ON that subject dunnitall:
"In a lot of cases retrocop, it's those who don't have to share or live too near to the immigrant communities that welcome them with open arms IMO."
As you might have gathered, am as close to welcoming with open arms as is reasonable -- in the sense of not wanting to see an arbitrary cap. On the other hand, this idea that I am somehow not in touch with immigration at ll is rather a long way from the truth. In my office alone, there are two English people, a Swede, a Belgian, a Mexican and an Iranian. A little around the corner there's someone from the Greek half of Cyprus, and then a German, a Russian, an Indian, a Swiss and two Italians. A couple more Italians recently passed their vivas or are on sabbatical. There are at any rate a fair few people not from round these parts, and even its being a Scottish University presumably makes me a sort of immigrant myself!
I'm sure this is the positive side of immigration and that elsewhere there are negatives. The problem is that immigration control needs to be targeted in ways that an arbitrary cap doesn't achieve. There have been stories about promising students being put off from coming to this country by the new, tighter controls that are slowly being introduced and that's precisely the sort of thing we should avoid happening.
Any form of immigration control that hits the positive sides of immigration and (perhaps as you might expect, because people who aren't planning on being "good" immigrants are the sort of people who probably would make an effort to avoid such controls anyway) have little to no consequences of the negative sides is less than beneficial. I don't claim to have the answer. But it does seem odd to claim that I have no experience at all. I've never bothered to do a precise survey, but in my corridor I'd say that the immigrant population as at least equal to the natives, if not more. And the idea that this is somehow a threat, or anything that matters, is bizarre.