Are these people really British?

Was no one else shouting "That'll teach you for Lindisfarne" at the telly during the World Cup quarter finals?

Immigration is like weather and it's been going on nearly as long. It's varied a lot over time and place.

As such, it's often been good for the people experiencing it (even lifesaving), but a certain level of it can sometimes be badly planned or harmful, even though every single immigrant might be a perfectly nice person.

It's not one thing, that is always either good or bad. It doesn't have to have anything to do with race at all.

Rolling our eyes at people who are unhappy about current immigration somewhere, just because immigration at some other time happened, or was good, is a bit like saying "it's just summer!" to someone struggling in a heat wave with temperatures made worse by global warming.

What has often been good or harmless can sometimes not be good. What's good and enriching and valuable in one city can be badly organised and disrupting of community cohesion in another.

Racists do exist but leaving this conversation only to them is crazy.

Its not illegal to seek asylum so they were probably not referring to asylum seekers.

You know that we're all African, right? So none of us should be in the UK. We should all leave it and let it return to the wild.

All of us are Out of Africa...

@glitterpaperchain That sounds exactly like what I hear the media saying about immigrants now!

I don't care what language anyone speaks, but I care about values. The issue is that I see far too many people coming here with poor ethics and values. Not wanting to help other people, stealing, placing a higher emphasis on money rather than character, assaulting people, driving obnoxiously loud and fast cars, etc. Some cities and towns are not safe enough to walk through at night.

And yes, you can say that some people born in the UK are like that... but the difference is that we can't deport those people. It makes absolutely no sense, in any shape or form, to say "it's OK for immigrants to be dicks because some people in the UK are dicks."

I’m descended from those Huguenots, do I get a French passport?

It is interesting though, mine arrived about 1701 in London (Spitalfields obviously) and then the first person to marry into the family who was an English Londoner was in 1809. So for 100 years they just intermarried with other French families, and didn’t integrate at all. They went to a French church in Spitalfields and all the records for them are in French. I wonder if there were French schools?

I do like to remind my Reform loving mother about this every time she moans about immigrants.

We're really not. We're one of the most homogenous nationalities on earth. Yes, there has been a lot of immigration in the past few decades, but most white British have stayed the same since the Vikings shagged us. From the link below:

• There are separate genetic groups in Cornwall and Devon, with a division almost exactly along the modern county boundary.
• The majority of eastern, central and southern England is made up of a single, relatively homogeneous, genetic group

Check this out; it's fascinating.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2015-03-19-who-do-you-think-you-really-are-genetic-map-british-isles

Who cares, half the thread is saying English people in England for 1000s of years aren't English so if we aren't from here neither is he.

What about those bloody beaker people?!!

I think a lot of the immigration stuff is tipping over to direct racism
police post a photo of a male who isn’t white and the comments are “send them back!”
where to? He’s from Burnley as his parents were and grandparents

Op, your post is facile

It isn't the unkowns Abdullah bin Zayed was really talking about here. He was talking about known radicals being allowed in and given safe harbour and how they are allowed to preach hatred and extremism, radicalizing our countries' citizens.

Very much Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.

I remember the Lenny Henry joke.
He got a white female member of the audience up on stage, and asked her
"Have you got any African in you ?"
"I don't think do. "
"Do you want some ?"

To engage with OP's direct point, I'd say the Huguenots weren't British, but most of their descendants in their various host countries eventually became so. Some more quickly than others, depending on when they started intermarrying, primarily.

I think this is why cultural compatibility is very important - further away cultures intermarry less and therefore remain as "other" for much longer.

Ethnogenesis is an interesting subject.

Set up in the 1700s I believe.

It really isn't "only the Western world that's having this thrust upon us", and it certainly isn't the UK. Germany is the only Western democracy in the top 6 hosting countries; the UK is 16th. 68% of refugees or displaced persons are hosted in low or middle-income countries. 26% in least developed nations such as Chad. See https://www.unhcr.org/media/global-trends-2025-report for more of the depressing details.

The Anglo-Saxons came her in small boats, from Europe.

Indeed. Chinese community in London. Jewish community in north London.

How childish. Is that the best defence you have for mass illegal immigration?

I think it's interesting (really) to discuss differences like these on the margins within the British isles. I just think it's disingenuous to play this "well William the Conqueror came on a boat across the Channel so we're all immigrants really" card.

Ethnicity is race PLUS culture, in my view.

I certainly can believe it. I would guess that it is likely an almshouse charity set up after the Huguenots arrived? So that would be the first half of the 18th century?

A charity has to stick by its charitable aims. If it was set up back in the 1700s to help Huguenots then it has to carry on doing just that.

Almshouse charities can last for a very long time. Perhaps the most well known one is The Charity of Sir Richard Whittington (yes - the Dick Whittington of panto fame).

This was set up on his death in 1423. The charity had an almshouse in London up until 1966 when it relocated to East Grinstead.

So, yes, I can well believe that there is still an almshouse for Huguenots!

Arguably it has a meaning of you are talking about descent. If Scottish pirates had a lot of children in one area, you would probably describe their descendants as having pirate or Scottish pirate DNA. Ancestry would be a better term I guess. But the weirdos (usually in America) who talk about Viking as a white race are indeed odd.

Also, while I'm not a historian, from what I can see, locals took good pains to make sure that incomers knew their place and did not inconvenience the established pecking order.
I'm not sayiing this isright or wrong, just that it was quite different.