U.K. Labour Party Admits: Mass Migration Is Not Beneficial
The desire to reduce mass migration is so undeniably popular in the United Kingdom, and such a threat to politicians who oppose it, that the left-wing government in power is flipping on the issue. Early this week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer publicly admitted that unrestrained mass migration hasn’t benefited the people of the U.K., despite claims to the contrary by elites, including himself.
Starmer’s conversion comes less than two weeks after Reform UK, which opposes mass migration, easily won a round of local elections.
“The experiment is over,” the prime minister declared Monday. “We will deliver what you have asked for — time and again — and we will take back control of our borders. I believe we need to reduce immigration significantly.” The point, he added, is to have an immigration system that “works for our national interest.”
In his speech, Starmer said the U.K. risks becoming an “island of strangers” and admitted the country’s suicidal immigration system “seems almost designed to permit abuse.”
Starmer’s “island of strangers” statement triggered screeches of “far-right rhetoric” and comparisons to conservative parliament member Enoch Powell’s 1968 “rivers of blood” speech. In that address, Powell compared the deluge of migrants the island was experiencing back then to “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” Powell described why mass migration was great for the migrant but rendered natives “strangers in their own country”:
They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighborhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated.
Powell was ousted from his party’s frontbench for that speech.
Labour’s Immigration Plan
Starmer vowed to implement reforms that “will create a migration system that is controlled, selective, and fair.”
The measures, outlined in a government White Paper published on Monday, will purportedly lead to a “substantial” reduction in net migration by the end of this parliament, Starmer said. He has pledged to cut net migration by about 100,000 a year by 2029.
Reforms will demand that migrants master a higher level of English. “When people come to our country, they should also commit to integration, to learning our language, and our system should actively distinguish between those that do and those that don’t,” Starmer said.