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Commentators react to David Cameron's speech about immigration

• Read the speech in full

David Cameron connected with a "rage" present among voters about mass immigration:

"...polls show six out of ten Lib Dem voters are as angry about immigration as ordinary Tory and Labour supporters. They are the ones paying the price as migrants take jobs and housing and pile pressure on schools, hospitals and social services.
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"For millions of British voters who have been ignored, Mr Cameron's words are as welcome as they are overdue."

honest discussion about immigration is not about culture but about who finds the jobs:

"Try these numbers instead: 173,000 - that's the number of immigrants who found jobs in the UK in the past [sic] three months of 2010; 39,000 - that's the number of Brits who did. Those are numbers from the Office for National Statistics. Other numbers from the ONS (regional characteristics of foreign-born people living in the United Kingdom, by Miller and Reid, if you're bored) show that immigrants are less likely to have health problems, more likely to be married and less likely to claim welfare. So they're not coming here and taking our women or our benefits. But they are, undeniably, coming here and taking our jobs."

that Mr Cameron's words are insignificant because, she predicts, he won't keep his promises:

"Well, it is a farce and it is a con, and the timing - three weeks, in fact, before local elections - not to speak of the audience and the venue (Conservatives in lily-white Hampshire), bore the hallmarks of quite a cynical political calculation. But there's probably no need for the BNP to worry about copyright - or, indeed, for the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, to get quite as hot under the collar as he did yesterday - because on past performance Mr Cameron has little intention of acting on the inference of his words. This was a play for his political base, intended to deliver doubting voters from the temptation of putting their cross beside the Ukip candidate, or even the BNP, come 5 May."

there is a fundamental problem in the debate about immigration:

"David Cameron's speech on Thursday was a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the debate on immigration. He starts off by identifying 'concerns on the doorstep', 'myths have crept in', pays a bit of lip service to 'benefits of immigration' and then launches into 'controls', 'cuts' and 'abuses'. He, of course, leans into lazy Brits on welfare who do not want to do dirty jobs and his speech is full of anecdotes about immigrants abusing the system.
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"These are all very familiar arguments about the phenomenon of migration. But one thing that most politicians miss is that migration is neither good nor bad. It just is. Adding value judgments becomes problematic because when we talk about immigration, we are in fact talking about immigrants."

is illustrated by a picture of two women sitting next to each other on the tube, one wearing a niqab and the other with blonde hair. She argues debate on immigration is stifled by accusations of racism:

"Politicians' consistent refusal to recognise the fractures and strains placed on communities by mass immigration has led to the voter on the street becoming more disillusioned than ever. I am a happy Irish immigrant who has always trusted the instincts of Joe Public. As ministers assured Joe that school standards were higher than ever, he knew they had gone to hell. Unlike his rulers, he knew that the way the welfare system worked encouraged idleness. Political correctness, he spotted, was being used to stifle freedom of speech, particularly about mass immigration. 'You're a racist if you say anything about all these foreigners coming here,' Joe would grumble to his mates, as he looked over his shoulder."

Chairman of Migrationwatch UK about the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s coverage of the speech, saying that the there is a "strong and widespread reluctance" in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ to tackle the issue of immigration:

"One is left wondering how it is possible to have a sensible debate on immigration when the largest news organisation in the country is so hideously biased on this subject - to adopt the terminology of its former Director General Greg Dyke, who complained memorably that the corporation was 'hideously white'."
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"It would be wrong to tar the whole of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ with a Radio 4 brush. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is a huge organisation. Some of their journalists are entirely professional, so are some of the editors."