Writing in today's Daily Telegraph, former Thatcher Cabinet Official Norman Tebbit declares that Britain needs a moratorium on legal immigration. Tebbit explains,

The projections from that inflow confirm that our population will rise by 10 million within 25 years, nearly 70 per cent by new immigration unless something is done. That is the population of another London, or seven Birminghams. At present the population of the UK is set to rise to 70 million.

This would be bad enough if we could be confident that the newcomers and those born of earlier immigrants were all determined to integrate into our society. At present, despite the integration and assimilation of very many immigrants and their descendents, there is no evidence that the pace of integration is fast enough to avoid a state of voluntary apartheid. We are, as Trevor Phillips has said, "sleepwalking into segregation" and the consequences of that can be seen in other parts of the world. 

Lord Tebbit seems to understand the urgency in halting immigration into his native homeland. America’s political elite remains clueless in grasping the magnitude of the problem of allowing current U.S. legal immigration levels to continue apace. Tebbit however argues,

It seems to me that we must assert that we need to aim for a zero net immigration policy. We cannot achieve that while our frontiers are open to EU citizens, and although that is not too threatening at present, some of the prospective new member states would act like wide open doors to Third World migration. We need a decent policy of giving sanctuary to true refugees (not, I might say, to anyone claiming to be a homosexual and coming from a country which discriminates against homosexuals), but we must close the door to others and start serious work on deporting those here illegally, as well as reinstating proper border controls. It would also require changing our law to prevent judges and others simply claiming that foreign law overrides the laws of this country.

When will we ever learn this lesson on this side of the Atlantic?