Immigration is a subject that has been bubbling away in the background for several decades, and of course I’ve written about it before on this platform.

But it will have escaped few people’s notice that in recent months it has shot higher up the agenda than ever before. Meanwhile, it is still the explicit policy of both Labour and Plaid Cymru to increase immigration into Wales, through the so-called ‘Nation of Sanctuary’ scheme.

As Gwlad, we’ve tried to talk as little as possible about this topic in the past, since we’re much more interested the Welsh economy. Yet now it has become such a high-profile issue that it demands attention.

First, though, it is necessary to reiterate that Wales is a different country from England. While mass immigration to the UK presents significant challenges for Wales, they are different from the challenges England faces.

Wales is not England

This is important because, inevitably, most people’s exposure to these issues comes from the English media. Presented with England’s problems, it’s no wonder that so many Welsh voters are attracted to ReformUK and their proposed English solutions.  It’s entirely possible to believe that ReformUK’s policies are appropriate for England, but they would be of no benefit to Wales.

Unlike England, Wales has a major problem with emigration. While accurate figures are hard to come by, it’s estimated that as many of 40% of young people from rural areas of Wales, particularly Welsh-speaking areas, leave in search of opportunities elsewhere. This also applies to the most able young people from urban and rural areas alike: Wales lacks an ‘elite’ university, with Cardiff being the only member of the Russell Group. Ambitious students from Wales will often aim to study in prestigious universities in England and, if successful, are unlikely to return to Wales for employment. The lack of a private-sector middle class, offering good employment opportunities for graduates and skilled craftsmen, makes matters worse still. Collectively, this combination of an emptying-out of rural areas and a ‘brain drain’ causes countless problems for the economy and for wider society alike, some of which I’ll return to later in this piece. Solutions to it need to be comprehensive and multifaceted – beyond the immediate scope of this article – and yet it is often ignored completely in more general discussions of migration.

Secondly, immigration into Wales from places outside the UK, whether legal or illegal, is far less than immigration into England. In Slough, for example (a place to which many people from Wales moved during the Depression of the 1920s and 30s), in 2022 only 36% of the population identified as “white[1]”. In Leicester the figure was 40.9%, in Luton 45.2%, and in Birmingham 48.6%. In London, the population of the city as a whole is 53.8% white but only 36.8% “white British”; there were non-white majorities in ten of London’s thirty-two boroughs, while white residents in Newham, Brent and Redbridge were outnumbered two-to-one.

In Wales, by contrast, the highest concentration of non-white residents as of 2023 was, as expected, to be found in Cardiff; but the city was still 85.6% white. Newport was similar, at 85.9%, but in Swansea the proportion was  93.1%. The percentage of white residents in Rhondda Cynon Taff was 94.5%; in Wrexham, 95.4%; it was 97.4% in Caerphilly, 98.3% in Torfaen, and over 99% in Merthyr, Blaenau Gwent, and Bridgend. Overall, Wales is by far the ‘whitest’ area in the whole UK.

Indeed, the contrast between the Valleys and comparable post-industrial areas in the North of England is especially stark, with Blackburn for example being only 60.4% white.

That ought to be enough facts-and-figures by now to make the point that, while immigration has had a transformative effect on large areas of England – whether you think that transformation is a good or a bad thing – the same simply isn’t true of Wales.

But that doesn’t mean that Wales is unaffected by what happens in England; it’s still our neighbour. We’ll now take a closer look at the nature of this mass immigration into England.

Immigration into England

Whenever immigration into England is discussed, most people immediately think of small boats arriving on the South Coast.

This does of course happen, and the numbers of people arriving this way are substantial, but they are (if you’ll pardon the pun) a drop in the ocean compared to the volume of perfectly legal immigrants arriving by conventional means, whether by sea or air.

According to the most recent figures I’ve been able to get hold of, the number of people who arrive in England on ‘small boats’ every year is roughly 40,000, while the number who arrive legally is slightly under 1.2 million, of whom 90% (just over a million) are from outside the EU. Or put another way, the immigrants that people spend most of the time talking about are barely 4% of total immigration into the UK.

There is some reason for that. Legal immigrants (the largest contingent of whom are from India, followed by Nigerians, then Pakistanis) tend to be ‘expected’, whether by companies they’ll be working for, higher-education institutions where they’ll be studying, or family members. Accommodation will have been arranged for them, and some means of financial support will be in place. More often than not they locate in large towns and cities, where employment and education is more likely to be available, and families and communities already exist for them to join.

Illegals, on the other hand, arrive with no accommodation and no income, and unless they are to be left destitute on the beach or immediately sent back to France, it usually falls to the government to provide both. This has an obvious and immediate impact on the public finances, and upon the places where accommodation is found for them (which in fact include many places in Wales – a subject we’ll return to later).

Hence it is immediately obvious that illegal immigration carries a direct economic cost. The economic consequences of legal immigration are more subtle. Many high-skilled migrants make a positive contribution to the economy as a whole, until of course they reach retirement age. Yet many, including family members who are allowed to enter alongside those who have jobs waiting for them, start drawing benefits as soon as they arrive. A significant proportion (especially in the Muslim community) never enter employment. Overall, most estimates seem to conclude that the total net economic impact of immigration into the UK as a whole is +/-1% of GDP, hence ‘within the noise’ to all intents and purposes, but marginally more likely to be negative than positive.

So take a view: has a 1% increase improvement in GDP been worth having, at the expense of the societal transformation of large parts of England?

“White Flight”

A consequence of all this which is not often discussed is so-called “white flight”. Many people brought up in parts of England where, due to immigration, they no longer feel at home, go looking for other places to live where they are unlikely to encounter so many immigrants. Since – as noted above – Wales is the ‘whitest’ part of the UK, many such people see Wales as an attractive place to move to.

So the fact Wales has far fewer black or Asian immigrants than England doesn’t mean we are experiencing less immigration – rather, we are experiencing a different type of immigration, immigration of white people from England rather than non-white people from outside the UK. The effect on the communities at the receiving end, especially when they are in rural and/or Welsh-speaking areas, can be just as far-reaching.

There’s a certain historical irony to this. In post-Roman times, as the numbers of Saxons in what is now England steadily increased (initially invited by the native British, but afterwards inviting themselves), disenfranchised Britons from the affected areas moved across to Wales where pre-Saxon language and religion were preserved. Some people (such as Ben Llywelyn, in this fascinating YouTube video)  see this playing out again, with ‘refugees’ from England seeking a bolthole in Wales.

Even if this is an exaggeration, there is no doubt that the rate of English immigration into Wales is increasing, and that this is presents Wales with both a cultural and an economic challenge – maintaining its distinctive culture (both in its Welsh-speaking and English-speaking forms) and preventing Welsh families – on average much poorer than those coming in from England – from being priced out of their homes.

Immigration into Wales

So taking these things together, we can identify three different types of immigration into Wales, each with different characteristics and different cost/benefit effects.

Legal immigration from outside the UK

This is comparable to the largest source of immigration into England, though on a vastly smaller scale. Except perhaps for areas of Cardiff, Newport and Swansea which have had ‘minority’ communities for a long time, it is not especially visible in the country as a whole.

Even so, the argument that it is actually necessary is, for the time being, true: Wales doesn’t generate anywhere near the number of doctors, dentists, pharmacists – and even non-medical professionals – that it needs.

As mentioned earlier in this article, Welsh students who could fill these vacancies often leave, before or even after being trained, to seek better opportunities outside Wales. The resulting vacuum must be filled from somewhere, and bringing in ready-trained people from outside the UK is the most viable solution. This will continue to be the case until the wider issues of Wales’s poor economic performance can be addressed, something which hasn’t happened under any of the Labour-led devolved governments we’ve had since Devolution started, and for which ReformUK have no proposals.

Illegal immigration from outside the UK

A mentioned earlier, this is much more visible than legal immigration, because when illegals arrive to be housed then it usually means the commandeering of local premises – the best-known example being the Stradey Park Hotel in Llanelli.

The Stradey Park Hotel débâcle was the work of Clearsprings Group, the Essex-based company owned by billionaire Graham King, which holds the contract to house illegal migrants on behalf of the UK home office. It owns numerous individual properties across Wales and has also procured accommodation at Lynx House in Cardiff, and the old Penally army training camp in Pembrokeshire. A similar fate nearly befell the Northop Hall Hotel in Flintshire, though apparently through the agency of another company.

Nevertheless this is one heading where the answer is clear-cut: this problem is nothing to with Wales. No illegal immigrants or asylum-seekers arrive here directly; no small boats wash up on Porthcawl beach. All illegal immigrants who arrive in Wales do so because they’re foisted onto us by Westminster. Many of them don’t even want to be here, and beg to be returned to England. The whole system benefits no-one at all except the landlords who provide the accommodation for them, the civil servants who administer the system, and those in the black economy who need cheap, illegal labour.

In our view Wales should simply, to the greatest possible extent under the law, refuse to accept or house such people. Councils should refuse to provide accommodation, and legally stop those who do.

Immigration from within the UK, mainly England

Under the Welsh Government’s current powers, there is nothing it can do directly to control immigration from England. But this isn’t true of other parts of the British Isles that are still under the jurisdiction of the British Crown.

The Channel Islands follow a model which we think would work very well in Wales, whereby housing in certain areas is reserved for citizens or specifically approved individuals (usually High Net Worth Individuals who are committed to paying over a certain level of tax) – thus balancing the competing needs of enabling existing residents to find homes easily whilst embracing incomers who will make a positive economic impact.

It has long been Gwlad policy to introduce such a system in Wales, but while it doesn’t require complete independence it does require more powers than Wales currently has.

The only controls Wales has at present are indirect ones:

• Most importantly of all, arrest Wales’s chronic economic decline by reversing current Welsh Government policies. This will both slow down the rate at which young people leave Wales, creating a vacuum that will inevitably be filled, and reduce the house price differentials between Wales and England, that makes Wales a cheap destination to move to for many English people.
• Phase out English-medium education in the areas where this is most practical (especially in areas with high proportions of Welsh-speakers and therefore of Welsh-medium teachers), so that at least the children of such immigrants will be able to assimilate over time.

So to conclude… Wales really is a different country from England. England’s problems are not the same as Wales’s; England’s solutions, and England’s parties, don’t address Wales’s needs.

Wales needs a party that is authentically Welsh, will speak out to protect Wales’s interests, and will prioritise the interests of Welsh people above all other considerations.

We simply don’t see any other party doing that – which is why Gwlad came into being. If you care about Wales’s integrity, about Wales’s economy, and most of all about Wales’s future as a distinctive nation, then we’re the only game in town. Join us today.

Appendix I – Why does all this matter?

To state the obvious: most people, most of the time, would like to live surrounded by things and by people that are familiar to them. This is why countries fight wars; because their people would rather not, all things being equal, find their countries changed beyond recognition by having unfamiliar neighbours, rulers and customs imposed on them without their consent. No-one has put this better than G.K. Chesterton in his book “The Everlasting Man” published exactly 100 years ago:

“A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss.”

We in Gwlad are unashamedly nationalist, not because we believe that Wales is better than anywhere else and that Welsh people are superior to their neighbours, but because it’s our home. We rather like it, and we want it to retain its distinctiveness while making it better still – in particular by escaping the poverty that 100 years of Labour party dominance has led to.

Such a position doesn’t keep the door closed to everyone who might want to move here; but it isn’t consistent with wide-open borders and a worldview that Wales is just a patch of land to which anyone is entitled to stake their claim.

Appendix II – Why Enoch Powell gets the blame, and deportation of illegals is so difficult

In many people’s minds, the most polarizing person, and the most polarizing moment, in any discussion of immigration is Enoch Powell, and the so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech he gave on April 20^th 1968. But hardly anyone has ever actually read it. The full text may be found here.

The first observation to be made is that the term “rivers of blood” isn’t there. Powell was however a classical scholar, and towards the end of the speech he quotes a phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid in which the poet fears for the future of Rome and says “I see wars, dreadful wars, and the river Tiber foaming with much blood”.

Much of the speech sounds extremely mild by contemporary standards, mentioning numbers of immigrants that seem insignificant today. The venom directed towards it appears to derive from three ideas deemed unthinkable today:

1. He expresses the concerns of people living in areas where immigrant communities were forming, and defends their right to prefer living among people of their own nationality within their own country.
2. He raises the question of “re-emigration”, namely providing financial inducements for immigrants to return to their countries of origin. Nowhere does he use the term ‘deportation’ or suggest that this should be compulsory.
3. He insists that all UK citizens should be equal before the law  and was concerned that certain immigrant populations were calling for exemption from laws that ‘native’ citizens were expected to obey.

Even so, the vilification given to it at the time was largely, as far as I can understand, not so much due to what it contained as due to the fear that talking about these things at all could lead to social unrest.

In any case, Powell was demonized, and then sidelined, and since then it’s been political suicide for anyone else to raise these questions.

Two other events in the meantime seem to have made the subject even more ‘out-of-bounds’. The first was the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, which led to the Metropolitan Police being described as “institutionally racist” for their slipshod approach to the investigation and initial failure to achieve a conviction.

The second was the ‘Windrush scandal’ of 2018, when the UK Home Office attempted to deport numerous people whom they believed to be illegal immigrants but were in fact here perfectly legally.

The aftermath of these cases has been an extreme sensitivity towards crime involving non-white people, and a reluctance to deport illegal immigrants unless a very high legal bar can be overcome, making the process very expensive and often impractical.

Appendix III – Blood and Soil nationalism among nice liberal Welsh people

Moderate nationalists like to say, and I’ve written many times myself, that immigrants are welcome into Wales on the condition that they fully assimilate – learn the language, adopt the culture, and become culturally indistinguishable from the ‘native’ population. Simon Brooks has written eloquently of how this was quietly going for generations, without anyone really noticing. Only with the upheavals of the late 19^th Century, when the language was found to be in serious jeopardy for the first time, did other ways need to be found to define who was Welsh and who wasn’t. 

To call someone a ‘blood and soil’ nationalist is usually seen as an insult – roughly akin to ‘knuckle-dragging morlock’ in some circles – and all of the above is true, but only up to a point. Ultimately, a nation needs to be able to point to some common bond between the land and the people who live in it; going back, ideally, for many generations. You only have to look at the songs, especially in Welsh, belted out by Welsh people who consider themselves impeccably liberal and ‘anti-racist’, to see how self-evident this is.

Here’s how our ‘official’ National Anthem starts:

“Mae’r hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi”
“The old land of my fathers is dear to me”

…but could that still be sung when a large proportion of people in the country had fathers, or at least recent forefathers, from other lands far away?

Here’s the ‘unofficial’ anthem:

“Aeth Magnus Maximus o Gymru yn y flwyddyn 383, a’n gadael yn genedl gyfan, a heddiw wele ni – ry’n ni Yma o Hyd!”
“Magnus Maximus left Wales in the year 383, leaving us as a complete nation, and look at us today – we’re still here!”

How can a people be ‘still here’ if most of their ancestors were never here in the first place?

Here are the lyrics of the song “Eryr Pengwern” by Cwmni Theatr Maldwyn, sung frequently on S4C and at school concerts:

“Fe roddwyd gwlad, fe roddwyd caer a thir i’m gofal, fe roddwyd gwlad…”
“Fe roddwyd tras, fe roddwyd hil i mi anwylo, fe roddwyd tras;
 Fe roddwyd gwaed, y gwaed fydd eto ar fy nwylo, fe roddwyd gwaed.”
“A country was given, a stronghold and land was given into my care, a country was given…”
“A kindred was given, a race for me to cherish, a kindred was given,
 Blood was given, the blood that will again be on my hands, blood was given.”

Again, it’s hard to reconcile that with the idea of a nation held together by nothing except shared values, without ties to the land, of family and, yes, blood.

So ultimately, for a nation to be both coherent and distinctive, it’s indispensable for a high proportion of its people to have some level of common ancestry as well as common culture and habits.

It’s true that successful nations can be, and have been, melded together without these characteristics – obvious examples being the USA and Canada – but the current situation between those two countries shows the fundamental instability of such an arrangement. What makes them distinct from one another? For Canada, it’s doubtful whether “not being the USA” is, on its own, enough. Likewise, Wales needs to be more than simply “not England”.

In other words, we can and should welcome people in, but there still has to be a ‘we’ that they can be welcomed into.

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[1] Of course I know that lots of white people come from outside the UK and that many non-white people are born in the UK; I also know that many non-white people are so thoroughly integrated into ‘British’ culture that the colour of their skin is completely irrelevant.  My point in using these figures is simply to illustrate the differences between the situation in England and that in Wales.