The Daily Mail shouts at me today, warning that white Britons will be outnumbered by 2066 if immigration continues at current levels.

Should I feel anxious? Should I worry?

I think we should all take a deep breath and be relaxed about accepting the inevitable. The demography of Britain is changing. And at lightning speed.

Britain will become significantly more diverse by 2050 with one estimate suggesting that ethic minorities will make up one in five of the population.

Researchers from the University of Leeds tell us that the ethnic make-up of the UK will “change dramatically over the next 40 years”.  And ethnic minorities will be more evenly spread around the UK than is the case today.

Of course, we live on a tiny island, all crushed together, and we can’t take everyone who wants to come here. So we discriminate between people based on their education, age and other points-based factors.

If you are a doctor you are laughing.

(An astonishing 11% of all medical practitioners in the UK qualified in India.)

But there are other categories of people whose entry to the UK is much more difficult to control. Spouses, for example. Around 30,000 a year.

Yet the Conservatives say they are going to get immigration down to the tens of thousands a year by the end of this Parliament.

A tall order, I’d say.

The Commons Home Affairs Committee in its report on an Immigration Cap concluded that numbers could only come down significantly if the student and family routes into the UK are tackled. And that is a bed of nettles.

The most recent report from the Migration Advisory Committee reaches the same conclusion.

How do you tell the British Pakistani community here in Pendle (for example) that the family route to settlement in the UK is to be choked off? I wait to hear the arguments.

The British Pakistani population in Pendle has gone from 4% in 1981 to 14% now with no sign of levelling off.

There is a pull-push operating. For understandable reasons, large numbers of people are desperate to get out of Pakistan, one of the most dysfunctional and corrupt states on the face of the planet.

And many British Pakistanis, happily settled here, look to Pakistan for their spouses, often cousins. Often uneducated.

If the Government wants to cut the number of people coming into the UK via the family route, it is going to mean more than tightening up the English language tests.

New inventive – and legal – ways will have to be devised to stop people coming here. Not easy.

We are, of course, not alone.

Canada by choice absorbs 250,000 immigrants every year - on a per capita basis more than any other country. 

There is a consensus across the political spectrum that immigration is necessary and good for the country.

Yet even there, in that open and non-paranoid climate, a lively debate is taking place on multiculturalism and the extent to which it is, or is not, working. (They’ve even got their own version of Migration Watch.)

Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, summed it up this way:

“Canada embraced multiculturalism expecting that, given the opportunity, everyone wanted to be like us. That didn’t happen. What happens when deep down differences still divide us?”

Discuss.