[Justlovemy]

Never before has a person of even simple means been able to pick up and move to a new country as easily as today. But what motivates people to do this? More particularly, what motivates those from modern countries that boast good economies and life spans to move to other countries?

From a recent edition of The Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../16/dl1601.xml


Immigration's flip side

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2007

The British have always been susceptible to wanderlust, a trait that helped create an empire and has given the globe its common tongue. Even today, we remain the most dispersed nationality on the planet.

There are 41 countries where at least 10,000 Britons reside and a further 71 with British communities of more than 1,000 souls.

Yet, if emigration has been part of our way of life for centuries, it has rarely been on such a scale as today. New figures from the Office for National Statistics show that more than 200,000 UK citizens emigrated last year, the biggest outflow of nationals since before the First World War.

Why the exodus? There is little hard evidence, but much that is anecdotal, to account for the figure. There is the traditional lure of a better life, higher wages, lower living costs, more sunshine and, increasingly, the desire to make permanent the lifestyle enjoyed in a holiday home. Cheap air travel makes living in a distant land not quite the leap into the unknown that it was even a few decades ago.

Increasingly, too, people are leaving these shores not to earn money but to spend it – the number of retired Britons living overseas, where their pensions go further, appears to be climbing inexorably.

That's the pull – what about the push? For it is also clear that people would not be departing on this scale if they did not find life in this country unsatisfactory. High taxes, intrusive government, unsafe streets, dirty hospitals, a coarseness of society that is squeezing out the old-fashioned virtues of courtesy and consideration – expats everywhere cite these aspects of life in modern Britain to justify their escape.

Yet none of these ills prevents this country remaining the most astonishing magnet for people. Last year, 510,000 foreigners came to live here, taking to 3.9 million the total since Labour came to power, the largest prolonged wave of immigration in our history.

It is when these two trends are set alongside each other that we see the profound implications. Put simply, as more and more UK nationals leave and more and more foreign nationals arrive, it is inevitable that the nature of this country, its society and its culture, will change.

Many will welcome the change and the diversity it brings. For centuries we have welcomed newcomers (though never on this scale) and they have contributed to the richness of British society and its wealth. But others will be alarmed by this "churn" of population, worried by its speed and scale and the way it is transforming our way of life.

These are big issues that are only now, belatedly, being addressed by politicians, notably by David Cameron with his call for a grown-up debate on population management. They have clear implications, too, for Gordon Brown's quest to identify that elusive thing, Britishness.

Most of all, they should lead us all to question why, when we have never been more prosperous, so many Britons no longer find this country such an agreeable place in which to live.