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Comment by ppod | Hacker News Reader

I moved to the UK seven years ago, and have clearly noticed a change in the time I've been here. It wasn't perfect to begin with, but there is now a clear popular attitude against non-British people. It's worse against non-white people and eastern europeans, but there is also a level of general xenophobia. Of course, this is not the prevailing situation in London and cosmopolitan cities, but it is prevalent among the electorate, and the government and civil service is slowly starting to reflect that preference.

I know people living in London will read this and claim it isn't true, but remember I'm talking about the country as a whole. Immigration is consistently ranked as the most important issue in opinion polls, and a large majority favour admitting "none" or "a few" from most countries. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk...

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Polls consistently show that Britain is one of the most tolerant countries in europe (debatable wether that is a good thing if it leads to intolerance in the long run ...) in any case I would suggest it is more likely the common language makes any alienation feel more raw. Alienated in a european country - can often be charitably put down to language differences (and learning the local language is a greater signal of integration when it's not english).

Yes, there are two reasons that interact for this:

1. The population feels the country is full

2. The population feels the government is systematically biased in favour of huge quantities of immigration and doesn't listen to their concerns

Both feelings are pretty much rooted in reality. The feeling of "fullness" comes from the fact that scaling infrastructure is constrained by physical and social limits like how fast new doctors can be trained, capacity of railway lines etc but the number of people that will turn up if allowed is unlimited. So everything in the UK is constantly on the brink of falling over due to being constantly at max load.

The second feeling is even more powerful. Immigration has become totemic because for so many years the political elite told voters they couldn't control immigration, that somewhere along the line - without any announcement or debate - the entire topic had been removed from the democratic realm entirely, that the UK had to accept anyone who turned up from anywhere and changing that was not only impossible due to the EU, but racist/xenophobic/immoral.

Tell large numbers of people who are concerned about overload that their concerns are racist and they should feel ashamed of themselves, that there should be no limits anywhere despite the obvious physical impossibility of such a policy, and it's a recipe for making the electorate very obstinate indeed.

However it has nothing to do with actual xenophobia. The UK is by far the most racially diverse country in Europe.

If you look at the graph here https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/statistics-net-migration-st... you can see migration levels consistently rising from 1975 to 2017 with 250,000 expected this year. Is there any level of migration for which critics would not be perjoratively labelled xenophobes by you?

The definition of xenophobe is 'one unduly fearful of what is foreign and especially of people of foreign origin' it could be that folk are not 'unduly fearful' in the UK where to mention only a few problems related to population density, there is an acute housing shortage, roads are clogged and the National Health Service is close to breakdown in many areas.

> and the National Health Service is close to breakdown in many areas.

That is entirely because the government has chosen to defund the NHS. It has nothing, and I mean really nothing, to do with immigrants using the NHS.

All the research we have shows us that immigration does not put the NHS under strain, that immigration could help pay for the NHS if the government chose to correctly tax the population and correctly fund the NHS, that the NHS cannot run without immigration (we have nowhere near enough doctors, nurses, and all the other varied allied health profesionals and we must source staff from abroad.)

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