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Ah yes, they've been here from the start.
Until 1948, Britain's non-European population was effectively zero. Sure, you can find isolated individual's like Henry VIII's trumpeter or whatever, but to jump from that to claiming 'there have been minorities in Britain for centuries' is just motte and baileying.
Otherwise you're right. People are very good at telling good immigrants from bad ones. The state, unfortunately, is not.
It would be funny to start using this argument in reverse. Vikings discovered part of America a thousand years ago, so naturally Europeans have been in the Americas "since the start". There are even rumour of Jews in ancient Israel!
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But it wasn't zero. And, I could be wrong since I'm not actually British, but to the best of my knowledge they were treated relatively normally and not faced with the levels of racism seen in the U.S. Or... maybe centuries is too far. But the past century, at least. I never used to hear about racial problems with minorities in Britain, though I suppose that is confounded with the low prevalence, it could be that the few minorities that were there were poorly treated.
Start with "anyone without a legal visa or immigration paperwork is immediately put back where they came from", or in the rare instance they seem like an actual legitimate refugee from an unsafe place you put them in the nearest European country or country adjacent to their home country as if they had merely crossed that border and not yours. Wherever they were before coming here, they go back as if they had never crossed your border.
That should address like 90% of the problem immediately, since the illegals are going to be the most greedy, selfish, uncaring, and unwilling to follow rules and wait in lines, and make up a substantial fraction of the population.
Then you adopt civic nationalism tests. Ensure they speak English, want to be British, are willing to swear loyalty to the Crown and set aside their old nation. Know what it even means to be British and have rights. Are not radical zealots for some religion or ideology incompatible with first world British values. Make sure they have some sort of skill or work ethic that makes them employable. Only let in people who pass the test.
Disqualify anyone from social services for the first five years. Maybe you help them with housing and job-finding program for the first month or two, but then they need to get a job and support themselves. Anyone who commits crimes or ends up unemployed is sent back as above.
All of this is legible to a state. The civic nationalism tests are probably going to end up subjective and a bit exploitable, but even something as simple as forcing people to state out loud "I don't want to bring Shariah Law to this country" is going to filter out a lot of people who would be too offended to say that out loud. And the English language requirement is not so easily cheated.
I think this is how Britain should handle it. I think this is how America should handle it. I think this is how basically every first world country should solve their immigration issues. We have a functioning society, we want cheap labor, immigration trades some amount of the former for some amount of the latter. Supply and demand dictate that the market price is massively in our favor and we can make whatever demands we want and still find people willing to fulfill the role. We can ask for anything we want that good, honest, hardworking people can fulfill, and they will continue to flood us with applications that we can pick and choose from.
This seems like hair-splitting. For most of the history of what we call Britain, the non-white population was as close to zero as made no difference, a rounding error. Until the mid-twentieth century, the majority of the British population could go their entire lives without encountering a single non-white person inside British borders.
By "racial problems with minorities", are you referring to racism experienced by minorities, or problems with racial minorities committing disproportionate numbers of crimes etc.? I'm not sure what timeframe "I never used to" covers, but in either case, it's not a new phenomenon.
For the former, the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 sent shockwaves throughout the UK, and was the subject of a government inquiry which concluded that the British police service was institutionally racist. (The handcuffing of Henry Nowak is ultimately downstream of recommendations made by said inquiry.) The murder was the impetus for new legislation surrounding double jeopardy in murder trials.
For the latter, last week we discussed Enoch Powell's (in)famous "rivers of blood" speech. He was sounding the alarm about the increased crime and societal dysfunction that appears to accompany mass immigration as early as 1968. While the grooming gangs scandal only really became common knowledge in the 2010s, it had been ongoing since the mid-90s.
The earliest newspaper report about a Pakistani rape gang is from 1955!
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The amount of times people use historical anecdotes along the lines of 'A person of moderate Arabic complexion rocked up in court one day, the entire country came to look upon this oddity as they had never ever seen the like of it in many many years and it was the talk of the town for the next 20 years' as proof of dark people being in Northern Europe is kinda hilarious.
My dad is about the color of Tom Jones (and of Isles ancestry for atleast the last 2-300 years) and growing up in Northern England in the 1950s he used to routinely be called the N-Word and referred to as if he were the darkest person in the world. And this was a major port town after the empire had already happened.
Yep, Marco Polo in China means that white people were ALWAYS there. They're completely acclimatised to whites. Never mind hordes of Chinese adults coming to touch your blonde kid's hair when you visit Beijing.
I've been to Beijing. They are so used to white people that they don't care and don't want to touch your hair. Maybe decades ago they were like that.
Beijing/Shanghai don't give a shit but when I visit even more industrial second tiers as a tall blonde I get asked for photos a ton by passerbys.
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