UK population bigger than France for first time ever after record migration | Hacker News Reader

UK population bigger than France for first time ever after record migration

gbnews.com

11 pointsBran_son17 comments

Misleading title. If the current trend continues it will be larger in 2025.

Apologies. The original title contained "to be", which did not fit in the 80 character limit. In any case, UK's population is already larger than the European parts of France, which is what most people think of, so while the shortened title is not technically true, it is not misleading.

France's total population includes the overseas territories while the UK's population is Great Britain and Northern Ireland (I believe). This should mean that the population of the UK is already larger than that of mainland France.

I think that's what the article already says. There's about 3 million citizens in the overseas territories (and 2 million abroad but I don't know how they are counted).

FYI This is GB news, think fox but more right wing.

Isn't this Office for National Statistics data?

Yep. GB News might be cranky but the data underlying the story is just fact.

No citizen voted for this.

Annual migration of 700,000 people to a country of 70,000,000 is absurd and completely destabilises society.

I don’t follow—what in particular becomes destabilized?

Because it decreases social trust, the bedrock of a functioning society.

Probably if one is a nativist, one has in their mind that "migration" means someone coming from a different culture, a culture that is less refined than one's own culture, and so the migrant would make everything in one's homeland worse...

Interestingly these numbers are all for legal migration, and the article also says: "It should be noted that we have elevated incoming migration owing to our leading support for Hong Kongers and Ukrainian refugees, as well as very high numbers of students because of our flagship education sector.”.

The ONS breakdown is probably better compared to this dog-whistle article: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

> someone coming from a different culture, a culture that is less refined than one's own culture, and so the migrant would make everything in one's homeland worse

Why should one have to think a different culture and people are inferior, to want to preserve one's own culture and people? If it was environmentalists worried about native wolves being slowly displaced by an invasive breed of dingo, would you call them wolf-supremacists? Certainly nobody accused Kashmir of supremacy when they worried about immigration [1].

Or are human groups so unique, the first of their kind in the entire animal kingdom, that they actually benefit from a competing group moving into their territory?

[1] Kashmir’s new status could bring demographic change, drawing comparisons to the West Bank - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...

Why? It’s an increase of 1%

Annual. Which is 80% over 80 years, a single lifetime. Unless there's a plague or the Mongols invade, such shifts rarely happen.

Only if it's evenly distributed. Canada has a population of ~39 million, but most immigrants are settling in one of two major areas.

YoY population increase of 1% is quite difficult to sustain, it puts considerable stress on already stressed markets and social systems.

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