GETTY Jeremy Corbyn has called for Britain to welcome more migrants

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While that might seem bleeding obvious to most of us it is not, of course, what enlightened sociological research is supposed to say. Previous studies at the university’s sociological department have concluded “diverse neighbourhoods are the healthiest” and “multiculturalism is not to blame for failed sense of community”. It has become an article of faith on the Left that migration is such a good thing, that the more we have of it, the better. If white British people are unhappy living in diverse neighbourhoods, many on the Left will conclude, then it serves them right – if only they could shake off their racist, xenophobic feelings and embrace the wonderful diversity of modern Britain, they might cheer up. I am pleased to live in a cosmopolitan country that has managed to absorb – very successfully, compared with other countries – people of many different cultures, races and religions. The fact that so many migrants are desperate to reach Britain is a tribute to how pleasant a country it is. But middle-class people who enjoy cultural diversity have no right to talk down to those who feel unhappy at the way their neighbourhoods have been transformed.

GETTY The Home Office cannot control the numbers of Eastern Europeans settling in Britain

The Left has no interest whatsoever in understanding people who oppose mass migration Ross Clark

If you are wealthy, your experience of mass migration is wholly different from that of someone who is struggling on a lower income. However if you are the former, migration has brought you a fantastic variety of restaurants and cheap labour to help you dig out your basement conversion. It has contributed to house price inflation – generating you vast paper wealth – enlivened your house parties and introduced novel cultural events. But if you are the latter, migration may well have put you out of a job or at least undercut your earnings. It may have priced you out of a home. It may have led to your favourite pub and shops being lost and your children having to attend a school where most of the pupils do not have proficiency in English and a lot of teaching time has to be diverted to bringing those pupils up to standard.

In some cases, such as where a migrant population has brought with it gangs, migration might also have led to a deterioration in standards of public behaviour. The Left tends to use the term “diverse community” to mean any neighbourhood where white British people are no longer dominant. Yet there is a huge difference between a genuinely diverse community and one where the native population has been displaced by a monoculture of people all from the same foreign country. It is very easy to revel in the wonders of migration if you live in a university town with a Brazilian archaeologist on one side of you, a Ugandan economist on the other and a Romanian musicologist over the road. It is quite another if you live in a neighbourhood where once well-maintained houses have been subdivided into tatty bedsits and let out to dozens of asylum seekers from the same country who only associate with each other. Yet time and time again we hear middle-class people who live in the former type of environment condemn people who find themselves living in the latter.

GETTY Cameron is seeking a new EU deal which will include a clause on immigration

The Left has no interest whatsoever in understanding people who oppose mass migration. It treats them instead as malevolent idiots. The University of Manchester study, which is published in the European Sociological Review this month, reflects on the different experiences of migration. While people whose neighbourhoods see an influx of migrants tend to be made unhappy by the experience, people who move into an area with a large number of migrants do not suffer the same effect. In other words, it is all about choice. If you are making a deliberate decision to move into a cosmopolitan neighbourhood, that is one thing. It is a completely different matter to find the area in which you grew up being transformed. The pro-mass migration lobby, however, doesn’t recognise the latter as a problem. On the Left, you are allowed to make the point that a sole, say, Somalian family living in an entirely white neighbourhood is bound to feel uncomfortable. But you are not allowed to admit that the last few white families living in a street which has become almost entirely Somalian might also have reason to feel that way.

GETTY In some cases migration might also have led to a deterioration in standards of public behaviour