In principle I'm one of those people the fearsome and ambushily predatory JuliaM refers to as the open borders crowd, and I'm not ashamed. Free movement of goods, money and people across borders is no bad thing at all subject to a couple of important conditions. First, coming for money is fine if it's money they're going to work for, but newcomers don't get to just rock up and get handouts off the local taxpayers. Fuck off. Second, hanging onto your culture is okay but newcomers don't get to just rock up and order the existing inhabitants about because their own culture doesn't meet the migrants standards. Fuck off again. Thirdly, and this isn't so much an issue with the migrants themselves as their countries of origins, it needs to be a two way street. If those conditions aren't met then open or even reasonably porous are not at a good idea at all.
In recent years Britain hasn't really met either of the first two conditions and is a bit iffy about the third, and yet we see that the grinning mutation and the snot scoffing madman who took over from him let in as many as four million people in the largest influx in more than a thousand years.
Official figures on Thursday are expected to show up to 5.5 million non-UK born people arrived in the country as long term migrants between 1997 and 2010 – the equivalent of almost one every minute.Plus the illegals, which might be the thick end of another million. But that's not really what I wanted to talk about.
Around 2.3 million left over the same period meaning the UK population increased by around 3.2 million as a direct result of foreign migrants.
What I want to draw attention to is the effect of me coming to Oz and Bill and Mrs Sticker going to Canada and the other 2,299,997 who all decided for one reason or another to up sticks and fuck off to somewhere better. Most of us will have had little or no expectation of benefits where we were going, which meant that to migrate we needed to bring with us either skills or money or both. In short it seems likely that Britain has exchanged 2.3 million mostly productive people plus their accrued wealth for 5 to 6 million people who, even if they were all too proud to take handouts and preferred to beaver away 16 hours a day, will often have come without a pot to piss in. And of course we know that nothing like all are too proud to take handouts. Meanwhile the Exile and Sticker households are happily contributing to the Australian and Canadian economies having already taken money with us out of the UK economy.
We've known for a while that this was not mere incompetence but a deliberate policy, supposedly to speed up the multiculti train wreck and possibly to fill the place up with newly enfranchised voters with a reason to feel grateful to the Labour government. And now we know the numbers too, which must be as bad as anyone suspected and probably even worse. Even I, as a believer in the ideal of open borders for free market and libertarian reasons (as very distinct from the shambolic and politically motivated clusterfuckopalypse that has been the reality), find these figures appalling.
So if, or more likely when, you see a piece in Comment is Moderated saying how Migrationwatch UK have it all wrong and they're a bunch of heartless right-wing bastards just point out that at least one person who favours the principle of open borders, really really open borders, is utterly horrified by the stupid, lopsided way it's been implemented by the left to suit their political agenda instead of something vaguely analogous to fucking reality. And point out that he'd be a lot more horrified if he was still there.