a la carte Europe

Which I suppose is the crux of the whole problem.
The world population is now over 7 billion.
It doesnt seem that there is 1 country in the whole world that is under populated any more.

Now that contraception is so widely available that is a surprise really. To me anyway.

There may be more people but for most people in this country our living conditions are better than they have ever been. Yes there are still problems because we seem to have lost the "we can do it" philosophy that led to the creation of the NHS and helped provide decent housing. We have also been sold the idea that the country somehow can't afford to look after those in need. At the end of WW2 the country was bankrupt but the welfare state was created because we cared. It's the old saying "Where there's a will.....

In the paper today I was reading an interview with a migrant in a camp at Calais. In his home country he had been tortured with electric shocks. He is has made the dangerous crossing of the med and has been trailing through Europe trying to find a home. He is my brother; I cannot ignore him. I feel so powerless when I read these things; and there are so many children involved.

Some of the mess in the middle east has been exacerbated by our interventions. We cannot now shrug our shoulders and say it is nothing to do with us.

Where there is a will indeed trisher - as I said upthread about the Poles when our intervention in Europe led to them being homeless, we welcomed them, because we had the will to make it happen.

I am not glossing over the problems that can be associated with creating a multi-cultural society, but we have no alternative if we wish to behave in a civilized way. We cannot turn the clock back to a time when we did not know what was happening on the other side of the world. We do know and we interfere in cultures about which we know nothing. This is the result.

To be fair, that is exactly what David Cameron is trying to sort out - the number of economic migrants we have to take from these so-called European countries.

I think that's commendable mishapand quite moving in the way your say it.

But there's still a problem in that I also may have a brother, but a different one to yours.

My brother may be a young homeless sixteen year old who is living rough in London, having left home after many years of abuse and neglect. Or a disabled middle aged man who commits suicide when all his benefits are stopped and he finally sees no other way out. Or it may be the thousands of Africans who I know are dying when there is a drought or famine.

I don't want to ignore these people and would like money to be made available to give them somewhere safe to live and to help them out in their desperation.

Others would have different brothers again and some would not think in those terms at all and just want to look after themselves and their families.

Given finite resources, I don't know what the answer is.

I'm afraid - at risk of having The Heavens come down on my head - I'm another who does not want to see another seemingly unending influx of migrants into this country. The border agencies do not seem to have any means of deciding which are economic migrants - and I suspect that most are - and which are genuine asylum seekers so we are supposed to take any and all. They end up in up in ghettos in our large midland and northern cities, creating tensions with those existing immigrant communities who have already created ghettos in our large midland and northern cities. We now have a large Roma community here who have settled in an area where the Pakistani and Bangladeshi Asians had made their own. To say they do not get on would be an understatement of huge proportions. There is also a large Somali community here, which in its turn will attract more Somalis as they come in, stretching educational and health resources in areas where they are already stretched to the limit. We are not overflowing with job opportunities either.

Good info greyduster. Its easy for us to sit back and talk theory. Sounds like you are seeing how this talk turns into practice and its just what we are apprehensive about increasing

It is indeed very hard indeed to welcome those fleeing oppression and creates the sort of problems outlined by greyduster - but can we reasonably ignore what is happening and do nothing?

When the argument of migration is raised there is tendency to list every migrant that ever came to Britain since time immemorial, knowing full well that they didn't come in particularly large numbers and were easily absorbed. Huguenots would be one group that are invariably mentioned but when they arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries Britain's population was tiny, they brought their artisan skills with them and set up workshops in London and undoubtedly were a huge asset to the community. As indeed were many other different peoples that followed.

Greyduster has made a valid point, it would be disingenuous to say that is always the case now. There are communities within our country that choose to live apart and don't like our culture or way of life. Sometimes, as Greyduster has also pointed out some of the older established immigrant communities are also under stress when a different culture is placed in their midst.

What's the difference between that and Brits going abroad and living near other Brits? We do not call it a ghetto, that's all.
Careful of the words you use.

TerriBull the Hugenots are estimated to have made up 1-2% of the population in 17 century. So maybe a small number but very significant. The point is that the same arguments have always been made about immigrants. The Irish for example were supposed to be the cause of cholera, were blamed for keeping wages low and for creating slums. They lived several families to a room, sometimes with a pig. (any of this sound familiar?) Most of us are probably also the descendents of immigrants, not the British natives we imagine we are.

I make no apology for using the word ghetto, a definition of which is a poor area of a city inhabited by people of the same race, religion or social background. Last week, DH had an appointment at one of our larger hospitals and because parking there is a nightmare, we went by bus, which took us through the city's north Eastern suburb. I hadn't been there for many years - the last time being when I drove DH to the same hospital when he fell off a ladder and broke his ribs! I didn't have a lot of time then to take in the scenery. During the twenty minute journey from the city centre, until we reached the proximity of the hospital, I saw two white faces. I also saw a Bangladeshi community centre, a Yemeni Community Centre, a Somali community centre, a Kurdish community centre and several mosques. And then into this mix, in the same area, we put the Roma. Our immigrant population is not one community - they are many different communities and, from what I have been told, they do not mix happily with each other to any great degree, so the chances of us becoming one big happy family smacks of rose tinted glasses. It is set to get worse unless we put the brakes on now.

Everyone has different social circles. I live close to a catholic church and a park with a bowling club- I don't attend either of these but I live alongside people who do. 4 community centres mean active and thriving social networks to me, I wonder why you find them threatening? There have been Irish centres in cities for years do you consider these a sign that the Irish don't mix happily?

trisher - I don't imagine myself as native British through and through, I know I'm not - maternal grandmother Irish, maternal grandfather half Alsace, can't say Alsatian sounds too canine - paternal grandfather Sicilian. I know many of us are a mixture.

Possibly 1 - 2% was a lot in the 17th century, but I think I read somewhere that we only had a population of 13 million or so in the early 19th century so in a time when longevity was rare, I imagine an influx would have been a good thing because we were under populated.

I do not dispute that some Brits abroad live in separate communities, particularly many of the retirees that go to Spain. It does beggar belief why they would prefer to eat gammon and chips and the like instead of wonderful tapas and not try to have a rudimentary knowledge of the language but presumably they wanted to escape our dreary winters. I don't think it's a good thing living apart from the mainstream if you choose to live abroad. Possibly we don't call where they live a ghetto as presumably they are opting to live separately. Ghetto an Italian word, I believe derived from an area in Venice, I can't remember the name of that area but I went there a couple of years ago and it's where the Jewish of that city were forced to live in the middle ages, but that term has pretty much been adopted by everybody these days.

Ghetto - from the veneto dialect, meaning waste. Presumably used perjoratively ?

Where did i say I found it threatening? I don't. I'm just trying to illustrate that where ethnic communities establish themselves, those who follow them into a country and a city, will perforce enlarge that community by dint of wishing to join their own. They don't have to struggle with language and cultural changes. It makes sense, but it is damaging. I think that we have to question how far it is sensible to allow the demographic of any city to change by allowing unrestricted migration. Last year, our council closed several libraries due to lack of funding, yet the cost of interpreting services rose to £220,000. They have 44 languages to cater for!

I think it possible to retain cultural ties such as the Irish centres you mention Trisha, having gone to Catholic schools awash with friends with Irish parents we all mixed there weren't any barriers. We also had children of Italian immigrants that took longer to assimilate as their parents tended to hang on a bit to the "old country" through traditions such as going into mourning with black clothes for a long time plus the older members of the family didn't always have a working knowledge of English, however the 2nd generation tended to be fully assimilated because that's what they wanted and they regarded themselves first and foremost as English. Possibly the severing of ties then was absolute as there wasn't an internet which can keep communities far more in touch with where they came from.

Couldn't help googling "ghetto" and this question came up-"I was wondering, do people in England consider citizens of Newcastle to be 'ghetto'? (Like how people from the US consider Harlem and Compton 'ghetto')"
What???
I can't continue with this thread too busy laughing!!!!

Word Origin
C17: from Italian, perhaps shortened from borghetto, diminutive of borgo settlement outside a walled city; or from the Venetian ghetto the medieval iron-founding district, largely inhabited by Jews

There may be some disagreement over the derivation of the term, as shown by the second suggestion is that it comes from the Italian getto meaning "foundry" and was where the foundry workers used to live. Yes it is Venetian, but in the days of the "Merchant of Venice" the Jews lived in the ghetto in the same way that all other foreign nationals lived in their own quarter, it being illegal for non-Venetians to own property within the city boundaries. Given that the Jews were also the moneylenders at that time and kept their stock of money at home, the ghetto also afforded them security from potential robbery at night as its gates were guarded, not to keep them in but to keep miscreants out.
Just saying.

The idea of the ghetto is that Jews were segregated and forced to live in certain areas, not that they chose to live there.

Sorry DJ, not quite right. As I said, originally all other nationalities lived in their own designated quarter -there was one for Germans for instance, for the reason I gave. In more recent times, such as under Hitler once he invaded Poland or Czechoslovakia, th Jews were required to live in designated areas in Warsaw and Prague, but within those (for a time at any rate) they had a degree of self rule and autonomy. In the early days it was presented as a "safe" area for them. With hindsight of course we know how things turned out.
But the bottom line is that the pejorative sense of the word "ghetto" was not part of the original "ghetto".

An interesting article in the Times(I won't give the link as you can look it up if you want to) about the amount of tax paid in relation to the amount of benefits received.

But the meaning of words often changes with the passing of time-"awful" being a classic example and from what I can gather the word now sometimes is used to describe something which is rather what we might once have termed as "with it" as in "that music is so ghetto".
Which meaning you go with probably reveals your age!