Immigrants but legal ones?

[Tiktakmam]

I’ve been living in the UK for 16 years, have two children, and work full-time. I consider myself integrated, living according to British values, and respecting this country. I look after myself and my home, and I try to contribute positively to the community.

Yet, many of us — especially from Eastern Europe — don’t feel entirely safe with the ongoing issues around illegal migrant boats. Even though we are legal residents, I’ve noticed growing dissatisfaction from some neighbours. When I mention that I’m from Eastern Europe, I often hear comments like, “Of course you are…” — basically implying I’m not British.

This makes me feel like I’ve somehow “brought these boats” here, as if I’m just another part of the immigrant problem. Seeing flags and attitudes that suggest “immigrants go home” is disheartening.

I also feel somewhat less confident around British people, especially in areas with mostly locals and fewer immigrants. For example, when I travel to campsites or smaller towns, I sometimes feel looked at as untrustworthy. Luckily, in London I feel much less like this.

Post-Brexit, it feels like the country has changed in ways that make life less secure, not just for immigrants but for everyone. It’s heartbreaking that all migrants, legal or not, are often dropped into one pot and judged as a single group.

I keep wondering — after so many years of people from other countries contributing to making the UK a brighter, more vibrant place, why does it feel like the country has been going downhill over time?

I feel so heartbroken, because I understand that the UK will never truly be my home, as I was not born here. Yet it hurts to realize that, with every passing year, it feels more and more like I will never be fully welcome.

Why has it gone so wrong on a broader scale? How can we have a healthier, safer society for everyone, while respecting the law and supporting integration?

I hope we can have a conversation about this that goes beyond fear and politics, and focuses on community, fairness, and safety for all residents.
Im just curious, in this era of migrant boats and heightened tension around immigration, how do you perceive or feel about other immigrants, even those who are legal residents? Does this climate affect the way you interact with them or how you feel about other immigrants, especially in less multicultural towns? What does your family of friends say?

understanding why the UK has a much higher average refugee acceptance rate than France

This is a lie. In 2023 France received 167,000 asylum claims, more than double than the UK's approximately 67,000. In 2024 the numbers are getting closer with France receiving 130,000 claims, and the UK 108K,

I can't even get a quick illegal immigration stats check before Brexit. The number of illegal migrants before 2016 were very small but Google won't give that information because your governments doesn't want it to be easily obtainable.

This is how much crap you were fed by politicians selling you the slogan "wanting to control borders" during the Brexit referendum, and facing reality.

Unless all the tax paid is all on income from investments or pensions, anyone paying tax is likely to be working. And if they're working, the country as a whole is benefiting from their labour as well as their taxes.

Exactly. Unfortunately for Pandora, she hasn’t been able to explain exactly what she thinks is racist about my post, apart from accusing me of ‘weaponising VWAG to bolster racism’ and this is the issue.

We need as a country to have a sensible conversation about this and we need the government to start listening and stop trying hide the problem and creating an information void that can get filled by others.

Then you get people like Pandora running round yelling ‘racist’ at people and wondering why the conversation gets heated.

@blueclip You asked why services no longer work as they should.

It’s largely down to austerity over the past 25 years. Public services have been eroded, budgets and resources reduced.

It’s easier for some people to blame immigrants rather than votes and political policies which have led to areas being decimated and the public purse transferred to private wealth (PPE, Carillion etc).

It’s also preferable to the elite for immigrants, black and brown people to be blamed, while they continue to shake us down.

Maybe why the OP came to the UK is none of your business? Is that even relevant now she has been here for 16 years?

Judgemental post - I can just imagine you shaking your head at 'how sad' it is.

I don't have a British passport but have lived and worked in this country for over 40 years. In the NHS as a nurse - as that will give me extra brownie points.

I've had Indefinite Leave to Remain since I was 16 - but recently have had to prove my immigration status over and over. Theresa May changed the system to biometric data - v. cumbersome and difficult to do. It's just been changed again to an e-visa system. Again, very cumbersome and difficult.

If you want to apply for UK citizenship it will cost at least £3000 per person.

For me life is pretty easy though, that's because I'm white and adopted an English accent as soon as I could.

@OP I totally get what you're saying, and think the racism and bigotry in the UK is disgusting.

We're also not a very big island and our resources are finite. That's not racist thing to say, it's simply practical. We are already stretched to the limits and our abilities to cope are failing - GPs, Dentists, Schools, Emergency Services, Adult Mental Health Support, Hospital Places, CAHMS, Social Housing - even getting the bins emptied and the streets swept - we're running out.

They are illegal if their asylum claims are spurious and not covered by the 1951 Refugee Convention.

The ones found to be wanting to pop home for Christmas don’t sound very genuine ‘refugees’. This has been reported by the Chief of U.K. Border Force in a rare moment of openness.

There are posters here who pop up on every race/immigration thread to whip up hatred and fear, threatening of 'dire consequences' and societal collapse. Same stuff over and over again.

I caught a bit of GB News just now. It's all 'boiling point' nonsense recycling the same few protests as if they are happening everywhere. They are desperate for civil unrest, see Farage's disgraceful speech recently.

The people painting flags on roundabouts and protesting are a tiny minority, whatever they try to make you believe.

It’s just a really complex situation.
For context, I’m descended from immigrants if you go back a couple of generations (and poor ones not highly qualified and invited here so probably illegal) married to an immigrant from a Mediterranean country who has been here 25+ years.
Both of us are scared by the media pushing Reform and the powder keg situation regarding asylum seekers and the protests. DH has said if Reform get in, we are off back to the EU, even though he’s basically lived his entire adult life here, has no friends from his home country at all, favourite foods are steak pie, black pudding and apple crumble!
But there’s a sense that his obvious foreignness makes him vulnerable in a way that he didn’t feel pre Brexit.
At the same time, both of us are uneasy at the polarisation of rhetoric about immigration. The middle class and liberal line is all about free movement and welcoming diversity, based on 30 odd years of globalisation. If you are working class globalisation doesn’t always work so seamlessly.
Of course a massive influx of people of a totally different culture to that of a Christian country will cause friction. It isn’t just about white/ brown (although for some people of course it will be) it’s that nobody likes rapid change they have no control over, and some cultures are obviously going to be less compatible with British culture.
Poorer people have much less control over where they live- the changes are not theoretical.
For context again, my street is a mini United Nations. My immediate neighbours are Ghanaian, Vietnamese, Syrian. It’s a respectable working class neighbourhood, everyone works hard and is friendly and it’s very peaceful. I’m lucky. But it works because of the mix. Large influxes from one place are always going to present a problem.

But you tried to worry PP by claiming we tried to deport the man because he was brown and Muslim but totally skimmed over the actual reason which was tax fraud.

Can you not see how inflammatory that is? It reads like a clickbait tabloid headline - the worst kind.

And in the current climate, being Muslim and a bit brown might well be enough - the previous government tried to deport someone on those grounds - when all he'd done was committed tax fraud.

Gather up all the strength you have because in this tense environment you will need it. OP, you have every right to be here and if you experience any attacks you must report them to the police. As for bitchy and prejudiced comments, I’ve experienced this all my life (though I’d think I would get more in other countries) and I’ve really had to toughen up. I’ve worked on my own mindset so I can be a strong person and strong mum to my daughter. I’ve also got a small but firm circle of friends who understand me and we all listen to and support each other. We can control what is within our means and as for the rest, just stay civil but vigilant. I personally think you can’t change snooty attitudes and they reflect the stupidity of that person. Don’t let them get to you!

Which being processed will determine. Therefore, until they are processed, they are not illegal because it is not illegal to seek asylum

Goodness. I know that the UK relies on migrants to do the work that UK-born ppl are too lazy to do, but seriously, asking a migrant to google some easily-available facts for you is really taking the piss.

Very well. A quick google would give you loads of data. For example from the government’s own website:

“migrants arriving on the Skilled Worker (SW) route are more likely to be net fiscal contributors compared to those arriving on humanitarian routes. For context, estimates from our Annual Report 2024 suggest that an average SW migrant has a £16,300 net positive fiscal impact compared to £800 for the average UK born adult” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisory-committee-report-on-net-migration/net-migration-report-accessible

From the Office of Budget Responsibility’s latest report, “migrants in general tend to arrive on these shores when they're already of working age and they often leave before they retire, meaning they cost the state less in schooling and retirement benefits. This might also help to put another of the report's findings in context: that UK-born citizens paid for only 89% of the benefits and services they received through taxes, costing the state £624 billion between 2001 and 2011.”

etc etc.

Many Algerians don’t trust the French government and certainly didn’t when DH was considering his options. Things have changed a bit but it was only in 2012 that the French government admitted this happened. Murder of protesters by the French police in Paris.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-58927939

I am a Reform voter. Let me explain to you why people are going over to Reform in such large numbers.

1. The sheer scale of immigration. When people migrate to a country in small numbers, they can be easily assimilated – especially when they come from somewhere like Poland or Czecheslovakia. I have known immigrants who seem more British than the British, by which I mean they have adopted the traits I like in the British (politeness, manners, self-mocking/self-effacing humour, etc) and none of the traits I detest (the oafishness, insularity, philistinism, pomposity, coldness). But when people move to a country in huge numbers, and do so within a small time frame, its identity is destroyed. You simply cannot assimilate such numbers. And when the people who migrate either know nothing about that country, or have an ancestral grudge against it, it's even worse. Imagine an experiment. Imagine you moved ten million people from Finland to Okinawa. What would happen to Okinawan identity? Obviously it would be destroyed. (The Okinawan left, however, would tell people they were being 'enriched'.) Immigration has happened on such a scale that I no longer live in a nation with a shared history and shared identity. No one voted for this change, and no one asked for it. It has simply been imposed on us.

2. The quality of the people you let in. Many immigrants really have enriched this country. T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Bill Bryson, Clive James, Joseph Conrad, etc, were all immigrants. No one objects to a university-educated Polish girl moving to the UK, or a teacher from Romania, or an engineer from Finland. I have worked with many eastern Europeans – Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, etc – and have liked and respected them all. The British are not a race. We are descended from a mix of Danes and Norwegians and Germans and French and Irish. But I do not welcome people who overstay their student visa, or come in as students and then vanish, or claim asylum when the only thing they are are really fleeing is the police. Look at the example of Anicet Mayala, an illegal immigrant from the Congo. Human rights activists fought against his deportation and won. He is now in prison for raping a 15-year-old girl. The vast majority of these so-called 'refugees' are young men, many of them rootless drifters, others criminals. Not only do they know how to work the system, there is an entire network of left-wing activists helping them. A 23-year-old Polish girl who comes here to do a masters in biochemistry enriches our culture. A boatload of young men, some of them criminals and most of them barely literate, does not.

(Let me just add that there are plenty of white Brits I wouldn't want in my country either! I sympathize with Spanish people who get sick of British yobs moving to the Spanish coast, refusing to learn the language, waving union jacks and urinating in the street.)

3. The way the left are using immigration to antagonise people and destroy their identity. The left is a magnet for bitter, destructive, hate-filled people – I mean people who never grow out of the adolescent rebel stage. They like the fact that immigration is upsetting people. They like the fact that it's destroying people's identity. They like the fact that the green belt is being ruined in order to house the immigrants. They know it upsets horrible little middle class nimbys like me, and they love it. Though they pose as moral and humane, many of them couldn't care less about the immigrants. Their real motivation is spite and hatred. The left hate British identity. Above all they hate English identity. Even George Orwell noted that. When those on the left realised there wasn't going to be a proletarian revolution, and that they weren't going to have the pleasure of massacring 'the bougeosie', they switched tactics. They concentrated on destroying people's identity instead. And the quickest way to do that was to open the borders and overwhelm them with immigrants.

4. This migration crisis is only going to get worse. Africa has the highest birth rate in the world, and the African population is going to double – right in the middle of climate meltdown.

I referenced the acceptance rate not the total number of asylum applications.

Here are the latest available UK and France acceptance rates:

The UK's initial asylum grant rate for the year ending June 2025 was 48%, a decrease from the previous year's 58%. While this is lower than the high of 77% in 2022, the current rate is still higher than any pre-2019 figure. However, many refused claims are later overturned on appeal, making the overall long-term acceptance rate significantly higher than the initial decision rate.

In contrast, France's first-instance protection rate was 31.4% in 2023, meaning that nearly 68.6% of asylum applications at this stage were rejected, according to an AIDA report.

And Reform's plans to deal with it are pure fantasy

Like Brexit

Exactly this. As I have said, I've been here 28 years. I've experienced xenophobia from day 1. Often disguised as 'just banter' but the undertone is absolutely there. Including from British born people I was training in the correct use of business English - yes, my English was substantially better than theirs. Some British people have this sense of deep exceptionalism - the ones who go and live in Spain and don't learn the language, eat in places only serving English food, making zero effort. And then they demand that those of us who come to the UK more or less pretend not to have our own culture. All of that has become much worse since the 2016 referendum.

There are many people in the UK who are very open and accepting of immigrants, but there is a substantial subset who aren't and never will be - and it's because they have this sense of superiority.

The complaints about Polish shops are a typical example. Why shouldn't Polish people who come here have shops where they can buy a taste of home? We have them where I live, alongside Turkish and Korean shops. I shop in all of them because they have food I like to cook with. I've never found them unfriendly - perhaps you get out what you put in.

No we aren’t.

The UK is full of people who weren’t born here. If we were insulated people from abroad wouldn’t come here.

Most of us are definitely not suspicious of people who are not British born.

Which makes the Brexit referendum even a bigger joke when the UK had few problems with illegal immigration before 2016.

There were 2 big slogans during Brexit to leave the EU - "make our borders safe" and "we send the EU £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead"

We all know what's happened to the slogans people voted for.

Your post has been deleted, so I can't really repeat the racist bits without also being deleted.

Er, I'm a migrant...😂 But anyway, it was a question asked in good faith because my own Google search to .gov showed that its not a blanket statement of fact and depends, as shown by your link below regarding the SW route, varies wildly between non EEA and EEA citizens.

It's perfectly reasonable in any type of discussion when someone makes a claim to ask what the source is 🤷‍♀️

I’m so sorry you feel like this @Tiktakmam and I completely understand why. During the few days after the Brexit vote there was some disgraceful racial abuse hurled at some Eastern European immigrants here. Some local people were very vocal about their disgust but our MP said absolutely nothing, nor did the local council.

Interesting post.

1. Don't disagree in principle. Not sure how many parts of the country are really experiencing this kind of change at the moment, though. I would say it's rare, but don't deny there may be pockets of the country where this is so. It seems that the people getting really upset about the situation don't often live in those pockets themselves, though.
2. Sure, you want the better quality refugees, but do you have stats to prove that asylum seekers are such 'poor quality'? I only have anecdata, but have met loads of asylum seekers who are doctors, computer scientists with PhDs, public health experts, economists, civil engineers, town planners, etc. and very few without qualifications except wives of high-powered husbands and mothers whose husbands have been murdered. I admit my experience may not reflect the norm though.
3. Hmm. This is where you've lost me. I would see myself as fairly left but have no wish for a revolution, am middle-class through and through, and spend time volunteering to help immigrants. I don't recognise your description in any way at all.
4. Yes, this is a big worry.

With respect, you haven't addressed my main concern which is why France currently rejects a significantly higher percentage of their asylum claims than the UK. The answer isn't Brexit or the EU.

If the stats show you have a better than 50% chance of successfully claiming asylum in the UK after all the endless appeals, compared to less than a third accepted in France, you are going to go the UK.

Particularly if the lack of a national ID card scheme in the UK makes staying and working illegally here much easier, if you are denied leave to remain.

We need to address both of these concerns urgently to prevent a future Reform government.