Mother tongues

"Polish now the second most common language in England and Wales" proclaimed the Sun yesterday. When I heard this I was a little perplexed. I mean I live in London, in a neighbourhood with a very diverse ethnic mix, including lots of Poles, but I haven't really noticed huge numbers of people speaking Polish. So I delved into the detail.

According to the latest census data released by the ONS, over 92 per cent of people in England and Wales speak English as their main language (English or Welsh in Wales) and fewer than 0.5 per cent of people (137,511) do not speak English at all. Polish is the main language spoken by 546,000 people. They together with the speakers of the other top five other main languages (Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati) number about 1.5 million people, almost all of whom speak English as well. For the record some 570,000 people in Wales and England speak Welsh (but to be fair to the Sun, it is unlikely to be their main language). 

So now we know. Far from being flooded by immigrants who are diluting British culture and robbing the nation of the English language itself. Even in London, one of the world's great melting pots, 80 per cent of people use English as their main language. That is the same as the national figure for the United States. 

Immigration is not to be feared but embraced. Immigrants enhance British culture, contribute to the economy. Immigrants don't steal jobs, they aren't welfare scroungers. A National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESCR) report last January found that the number of migrant workers coming to the UK over the previous decade had had little or no impact on joblessness, with "no association" between rising immigration and an increase in unemployment benefit claims.

I should declare an interest here. I am an immigrant, actually an asylum seeker, although when my family came we were called political refugees, in our case my parents were fleeing the apartheid regime. We probably wouldn't have qualified under current asylum rules, so it is just as well we arrived when we did. We were allowed to stay, stayed long enough to acquire British citizenship and we are still here. Britain is our home.  

I think we have made pretty good citizens as well. My dad got work straight away and worked hard every day  until he retired on a state pension. My sisters do proper jobs in the public sector adding value to people's lives for small reward. And I pay my taxes (to be clear my whole family pays their taxes but compared to my sisters that is the only contribution I feel can claim). Yes, we have benefited from this country's education and health systems but I believe we have made in our own ways our own contributions to the health and well being of Britain.  

Our story is typical of so many immigrants. We come, we settle, we assimilate, we make our mark. How dull Britain would be without all of the things which immigrants have brought? I could list all the wonderful thing immigrants have contributed to science, technology, the arts and medicine but I will be obvious and list some of the food we would be without: fish and chips, curry, spaghetti, sushi, hamburgers, yams, and sourdough bread which thanks to the Poles is now available in my corner shop every day of the week.