It's clear Britain can't survive without immigration. Now Labour must convince voters | Simon Jenkins

Yet more evidence shows that we will only rely on it more as time goes on. It's time to debate it without toxic rhetoric

Britain needs immigrants. According to the Office for National Statistics this week, Britain's indigenous" population in the 2030s will be static and ageing. Growth in population will be buoyed only by immigrants, their number predicted to rise by 5 million over the next seven years. Thank goodness, surely, for them.

As this debate lurches back into public discourse, it is cursed by the ease with which xenophobia delivers political gain. The fact is that Britons have turned massively in favour of immigration over the past half century. In the 1950s and 1960s, roughly 80%-90% wanted it to stop. Then the inflow was under 250,000 a year and Enoch Powell could forecast rivers of blood". Net migration was below zero.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist