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Comment by ifwinterco | Hacker News Reader

People absolutely do have a problem with legal immigration, especially post-Boriswave.

If legal immigration means millions of new people every year and rapid demographic change, of course that will cause a political issue.

It would be very strange (basically unheard of in human history) if it didn't.

People I know who are non-white all report increased racism (mostly not aggressive but noticeable) since Covid, despite having English accents so clearly not being illegal immigrants.

That is caused by reckless immigration policy stoking resentment

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There are no millions of people every year, stop spreading lies. Net immigration to the UK in 2025 where 170000 people. Decidedly not millions!

In Canada it has been closer to 500k per year

Maybe not millions per year but millions over a very short time

Close to a quarter of our population are immigrants right now. It's become a pretty fragmented society imo as a result.

When was Canada ever a unified society? You have two official languages primarily based on which end of the country you live in.

Fair enough.

Maybe it's just rose colored glasses then, but it certainly feels like we're more divided than ever before

It’s no longer more than a million a year (thanks Kier Starmer, I guess) but there are now at least 15 million people in the UK who aren’t White British, it is absurd to pretend that isn’t a big number.

A lot of people ideally want immigration to be negative, so +170k is still going in the wrong direction.

There are potential arguments in favour of that level of immigration but you need to convince people that it’s fine for their country to change beyond all recognition in the space of a single generation.

And unsurprisingly, the people trying to do that are finding it a tough sell

Net immigration was never more than a million (let alone "millions" which was the lie I responded to). It reached a peak of 900 000 in 2023.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...

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