Being over-run by the herd of foreign and very dear pretenders

Foreign born – that is now the quick & dirty way to measure the number of ‘immigrants’ living in our country. I understand why, but I always want to ask – Yes, but how many of them are British, really?

Because lots of British-born-and-bred people spend part of their lives living abroad, for a whole variety of reasons such as marriage, work, education, just wanting a change. And many of them have children while living abroad, though few, if any, of us natives would regard those children as either foreign or immigrant when – if – the family return to live in the UK. It is a moot point whether their number is greater in these days of globalisation than it was in the days of the Raj, when, for example, few thought that Colin Cowdrey, captain of cricket, was not English.

I now have a poster boy for this question: Bradley Wiggins was born in Belgium.

I wonder just how many of ‘our’ Olympic medal winners would count as immigrants if we defined them by the country of their birth.

Links
Team GB: Bradley Wiggins
Bradley Wiggins has been voted the 2012 BBC Sports Personality of the Year
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