What can you say about the large influx of foreign people coming over into this country (the UK overall)? Do you feel rather xenophobic about it, or do you think it's a good thing?
I don't really have much direct experience of the current wave of immigration to the UK; it's not really noticable in Glasgow. Up here, the non-native ethnic groups tend to be 2nd or 3rd generation Indians and Pakistanis, some Chinese and miscellaneous Arabs. They all seem to have settled in very well; the first generation opening small shops and restraunts and whatever else they could make a living at, and then sending their kids on to higher education and careers.
Thus, foreigners aren't inherently bad, however the current wave of immigration is rather different to those past waves that integrated so well. Instead of economic migrants that are coming over to work, even being encouraged to do so due to post-war labour shortages, the current wave is composed more of assylum seekers from some of the most ass-backwards, war-torn, traumatised regions on the planet, with no jobs to take when they get here and just the monotony of benefits and crime-ridden housing estates awaiting them. With a strong cultural identity, a distrust of authorities (who could stop their benefits or deport them) and no legitimate livelihoods available to them, the stage is all set for the formation of gangs, ghettos and rampant crime.
My ex has a more direct experience of it than I do. She lives in Sodertalje, Sweden, and it's become the crime capital of the country, with 40% of the population being immigrants from Turkey, Syria, Russia and probably just about every other shithole you could think of. The police no longer control the town; they arrested a couple of Syrians about 5 years ago, and the result was that a hundred or so other Syrians rioted and shot at the police station until they let them go. There's also a complete lack of respect for the existing laws and customs of Sweden, as evidenced by a native Swedish girl who was attacked for not wearing a Hajib in a muslim area of the town.
Anyway, the grand ideal of the melting pot seems a huge flop, and the salad bowl is a more apt analogy, though a salad bowl in which the tomato shoots the lettuce for not worshiping the right god, and the cucumber routinely stabs other cucumbers from cavorting with the cress, then gets upset when the olives come to arrest them. It can work out when the conditions are right for it, but throw a bunch of radically different groups together, who've come from regions where the same groups were killing each other, and you just end up with a new, miniture version of that warzone.
