Like house prices, immigration could fall too

The thing about population projections is that they are usually wrong. Our problem in future may be getting people to stay

David Aaronovitch, The Times - 9 Sept 2008

It was a strange conceit, I thought as I listened to their Laurel and Hardy act on the Today programme yesterday, to suggest that if Nicholas Soames and Frank Field agree on something, then they must be more likely to be right. And I imagine that they conceived that their rectitude was further enhanced by the support of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton and the erratic Muslim Labour peer, Lord Ahmed.

There they are then, bound together in a new group, Balanced Migration (well, it’s hardly going to be called, “Chuck ‘em Out” is it?), all their religious and ethnic bases cleared and ready for action. Though why, since they commissioned Migrationwatch UK (aka “Send ‘em Back”) to create their platform for them, they didn’t just join that organisation, is a bit obscure.

Balanced Migration is so called because it wants to create a rough balance between people going and people coming in. It imagines that by so doing it can limit Britain’s population growth to “sustainable” levels, as well as limiting what Mr Field called the transformation of some neighbourhoods “from settled working-class communities to societies they can barely recognise” Full Article