Comments on: People are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles

By: Sam J.

Sam J. — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 17:33:34 +0000

I know how to solve this problem. Make all the immigrants that come serve the same purpose as most immigrants that came to the US, or Australia, let them be slaves (they called them servants but most of them died so I call that fiction) like most of us in the US came here.

By: Abelard Lindsey

Abelard Lindsey — Sat, 22 Apr 2017 14:56:29 +0000

Powell made his speech in 1968 with the “year 2000″ being little over 30 years off. Today as I type this, 2050 is about the same time away as 2000 was in 1968.

So we have to ask ourselves what the demographics of, say, France, UK, or Germany will be like in 2050? Or that of the USA? My understanding is that serious demographic replacement is ongoing in certain areas of Europe (e.g. the majority of London proper’s population is no longer English). I was in a small town in Sweden for 2 weeks in ’15 and saw significant Muslim immigrants even in that small town. I can’t imagine what Stockholm would be like (although Goteborg was not too bad).

By: Graham

Graham — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 19:40:26 +0000

I find it noteworthy that even Powell made that comment about the importance of keeping families unified. What a wet.

Britain’s settler dominions never made “family reunification” a priority in selecting immigrants.

[They didn't even exclusively prioritize Britons- Canada famously even within the empire maintained immigration controls against it, including against the UK. As a self-governing dominion it was just exercising the normal controls also held by any colonial governor, oddly. It did take and want a lot of Britons, just selectively. It also sought out other Europeans.]

Within those categories, it was labour value only and subject to health and morals examination typical of the time. Don’t know about early on for Canada, if the wife and kids didn’t come with you. By the mid-20th century, you could bring over wife and minor kids. Not grown kids, and no siblings, cousins, parents, etc. Nor did any of these people expect such a thing. My maternal grandparents probably would have thought it insane to expect to follow their daughter out when she married a Canadian.

Nowadays of course ‘family reunification’ is practically untouchable. As though extended families never broke up before in the process of settling the world.

By: Slovenian Guest

Slovenian Guest — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 19:13:56 +0000

It’s like with mass surveillance, it was all don’t be paranoid, nothing to see here, which simply turned into yeah so what, got a problem? Back in 1968 it was still a choice between rivers or oceans of blood, that’s now settled.

By: Viewer

Viewer — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 17:32:13 +0000

Hmmm. Yes, the timing may be a little off but the ethnic increases are happening. Go to any industrial (or post-industrial) town in the midlands — Powell’s constituency area — or the north of England (and you can add south Wales, too) and you will see schools where there are very few non-ethnic children. This pretty much means that in ten or a dozen years’ time those kiddies will be young adults and young adults tend to enjoy, er, practicing making children. Given that practice makes perfect (plus the whole business of arranged marriages) the numbers will increase dramatically.

Also when Powell gave this speech the year 2000 was seen as being on a distant horizon (in much the same way in the ‘fifties the prediction was we would all have out own personal helicopters in 50 years) so it was a dividing line. Once you get there however, you realise it wasn’t so distant after all. Powell was more right than wrong, as we will see.

By: Lu An Li

Lu An Li — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 16:25:35 +0000

“He estimated that by the year 2000 up to seven million people — or one in ten of the population — would be of immigrant descent.”

“How did that prediction pan out?”

“The Census in 2001 showed 4.6 million people living in the UK were from an ethnic minority, or 7.9% of the population.”

NOT that far off. His estimate probably based on the situation as presented itself at the time.