What utter rubbish! There has to be a limit on immigration for social and environmental reasons. England is horribly overcrowded and congested. Our sense of community, common heritage and social cohesion has gone out of the window. Yes, some immigration is both necessary and desirable, but the free for all of the past 10 years has to come to a halt right now!

Richard, Kidderminster, England

to quote the great Milton Friedman : "It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state,"

T Bishop, Denbighshire,

The problem is not immigration in itself but, rather, the rate of immigration and population growth. We simply do not have capacity for the current growth rate.
Our prisons are full. Our roads and trains are reaching capacity. Schools are struggling with the influx. There is already a shortage of housing. Water supplies are not meeting demand. Only yesterday, The Times even reported a shortage of judges, a particular problem being the sharp increase in the number of immigration cases in the last four years. The list goes on.
Population growth is running ahead of actual increase in infrastructure. Businessmen would say we are "sweating the assets". As well as the rate of infrastructure provision, the enormous costs and environmental impacts must be considered in any assessment of benefit to the existing population.

Neill Foster, Aylesbury, UK

I humbly suggest that EU must include Canada, Australia, New Zealand and all former USSR countries that are closer to enlarged EU border. So, that the 'IMMIGRATION' shamble in the UK is 100% fully done.

Because of the 'Unstable' UK immigration policies, by 2020, the UK work force will be fully filled in by the EU immigrants, who are un-skilled, semi skilled, not English speaking, having no professional qualification and not planning to work for long time in a particular industry. As the Asian economies are growing 4 times faster than EU, the professionally qualified, educated, experienced, skilled, English speaking Non-EU immigrants won't be coming to UK as in the past. By 2030, the UK's work force will be less hard working, uncompetitive and have loads of un-skilled. They will be in for a 'fight of their life' against a hard working, very competitive, educated and skilled Non-EU work force in Asia and Africa.

Uma Shankar, UK,

There was a saying in the factory when the lunatics took over the asylum in the 1960s. In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king.

I have noticed in the past 50 years an enormous discrepancy between the news coverage of papers which is usually excellent.[ Reading the Sunday Times was part of my educationand,and I find the Times gives excellent coverage, ]but the comment bears no relation to the news.
I once wrote to the local paper instead of sending journalists to university they would do better to sit them down to read the news in their back copies.
Going to those universities certainly has strange effects.

ged, manchester,

Immigration is not totally bad; but it is also not completely beneficial. There are more than just economic factors to consider.

The problem in the past 10 years has been the numbers entering Britain overall and particularly those who are are uneducated.

The number of low-skill jobs in this country has decreased but there are enough to employ lower skilled native Britons - many of whom might take them if they paid a more realistic wage and if the welfare system didn't encourage them to remain idle. The influx of immigrants who are prepared to do unskilled, low-status jobs has driven down wages to the point where it is not attractive for many native people to work.

Then there are the problems of assimilation. We already have
large numbers here from cultures which do not want to participate in mainstream British life and continue with illegal cultural practices such as forced marriage. Social cohesion is being damaged by continued immigration from these countries.

Donna Walker, Effingham, Surrey

Leaving aside the obviously beneficial effects on employers and the immigrants themselves, UK society in general also gains from substantial immigration. Who else is going to build the many houses that we need, new hospitals, roads, railways and airports, and who will invigorate our rather moribund manufacturing and agricultural enterprises? Not the indigenous population, they have already lost the impetus to do these things. A large number of skilled people with (at least in the short term) reasonable economic demands will soon sort out the problems caused by labour shortages and get some momentum behind the UK economy. It's true that some will suffer; the builders on high wages, and those in catering and care homes. They will need sympathetic support and retraining for other work. It's also true that the island will get much more crowded. Better that than a downward economic spiral caused by skill shortages and an aging population.

colin, Shrewsbury UK,