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by eyevz 1 hour ago
I find it crazy how the establishment will consider absolutely anything other than that Brits are legitimately fed up with immigration.
10 comments

There's being fed up with something and there's fomenting civil war. The huge wave of immigration, which has since subsided, happened under the Tories.
Immigration has dramatically gone down in the past few years.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo... (figure 2)

I think the real problem people are having is that a large amount of those immigrants are now no longer from the EU. But you have Brexit to blame for that.

If people prefer unskilled EU immigration to skilled non-EU immigration its says something about them.

People had a problem with EU immigration before Brexit so I do not think that is it.

I think most of the problem people have is with is to illegal immigration. The sentiment is "stop the boats". There are bizarre things happening in the asylum system. Do we need to consider claims made by people from the EU or the US? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/18/eu-citizens-hand... That is an extreme but there are lots of claims by people from safe countries.

Small boat arrivals and asylum applications are down and deportations are up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70989jrdweo

Hard to complain here with the current trajectory.

I know, but the people complaining about immigration do not. I partly blame the media and social media, and partly politicians focus on net migration numbers.
Who/what is the "establishment"?
If they are fed up with immigration they are stupid. “Gee we have declining birth rates and we want to deny this pool of labor that might correct course because they are brown.” The american empire was built on easy immigration. Turns out the tired and poor that we took in can build empires and win europe’s major wars for them.
The job market has imploded and the economy hasn't been growing since 2008. There definitely needs to be a cap.
If only there were more customers to grow markets! Hmm I wonder how that could be done…
You are not going to get more customers with higher house prices or through greater youth unemployment.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm203nn7lzro

Immigration is a duct tape solution to fixing things at this point. It is not going to build you an empire today.
Why aren’t Japan, Korea, China importing millions from India and Africa to replace their falling birth rates? Because people are not identical interchangeable units.

If you drop 1 million Africans into London they don’t simply become British, they are just Africans living in London. People understand intuitively that replacing the native population with foreigners at massive scale mostly just erases the native culture and people (which have existed for thousands of years).

The American Empire was built by specifically importing millions of Europeans who shared much history and culture (religion, appearance, history). If America had instead been grown by importing people from India or Africa, the American Empire would not exist.

You are fear mongering here. I do think immigration is double edged, but if you look at the statistics I posted it is very far from replacement level. If you would prefer to have immigrants from the EU instead, then something needs to be done about Brexit.
That seems like an inadequate explanation of why Elon Musk, who is not a Brit, is investing so much time and energy into this issue.
Imagine the irony of Northern Ireland getting mad over immigration.
Another way of looking at it is that they have been mad over it for centuries.
New genocide hot take on HN: has anyone considered maybe it’s the $VICTIMS that's the problem! Wow I’m so freaking smart.
"No, the problem isn't our policies. Big tech is the problem!"
As an American, I can assure you that policy issues and corporate meddling are in fact not mutually exclusive.
As a brit, I can confirm I am not at all fed up with immigration.

Your comment is unnecessary, unsubstantiated, doesn't add anything to the discussion and is just going to cause arguments in its current form.

English are rapidly becoming a minority in England. Many towns and cities are well less than 50% native English. There are millions in the UK who are opposed to being replaced by Africans and Middle Eastern people. This is a natural and sensible response to the situation that literally any nation of people would also share.
The most likely candidates are places like Bradford and Birmingham, which are still - according to wikipedia - 60%+ white british, that's without even considering british asian or other people born in and native to the UK.

Again, sorry, I can't find any sources to support your facts here, maybe I looked in a different place to you, so perhaps you could share your sources?

You mean the made up idea of immigration as a problem? Sure.

What Brits probably want more is to rejoin the EU, get back some leverage on the world scene and dig themselves our of the brexit hole

I don't think it's a made up idea that immigration is a problem, some people clearly, definitely consider it a problem, and it can cause problems. But it's a problem that's been heavily worked on recently and has had a lot of success in solving in the UK over the past 2 years.

This is why it's completely barmy to suggest the average brit is fed up of immigration now, and I'm not sure why many people pointing that out are being heavily downvoted.