we've had some great immigration here - all the people who were invited here after the war from the west indies etc to fill jobs and get the economy moving and ugandan asians stimulating the economy through enterprise, for example. think back to the olympic opening ceremony and the celebration of a multicultural community - great, indeed. when my daughter nearly died in childbirth, a team of seventeen nhs medics of various kinds saved her life - amongst the ones i met were black africans, asians, white british...i wouldn't have been without a single one of them, that day.
but i am (reliably, i think) informed that in some parts of the world we are known as 'stupid country', the place where you go for benefits, free health care and free education, a free car (not sure what dodge that is), whilst sending money home to build your nice house for when you retire, and planning to move on to a 'better' country where you can get a really well-paid job! i promise you, people who are not indiginous (sp?) to the uk told me this - i don't know any bnp people and i only ever read the daily mail at my mother's, so i don't see it very often.
someone mentioned afghanistan. a then-friend, from afghanistan, told me a mutual aquaintance had just then been deported but that was ok because she was borrowing someone's passport and coming back the next week! there are lots of reasons for people from afghanistan - Sikhs, for example, are persecuted by Muslims there, and try to leave. i know one Sikh boy who was put on a plane with a stranger, aged fourteen, and dumped in london by the man who he thought would look after him. he did not speak english and had nowhere to go. fortunately, he found his way to a gurdwara. all turned out well in the end thanks to the kindness of two sponsors and his own very hard work - he's a young businessman now, doing well and a permanent resident in the uk, with a passport.
so some people want to come here to survive, and some aren't given any choice, they're just 'getting out'. a young Muslim i know told me his family came here because they couldn't get into america, and another said his family came so they could practice their kind of Islam freely, without being persecuted - he also said something i really liked, which was "we've got a good country here. why spoil it?" i can't remember what means of 'spoiling it' we were discussing at the time, but that sentence stayed with me.