How many is too many? How much is too much?

Those questions continue to haunt our Prime Minister as Britain’s rates of immigration continue to spiral, recently hitting an all-time high.

Toward the end of May, one national newspaper reported that in the near future “the population of the UK is on course to overtake that of France for the first time in recorded history."

Annual net migration to the United Kingdom now exceeds 600,000, with a total of 1.2 million long-term immigrants being offset by only 550,00 leaving the country.

The majority of those migrants – more than 900,000 – came from countries outside the European Union. EU migration comprised less than ten percent of the total.

This is a remarkably different situation from that experienced before Brexit.

In his campaign to push Britain out of Europe, Boris Johnson had pledged to rescind the rights of EU citizens to live and work in Britain, and, in that at least, he was true to his word, fulfilling a promise popular with the more xenophobic extremes of Brexit enthusiasts.

At the same time, however, he made it easier for non-EU nationals to move to Britain. Changes he introduced to study visa regulations have, for example, resulted in a doubling of the number of family members accompanying overseas students during their periods of study in the UK.

While this pleased universities reliant on international incomes, it infuriated those who believe that these advantages to higher education institutions are far outweighed by the increased burdens imposed by this influx of dependants on local schools and hospitals.

Last month, the British government announced that it would restrict the rights of overseas students’ family members to reside in the UK. This would reduce the sixty-one thousand Nigerian dependants, the thirty-nine thousand Indians, and the thirty-six thousand others who entered the country under student family visas last year. But it certainly won’t be enough in itself to bring net migration figures down to the “tens of thousands” promised by David Cameron when he entered Downing Street in 2010, at the start of this long, tired Tory administration.

The vultures of the Rabid Right have already started to circle the depleted carcass of Tory immigration policy. Last week, one backbencher even argued that the government should halve the number of visas available for care workers, at a time when the social care industry and healthcare services are experiencing an extraordinary crisis.

There are a number of ironies at play here. The first is that a government that pledged to reduce immigration has in fact overseen its rise to record levels. Six hundred thousand is a long way from the pledge of fewer than 100K.

The second is that any people who voted for Brexit for xenophobic reasons have seen European workers replaced by migrants of what they might view as more ‘exotic’ ethnic origins.

That probably doesn’t please the racists very much. Indeed, riots have erupted in protest at increases in the numbers of asylum-seekers, even though such refugees account for a very small proportion of overall immigration figures.

The third irony is that migration is generally good for the economy and that those on the right of the Conservative Party who most oppose it are those whose ill-judged actions wrecked the economy in the first place.

The problem, of course, is that we can’t have everything. We need to learn to accept balance and compromise. We need to be grown-up about this.

For, as one former Home Secretary told the BBC last month, the government promised to “get the numbers down, but the country needs immigrants."

This tension was articulated last Tuesday by a headline on the front page of the Daily Express: “Tories split over new tough rules for migrants." The paper reported that the Treasury is resisting pressure from the Home Office to introduce further restrictions on migrant workers.

It seems clear that we can’t have low immigration and at the same time sustain the kind of economic growth and national wealth to which we’ve been accustomed and upon which we’ve come to depend.

It's the same with our approaches to the cost-of-living crisis, global warming, and the national housing shortage.

A common response to rampant rates of inflation has been to demand higher wages or to seek to counter the Bank of England’s interest-rate-rising attempts to reduce inflation with calls for the government to give financial relief to mitigate the impacts of increased mortgage costs.

Both approaches would of course be self-defeating – utterly worse than useless.

We won’t accept that the current economic crisis has meant that there’s less material wealth to go around and that this will necessarily impact negatively upon our standards of living. Instead, we try to maintain our own lifestyles and pass the pain on to our neighbors.

Meanwhile, a recent report predicted that requirements upon airlines to reduce the carbon footprints of their flights will result in unsustainable use of animal fats in place of more traditional forms of aviation fuel. That, in turn, will lead to increased consumption of palm oils by other industries, which will result in greater environmental damage.

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Nobody wants to fly less. No one’s willing to give anything up. They just want to move the problem along, kicking it down the road, till someone else will have to deal with it.

We also know we need to build more homes for our growing population, but not in our own backyards, thank you very much.

It’s pretty much the same with immigration. If we’re to enjoy the economic benefits of those increasing population numbers, we also need to bear the longer-term costs: to invest in public services, agricultural, industrial, and transport infrastructures, to build those new homes, and to build more schools and more hospitals too.

Ours is a small island, but we’re hardly running out of room. The problem isn’t immigration in itself but its impact on public services and social resources after more than a decade of cuts to government spending.

Immigration boosts the economy and that helps to fill the coffers at the Treasury. If we deploy those enhanced funds to invest in our nation’s future, rather than committing to unfeasible tax cuts for those who least need them, and if everyone thereby shares in the benefits of immigration, then we might eventually manage to break away from our continuing cycles of xenophobic prejudice and socioeconomic self-harm.

It’s a simple enough equation. So, how much is really too much? Nothing’s too much if we plan, prepare, and share in fair and sensible ways.

That’s surely just the rational response of the machinery of the state: an answer not to a problem, but a reaction to an opportunity – one we should welcome and embrace.

It’s hardly rocket science. It’s just a political iteration of quantum economics.

Yet Rishi Sunak’s administration has attempted to distract media attention from the overall migration figures by repeatedly stressing its draconian strategies to deal with the small proportion of migrants who attempt to enter the country illegally by risking the dangerous journey across the English Channel in small boats.

The harsh solution – to lock them up prior to their deportation to central Africa – is set to cost the taxpayer £6 billion over the next two years. That’s even more expensive than housing those refugees in Britain while their asylum claims are being considered.

In fact, at the end of last month, the government admitted that it would cost £63,000 more to send an asylum-seeker to Rwanda than to keep them in the UK.

And that’s certainly not as complex as quantum. It’s merely the irrational arithmetic of xenophobic cruelty.

It betrays a brutishness that would once have been seen as the antithesis of Britishness, an insult to our national character and a stain upon our reputation for decades to come.

Two weeks ago, this situation was further complicated when the Court of Appeal in London found that Rwanda hadn’t after all been shown to be a safe destination for refugees.

This compounded a growing sense of public unease with the Home Office scheme. There have also been recent reports in the press as to the current Home Secretary’s failure to declare past professional relationships with the Rwandan government – to whom she wants to pay a hefty fee to take those refugees.

Ten days ago, one former Conservative minister described the deportation scheme as threatening to “downgrade” the reputation of British foreign policy.

This moderate intervention was followed last week by reports that voices on the extremes of the Conservative Party were pressuring the government to campaign for a referendum to force the UK’s departure from the European Convention on Human Rights. Yes, seriously.

At the end of last month, Home Secretary Suella Braverman described opposition to her plans as founded upon a “phoney humanitarianism”. Yet she’s herself someone who seems to have very little sense of the humanitarian, of humanity, or of the value of human life at all.

One can only hope that the international repercussions of the tragedy of hundreds of people perishing in Greek waters last month will help to focus the politics of this controversy away from such messages of suspicion and hate and back toward our duty of care for the real men, women, and children involved.

This summer, the United Kingdom is celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the arrival of a generation of migrants who’d been invited to come here from the Caribbean after the Second World War to help rebuild the country’s economy. Those people’s contributions to British society and culture proved to be transformative, invaluable, and immense.

They were key to the making of modern Britain as, at its best, an international, multicultural, vibrant, and dynamic nation.

Even King Charles last month said that it was crucial to recognize and celebrate “the immeasurable difference” that they’ve made to the UK.

That’s something that those self-styled patriots – those who most loudly claim allegiance to that king, yet who want to close the country’s borders to such immigration – might now do well to recall, as they seek to reverse the benefits that decades and centuries of immigration have brought to this small island nation.