Last weekend, my cousin's beautiful child, not long out of medical school, wed her sweetheart - a good-looking young medical professional from an Indian household.

The Hindu wedding event ceremony was amazing, vibrant and huge fun for everyone. Watching as young English and Indian individuals danced together, I showed that the day was a perfect example of multicultural combination as we all want it to be.

But it is precariously ignorant to take these benefits for approved and to anticipate that the conference of cultures will automatically cause universal love.

The UK has perhaps the very best record of any country in the way that, for hundreds of years, it has taken in immigrants and refugees from every corner of the planet, providing a safe and civilised sanctuary.

From the Huguenot Protestants who ran away massacres in France throughout the 16th century, to the Jews getting away Nazi genocide during the Second World War, right up to the Ukrainian females and children used shelter today, British tolerance and compassion have been a lifeline for millions.

Now that tolerance is being stretched to its limits. Mass immigration, intensified by people-smuggling on an industrial scale, is destabilising our nation.

We must not fall under the trap of supposing that, due to the fact that it has actually generally exercised fine in the past, Britain can soak up any amount of group change.

We have never seen intensifying immigration on anything like the scale of the previous 20 years, wites Prof Robert Tombs

History reveals that, even here, sudden increases of migration have actually triggered upheavals that last for centuries. And we have actually never ever seen intensifying immigration on anything like the scale of the previous twenty years.

Official figures from the Department for Education exposed on Thursday that white British kids are currently the minority in one in four schools in England.

This change has actually been especially marked in our huge cities. At Rockwood Academy in Birmingham, for example, there was not a single white British pupil tape-recorded among the 1,084 who attend the school.

Last week likewise saw the publication of a report from Professor Matt Goodwin at Buckingham University, predicting that white Britons will be a minority of the population by 2063 - hardly more than a single generation.

By the end of the century, according to his figures, 60 per cent of the nation will have been born overseas or will have at least one parent who is an immigrant. By then, more than 19 percent of Britons will be Muslim (compared with the existing 7 percent). Goodwin's forecasts are based on census data and figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

I suspect these numbers badly undervalue the real rate of change. They assume a constant increase and steady geopolitical conditions, when we have every factor to expect both of those aspects will prove unstable.

An anti-immigration protester holds up a placard during a demonstration in Dover in 2020

Climate change could have a devastating impact on migration, if even a couple of of the more alarmist theories are substantiated.

Tens of countless individuals in low-lying nations such as Bangladesh might be made homeless if sea levels increase. Millions more would leave their homes if glacial melt in the Himalayas triggered devastating flooding in India.

Civil wars in Sudan, Congo and Eritrea have actually already driven massive varieties of people to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. African countries from Nigeria to South Africa remain in danger of tearing themselves apart, and the outcome would be a massive rush of individuals looking for to get away the fighting.

These upheavals would be minor compared to the after-effects of war in between India and Pakistan, or in the Middle East. In those cases, Europe could see 100 million refugees or more.

Add to that the rise of organised crime and people trafficking. For all Sir Keir Starmer's bluster about 'smashing the gangs', he closes his eyes to the reality that this is a multi-billion-pound service - one that will not cease simply since he makes speeches.

These are not petty bad guys. They are global cartels, who have discovered a profits stream that rivals earnings from the drugs trade. The Government has no concepts at all about how to stop them.

The varieties of economic migrants making the perilous crossing from France in overloaded rowboats are mounting, sometimes topping more than 1,000 in a single day.

The cumulative result is mind-boggling. According to your house of Commons library, 44,000 individuals got here unlawfully in the 12 months to March - which figure, obviously, represents only individuals we understand about. A lot more have likely slipped under the radar, landing undetected or concealed in lorries and containers.

But 44,000 relates to simply 5 percent of the migration total for the year. Legal arrivals surpass the prohibited ones by about 20-to-one.

Nothing in our long and fascinating island story has actually ever come close to this. Mass migration, introduced by New Labour under Tony Blair, is a negligent experiment in group transformation that has actually never been attempted in Britain before.

But it has actually occurred somewhere else. And for native populations, it has actually frequently been devastating.

When Europeans settled in the Americas, from the 16th century, they forced their way on to the land. In Australia and New Zealand - countries that were much less largely populated - there was less massive violence however the effect on the aboriginal people was no less disastrous.

Significantly, the British Empire never ever permitted migration to India, which had a big settled population. British subjects were encouraged to settle just in sparsely peopled areas: for example, Canada and wide-open parts of Africa such as Kenya.

But in every case, once this procedure began, it was soon unmanageable. More than six million Irish emigrants arrived in the US throughout the 19th century, a third of them in the area of less than a years from 1845.

Almost as many Italians emigrated to America, the majority of them between 1880 and the early 1920s. In a nation riven with racial departments, the Italian and Irish communities combated to endure, frequently naturally by effort, however likewise by political corruption and organised crime.

Starry-eyed Left-wingers like to declare that Britain too is a 'nation of immigrants'. That's entirely disingenuous.

William the Conqueror, who showed up throughout the Channel in 1066 with his own flotilla of boats, brought only about 7,000 men. Yet that small army and the French-speaking Norman immigrants who followed damaged the native Anglo-Saxon culture and ruled over an entire individuals.

Almost every large Saxon structure was destroyed, the judgment elite was changed, their residential or commercial property took and the language altered beyond acknowledgment. For centuries, Saxons were required to labour as serfs, disliked as an inferior race by the colonising elite. Even Saxon saints were benched.

It took a minimum of 400 years for the aftershocks of the Norman intrusion to decrease.

Resentments ran so deep they are still visible in our folk legends: Robin Hood was thought of as a Saxon knight battling Norman oppression. The concept of this 'Norman Yoke' inspired democrats well into the reign of Victoria.

Even today, almost a thousand years later on, the Conquest might be embedded in our class system.

A 2011 study discovered that Britons with names indicating Norman descent - such as Mandeville, Lacy, Glanville or Percy - were on typical 10 per cent better off than those with Saxon artisan names such as Smith, Cooper, Baker or Shepherd, practically a millennium after the Battle of Hastings.

To understand fully how terribly damaged a country can be by unrestrained migration, we need just take a look at Northern Ireland. During the 17th century, 10s of thousands of Scottish protestants migrated to Ulster. Though separated by the Irish Sea, these 2 countries are so close that on a clear day they show up to each other.

This was a state task, started by the Scottish and English federal governments during James I's reign, and conceived as a method of ending mass hardship in Scotland by encouraging individuals to live by farming in Ireland.

Well, we all know the result: it caused enmity and violence still common today that has seen thousands eliminated over the centuries.

Not all the social inequality in Britain is the outcome of the Norman invasion, obviously, any more than all Ireland's Troubles were the repercussion of a strategy to minimize hunger in Scotland.

But when issues have intricate causes, people seek simple scapegoats - and migration will constantly supply one.

The UK population is now 69.5 million, according to the ONS. (Many believe it to be

substantially higher). That's a boost of ten million this century. Yet the birth rate is falling: in 2023 it reached its lowest rate on record in England and Wales, at 1.44 children per lady, compared to the 'replacement rate' of 2.1 - the variety of children needed to keep numbers steady.

If our growing population is not due to giving birth, it needs to be driven by immigration.

The falling birth rate is not a brand-new phenomenon. In 1938, it was predicted that the UK population would peak within five years at 41 million, and that it would then fall steadily for the next 3 years, to 31 million by 1975.

In case, this turned out to be nonsense, partially because the official statistics did not anticipate the Second World War and the child boom that followed.

But the forecasts also stopped working to take account of the starts of immigration from former nests, with lots of thousands getting here from the West Indies after 1948 - the 'Windrush generation' - and Pakistan and India following self-reliance and partition in 1947.

There were other surges, for example from East Africa after the increase of the despot Idi Amin who expelled 80,000 Ugandan Asians, amongst them the moms and dads of former Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Crucially, the excellent bulk of these immigrants were figured out to incorporate into British life. If not already English-speaking, they found out the language. They searched for work or began services. Many brought much needed skills and dynamism.

But that is not the case today. A high proportion of legal immigrants pertain to do low-paid work, for example in care homes and the hospitality sector. Those who qualify under the government visa scheme for proficient employees or health and care workers can anticipate to be paid 80 percent of the standard salary.

Those in the fishing market, for instance, receive ₤ 12.82 an hour, as opposed to ₤ 15.88 for British employees. A comparable discrepancy applies in many trades from welding to dance and choreography.

When will white Brits become an ethnic minority? Map reveals neighbourhoods where they currently are

This has a threefold effect: wages are depressed, new arrivals reside in comparative poverty, and lots of British individuals have dropped out of the labour market. Resentments grow on all sides and the cost is unsustainable.

Many other migrants, it needs to be stated, make the most of our generous asylum system - consisting of housing (sometimes in comfy hotels), food, totally free NHS healthcare and even investing money.

The best source of bitterness, though, comes when immigrants refuse to incorporate. Incredibly, lots of on the Left motivate this by trashing our culture and libelling our history - elevating every background except the native one. It spells disaster for our future when immigrants are motivated to remain locked within their own neighborhoods and taught that the British have always been their enemies.

How unsafe this is, we can see by looking throughout the Channel, to France where second and 3rd generation immigrants from North Africa produce a consistent state of discontent. Riots are regular, car-burning is a nationwide sport and extremist political leaders talk of're-migration' - the expulsion of people who 'do not suit'.

This will be Britain's future if the Government does not take control of the scenario right now. Immigration can benefit everybody, however just if it is strictly managed, democratically accepted and culturally integrated.

Allowed to lack control, as the arc of history shows, it damages nations.

Professor Robert Tombs is the author of The English And Their History

FranceIndia