I’m new to this story and so I read the blog post in the sibling comment and a DHH post it links to. For one, DHH’s supporting words for a provocative race troll (that guy who uses the stage name Tommy Robinson) are pretty suspect. Secondly though he allegedly repeats some statistics in a way that shows he only considers white people to be native Brits.

Pretty, ahem, niche opinions, to put it mildly.

It's sort of a silly opinion really. The British Empire spanned the globe. It's akin to being shocked to see blacks in the US.

Because a lot of people who are not white are born in Britain, making them native Brits?

It's clear to me in this context that they mean "native" in the ethnic sense, not by citizenship or birthplace, similar to the usage of "Indigenous" elsewhere.

There have been people of West African descent in England since the early medieval period.

So? Look, I'm aware that there has been a recent drive to erase British history with this overt (and often comically historically inaccurate) diversity agenda (see: Netflix slop and BBC docudramas), but I'm genuinely not aware of any person who would consider West Africans to be "native Brits" (in the ethnic sense of the term, of course). To a reasonable common man, it's absurd.

Even if this is your view, it's clearly not the view of the original author so by introducing this fringe opinion you're only serving to confuse the discussion.

How can you possibly define "native Brit" in a way that includes, say, Saxons, but excludes West Africans who immigrated in the 1200s, without simply saying "people with light skin"? Or is 1066 your cutoff? Why?

I was born in America but I'm not native American.

that's not the controversial part, it's the distinct overtones of "go back to India/China/etc" that comes with it.