11 million immigrants since 2000. When I

I can separate the economics, thanks. I live in London, a city that runs on immigrant workers and the taxes generated here prop up the rest of the country. What I can't separate is the idea that immigrants must be treated as less than pond algae because they are non-British.

Sorry, not clear on the question - is what ongoing?

The health surcharge (currently just over £1k per year for most visa holders - visitors/holidaymakers excepted - and around £750 for student visas) is ongoing, yes. And most visa routes have the "no recourse to public funds" condition applied, meaning they are not eligible for any benefits.

Also interesting to note that net migration significantly increased after Brexit, which was supposed to have the opposite effect (if the pro Brexit politicians were to be believed)

Maybe we need policies like Dubai or the Netherland or even China that looks to grow the size of the country. We could dam the wash for example or create a new county off the side of North Yorkshire by reclaiming some of the North sea - I'd call it Humpshire since that is what it would look life.

The top places for emigration are Canada and Australia, where they have a points system. Thats whats called controlled immigration. So I guess the people who are already living there are happy with that. That's all we are asking for too. Controlled immigration.

Why aren't you posting a link to the ONS proof of the 11 millions immigrants since 2000 @Uggbootsforever ???

The peak was in 2023, immigration has come down ever since.

Have you seen any reports predicting a rise in net migration?

Exactly-and I value our countryside, I value our farmers being able to produce food.i value the need for space, I value the need to have a lower population density. Being more self sufficient in resources for our own population. is the way to go.

Staying in someone else’s house is a privilege not a right. I wouldn’t rent out a 3bed house to 50 people because there’s room to squeeze in 20 mattresses in the living room. Unless you’re going to be good tenants, and keep being good tenants, positively contribute, live by the house rules and I don’t need that property for my own use - fine, but as soon as one of those things are broken - I don’t want you in my house.

For the health of wild animals and birds and for the benefit of having fresh air and water and being able to grow our own food, there always NEEDS to be miles and miles and miles of countryside.
The planet can not sustain unlimited population growth.

Citizens do not want to sustain unlimited population growth. They responsibly choose to have fewer children. It's unfair to keep consuming finite resources and developing countryside into concrete.
People in countries with poorer facilities need to curb their own populations until they CAN provide peaceful and meaningful infrastructure - education, homes and healthcare.

It is okay for citizens to decide how many people they want to sustain long term.

What is it you think should happen, always increasing population?

I am just interested, not invested.

She hasn’t stoked hatred though. She specifically mentioned she was only talking about population numbers.

This is exactly the problem she raised in her OP. People (like you, sorry) CANNOT separate the economics from emotive subjects like race and religion, which is why we’re sleepwalking into a crisis that everyone’s too scared to talk about.

OP YANBU.

I don't know what the numbers are. However I do know that I live in an area not too far away from where I lived 30 years ago.

You can't fail to notice roads are much busier, it's harder to get away from people when walking, basic services can't cope with the number of people, houses are more crowded than they used to be and on smaller plots.

If we hadn't messed up the housing market by allowing BTL and then making it worse with the pension freedom act so lots of people at 55 took out cash and bought BTL. I know this is all been clamped down on now but house prices are just far too high now compared to incomes. We would have been far wiser to stick to what was working 30 years ago. More babies would have been born here as families could afford to survive on one wage and buy a house. (I know it is more complicated than that for example pension annuities stop being viable because interest rates were slashed after 2008 etc so thus people turned to BTL)

The biggest problem I see now is nobody will just stand up and go STOP. Close the gate now. We are full. Then start to fix all the problems.

If we did that we could start to sort out the current position and eventually in 10 years or whenever we could evaluate if we are still full or if we now have further capacity.

There are some areas that are just costing the goverment a fortune and they don't add any value and need to be addressed.
These are amongst others-
1 Council paying for temporary housing for months/years at a time as no where to put people entitled to help. We either need to build council houses or take away the entitlement of these people so the goverment is no longer paying a fortune to private landlords or hotels or whatever.

2 Immigrants in hotels. Just obvious. Basic barracks would be fine. I hope they go through with this. I suspect they won't.

3 Social care for elderly. I know from personal experience after watching how my own elderly mum was handled. She had attendance allowance £400 per month, carers in 4 times a day paid for by council. I don't know how much the council would pay to the carer agency for these staff but quite frankly they are a waste of money. Now there was the odd one that was good but many of them were young girls clearly just doing the job for the sake of a job (okay can't blame them for that). However my mum was meant to have say a half hour visit. They would come in and ask my mum if she needed help with anything. They would make my mum a cup of tea and occassionally empty the kitchen bin. There was loads of stuff they weren't allowed to do. Most of the time they left after 5 mins as my mum said no she didn't need washed (even though she did).

So actually i did most of it (daughter) which meant I gave up working for 5 years and never went back to work. We either need to pay for these carers but have them actually do the caring or accept this system is very expensive and not really working. This has got to be why councils are struggling so much with these huge bills.

4 Benefits - enough said on this. We all know how the bill has increased by spades. We can't afford it. Full stop. If your kitchen cupboard is empty you don't feed next doors kids for free to be nice do you.

5 NHS - we either make people pay an amount to use it which would help fund it and stop people being so wasteful or we scrap it and just have a funded insurance based system.

6 Goverment Debt - much like people who find themselves in a spiral of credit card debt our goverment is using a ton of it's money in interest payments and worst of all continuing to increase it's debt each month. Where does anyone think this is going to go. For anyone who has got their selves overextended you will realise this is a bad place to be.

Okay so I have digressed but how sensible to just say stop, close the gates. Now start working on all the above issues. We either have council houses or we stop with the obligation to house people. We can't afford it etc

It's very hard to assess and start to fix problems when it's a moving target ie numbers coming in keep going up. We have to 'stop the rot' and then start to repair/replace as necessary not patch things up while the roof is still leaking and bills to the trades are going up and up.

Is that ongoing? If it’s needed for these reasons should population keep going up?

I guessed you wouldn't....

People can’t discuss and often refuse to accept when they are wrong or misinformed.. reminds me of Brexit.

@BallerinaRadio
The population has increased by 11 million.

Our birth rate is falling.

Do the maths - we haven’t had that sort of increase from people having more babies, have we?

Why are you trying to discredit the data?

How can they predict that immigration is going to fall when numbers of asylum seekers coming on boats are increasing? Hard to predict when we dont know when the figures are going to peak.

I think you're being somewhat disingenuous. If you didn't feel malice towards immigrants as anything but an homogenous group you wouldn't have started this thread. Stoking hatred of course affects them as individuals.

This is really misleading. This number have to be measured against population growth, people dying, leaving, being born. The more accurate estimate would be population growth compared to what it would have been if there were no immigrants. I would imagine we would have a population decline with very high % of old people unable to work.

Net migration and a concern over population size are one and the same. In an ideal world we run a meritocracy where we would let in people who contribute and kick out people who don't but if the government was to start to talk about kicking out Brits there would be uproar - the days of transportation to the colonies are long gone.

Except the British aren't a race. We're a big mix-up of two thousand years of DNA being swirled about.

We might be a nation. And in that case, the implicit criticism is of that nation's characteristics - which is fine, I think, coming from a Brit. In the same way that you can slag off your own family, but you don't want anyone else doing it.

Who would blame them!! 😂

They would take us back but it might take some time.

Going back into the EU would NOT stop or slow down immigration. Then again, leaving it hasn't worked either!