbean and South Atlantic islanders noble in defending their culture, and the British racist in defending theirs? It is largely about being a minority, and being outnumbered. But western people are a global minority. There are more citizens of either India and China than all the people of Europe, North America and Australasia put together. There are as many people in Bangladesh and Pakistan together as in the US.

In the developing world, there are simply no significant equivalents of Europe and the US, where around 10% of people are foreign born, or Canada and Australia where the proportion is around 25%. The foreign born in the developing world rarely exceed 1% of the population.

Indeed, developing countries have been the most draconian in clamping down on immigration. In 2002, Malaysia started forcibly returning some of the thousands of illegal immigrants from Indonesia, while India put soldiers on its borders with Bangladesh to force illegal Bangladeshi immigrants back home. Western countries do not cane illegal immigrants or point a gun at them, but provide them with free immigration lawyers, free shelter, free food, free schooling and free healthcare – then express disappointment when they are reluctant to leave.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE - and Jeff Randall in the Telegraph. No wonder he left the BBC.

By encouraging the greatest wave of unchecked arrivals that these islands have ever experienced, the Blair regime has eroded our traditions of tolerance and understanding, while forcing fundamental social change on millions who never voted for it.