Or maybe it's just the common viewpoint among most computer-literate, non-retired Brits.

It tends to be more popular among middle class people, and much less popular among working class people who actually bear the brunt of uncontrolled immigration. It's not the middle classes who are struggling to find social housing or any housing at all.

> uncontrolled immigration

Obviously not true.

Anyway blaming government failures such as social housing on immigration is a well known trick.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/oct/04/how-did-the-...

If anyone who can get in a boat in France can migrate to the UK, that is, by definition, uncontrolled. What you call "a well known trick" is, in fact, a perfectly reasonable argument, whatever the Guardian wants to say about it. It is fact that we have a massive shortfall in social housing. What caused that shortfall is largely irrelevant.

There are controls on immigration therefore it is not uncontrolled. The fact that a few desperate people are prepared to risk their lives in the Channel doesn't make it uncontrolled.

"Not building enough social housing is largely irrelevant to dealing with the social housing crisis." Hmmm.

How exactly are illegal entries into the UK via small boats controlled?

If this is controlled, why has the number of people arriving in this manner grown enormously in recent years?

Also way to misrepresent the other commenter’s perfectly valid point.

If Border Force intercepts a boat, they bring them ashore and hold the arrivals in short-term detentions centres. The vast majority of these people then apply for asylum, and the majority of claims are accepted. If they do not claim asylum or are refused, they face prosecution or removal.

The proportion of crossings by boat has increased relative to other means (air/lorries) because the technology for detecting undocumented entries via those other means has improved.

All this is easily looked up. The argument that "some people have done this therefore it is uncontrolled" is absurd.

The fact many (note: not all) of those crossing via this means are intercepted and processed through an administrative process does not make it controlled migration.

There is a process in place to deport illegal immigrants and thousands are forcibly returned every year.

About 3000 were forcibly returned between June 2020 and June 2021, although the vast majority of those (2,809) are people convicted of a crime. Few non-criminals are forcibly returned to their point of origin once they are in the country, regardless of their immigration status. Three-quarters of people who enter immigration detention after illegally entering the country are released into the population without being returned.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-statist...

> If anyone who can get in a boat in France can migrate to the UK, that is, by definition, uncontrolled.

So this isn’t true at all. You’ve just demonstrated that your own justification is false.

Actually, it is not.

The shortfall in UK's social housing can be traced back to Thatcher's policy of forcing councils to sell off their housing stock at firesale prices, and forbid them from using the money to build new ones.

Calling that an act of vandalism would be grossly unfair to the relevant Germanic tribes.

That may well be true. Thatcher gambled that home owners were more likely to vote conservative (and she was right). But an investigation of the historical cause of our lack of social housing does nothing to solve the problem in 2022, which is what I meant when I said it is irrelevant. We have hundreds of thousands fewer houses than we need, so it doesn't make sense to significantly increase the population of people who will need social housing.

I guess the country is un-policed as well, considering that there still are some people who break the law.

> who actually bear the brunt of uncontrolled immigration

Any kind of source would be useful for such claims.

> It's not the middle classes who are struggling to find social housing or any housing at all.

I guess it depends on your definition of middle class. Middle class is currently the part that's being squeezed, way more than the poor (you can't get money from someone who hasn't any). So yeah, the middle class does get by marginally better than the poor (who often live in Dickensian conditions, true). But bringing down the middle class is not going to solve any of this. On the contrary, the middle class is what you need to develop to get a healthy democracy. The problem is the long tail of high incomes, roughly from the 8th decile up. Including the well-to-do conservatives who fan the flames and keep spreading the idea that the culprits are everybody but themselves.

presumably computer-literate people are more than capable of finding an appropriate place to soapbox their political views.