Sadiq Khan is the Muslim mayor of London, who believes that his city, and the country of Great Britain, needs more migrants, because they are doing such wonderful things for the economy, filling jobs the native-born won’t take.
In an excess of enthusiasm, he tweeted that London was “built by migrants,” a claim that was at once shot down by those who responded to his bizarre claim with a brief history of the city he now governs.
Thomas Brooke, Remix News, June 27, 2023:
London mayor Sadiq Khan suffered the ignominy of having his bold claim that London was “built by migrants” revised by a Twitter Community Note.
In a tweet posted on June 21 to commemorate “Refugee Week,” the Labour politician suggested the U.K. capital was constructed by migrants and refugees, and called on Londoners to stand against the “hostile, draconian and immoral immigration policies” adopted by other European nations.
Sadiq Khan’s claim that London was “built by migrants” is bizarre and without foundation, unless he means to refer to the Germanic tribes – Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes – who arrived in England two thousand years ago, and whose major legacy was linguistic: the Anglo-Saxon that developed into English. These tribes did not “build London.”
Unlike the U.S., Great Britain is not a country of immigrants, and there was little immigration until the mid-20th century, when migrants started to arrive from the Caribbean in the 1950s, and then, in the 1960s, the migration of Pakistanis began. The Pakistani presence has been an unalloyed catastrophe.
Many of them arrived – and continue to do so — as economic migrants, eager to take advantage of the full panoply benefits offered by the British welfare state, including free or subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, unemployment benefits (even without having held jobs in the U.K.), family allowances, and more.