If there’s one topic that can cause heated discussion, it’s immigration.  For too long it’s been a taboo subject and public criticism of unfettered discrimination has been left to the far left BNP, assorted nutjob organisations on the fringes of mainstream politics and a relative few individuals prepared to put their heads above the parapet.

But there has been a change lately and immigration is no longer the taboo subject it was.  It seems that the more full the country gets, the less jobs and houses there are to go round the people that already live here, the more people talk about the proverbial elephant in the room.

The facts are quite simple.  At this point in time, according to the Office of National Statistics, there are 2.45m people living in the UK that don’t have a job whilst there are only 480k job vacancies.  That’s 5 people currently living here, relying on unemployment benefits, for every job vacancy.  In 2004 there were half a million homeless people in England alone and the figures are rising year on year.  According to Property World, we need to build a quarter of a million new houses every year just to keep up with population growth and currently about 100,000 per year are being built.

So there aren’t enough jobs for the people already living here, nor are there enough houses.  But the British government still allowed a quarter of a million immigrants to move here in 2008.  Where will they live?  Where will they work?  Or, as they have to have somewhere to live and work before they can move here (EU citizens excepted, of course), where are the homeless people already living here going to live and where are the unemployed people already living here going to work?

We cannot sustain economic immigration and it will be a number of years until we are able to do so.  Unemployment and homelessness needs to be down to the 10’s of thousands before we can sustain economic immigration.  It’s not about race or religion or skin colour or any other minority qualification, it’s about maths and logic.  The country is full.  The country is broke.  We can’t afford to pay people not to work because the jobs they could have been doing have gone to people moving here from another country.

The LibLabCon are talking about a fairer society in their general election campaigns but there is nothing fair in increasing the already unsustainable competition for the woefully inadequate supply of jobs and houses.  It’s unfair on everybody who lives here, whether they can trace their ancestry back to the Anglo-Saxon settlers or whether they’re first generation immigrants who’ve been here barely 12 months.  The unemployment and homelessness crisis that’s exacerbated by immigration affects us all.

The BNP and their racist clones aren’t the solution to this problem.  Closing our borders to all immigration and “sending the darkies home” isn’t the answer.  The only party with a sensible and fair policy on immigration is UKIP – ban all economic immigration for 5 years and then introduce a points-based system for all immigrants, including those from the European Empire.  That gives us 5 years to get people already living here into jobs and houses and then allow only the people we need to come and live and work here.