Shadowing Practice: Why Britain Can't Fix Immigration - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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This is the UK
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There's fresh violence on the streets of Belfast this morning after a night of terrifying riots
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And this all stemmed from one single trigger The chaos was
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sparked after what's being called an attempted beheading of a health worker And the main debate over all of this?
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Immigration Immigration in the UK has been the single most controversial issue that no politician could adequately solve Hell,
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if anything, the problem has only gotten worse with the most recent attempted Belfast beheading
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and subsequent grooming gang inquiry report being published shedding light on
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how thousands of British girls were sexually assaulted by mainly Pakistani immigrants over the past several decades.
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Every couple of months, there are new mass demonstrations against immigration in the country and racial tensions are at an all-time high.
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But how did the UK get to the brink of a race war, and how did immigration become the UK's biggest problem it can't solve?
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Well, to understand that, we have to look back in history where it all started.
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Chapter 1 Immigration before Immigration It's 1945.
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After six years of fighting the worst war in human history, Britain lies in rubble.
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Ruins fill English streets where proud Victorian era buildings used to stand.
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One in three homes were destroyed.
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880,000 soldiers were killed in the fighting.
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Roughly 6% of the country's male population erased overnight.
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Meanwhile, millions were left homeless or displaced.
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Britain needed to rebuild itself and fast.
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Lucky for them, Britain was still an empire that controlled one quarter of the world's population.
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In 1948, in an effort to mobilize its untapped manpower,
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the UK passed the British Nationality Act that granted equal citizenship to over 800 million people residing in its empire.
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As such, hundreds of thousands of its subjects from every corner of the globe rushed to Britain.
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This first wave of immigrants came to be known as the Windrush generation.
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Over 910,000 people from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa came to Britain between 1948 and 1971.
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Although World War II ended, world peace was far from being achieved.
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On the contrary, the world was going through a chaotic period.
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Ideologies clashed for domination and new countries declared independence from their colonial overlords, left and right.
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Even though India and Pakistan fought hard for its independence, upon getting it, many of their citizens left for Britain due to religious oppression in their new countries
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and lack of economic opportunities.
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Tensions in Europe still persisted.
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The Soviet Union, now in control of practically half of the continent, brutally oppressed its new subjects.
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In the 1950s, the Polish protests and Hungarian revolution were ruthlessly suppressed.
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Over 200,000 left Hungary after the revolution, heading west, 30,000 of which settled in Britain.
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Initially, in 1956, 72% of Britons were in favor of migration.
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The country was rebuilding, business was booming, and the number of immigrants wasn't too great.
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But by the late 60s, things started to change.
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Britain became one of the most attractive locations for economic migrants and refugees.
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In 1953, the country was getting 3,000 immigrants annually,
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but by 1961, this number jumped to over 136,000.
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Naturally, the policy of allowing one quarter of the world to settle in a tiny island
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that lacked enough sunshine even for the local population started to ruffle some feathers.
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As such, immigration legislation was tightening, requiring immigrants to have a job and substantial connection with Britain to be allowed to move in.
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The Windrush immigration crisis peaked with conservative MP Edward Heath's Rivers of Blood speech, in which he called the country,
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mad as a nation to be permitting large numbers of immigrants to enter.
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He concluded his speech by warning of the River Tibur foaming with much blood.
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The elites of the country found the speech racist and incendiary, but most of the public was in support of it.
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In a bit over a decade, public opinion of immigration flipped, with over 80% of Britons now feeling that there were too many immigrants in the country.
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And so, in 1971, the Immigration Act was passed, which further tightened rules about who could move to Great Britain,
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and the country never had an issue with immigration ever again.
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Right?
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For most of the 70s and 80s, immigration to the British Isles was on a gradual decline.
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The total number of yearly immigrants from the Commonwealth more than halved by the late 80s, with the country approximately taking 54,000 people annually.
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Things seemed to be calming down, despite the occasional hiccup like when the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin expelled all Indians
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and Pakistanis from his country only for Britain to take them as its own citizens.
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But then came the 90s and the world was plunged into chaos.
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Communist countries imploded.
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The Middle East and the Balkans were engulfed in war.
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Hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans, Gypsies, Yugoslavs, Somalians and Iraqis fled, many of whom set their sights on Britain as their new home.
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Then in 1992 came a piece of legislation that would forever change Britain, the Maastricht Treaty.
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This treaty is arguably the piece of legislation that founded the EU as we know it.
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To not delve into too much detail about it, amongst many other institutional changes it brought,
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it also established the right for all EU members to travel and move freely to other countries within the Union.
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Originally, this didn't make that big of an impact when the treaty encompassed these countries,
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as most of them were on a high enough level of development where mass economic migration was unnecessary.
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But in 2004, everything changed when the Union expanded and incorporated most of the ex-Eastern bloc.
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Due to decades of socialist economic mismanagement, Eastern European countries were left significantly poorer than their Western counterparts.
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As a result, hundreds of thousands of Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Balts, and later on in 2007,
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Romanians and Bulgarians flocked to more developed countries for work.
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Britain in particular became a favored destination for many.
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Initially, the government welcomed the immigration wave as it saw it as a potential for a new economic boom, believing that only 13,000 immigrants would come annually.
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Instead, over a million came in the next decade, which at the time was the biggest influx of immigrants in the country's history.
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By the mid-2010s, Britain's demographic picture was drastically changing and anti-immigrant sentiment was on the rise again.
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To give you a better picture, in the 1991 census, white native Britons made up 94.1% of the country,
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while ethnic minority groups were around 5.9%.
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In 2011, 20 years later, white Britons were 80.5% of the population,
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other European immigrants making up 5.5% of the population,
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Asians 7.5%, blacks 3.3%, and mixed people 2.2%.
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In 1968, when the Rivers of Blood speech was held, the immigrant population was nowhere near 6%,
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and the majority of people were upset with the amount of immigrants in the country.
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So you can imagine what the sentiments were half a decade later when the number reached nearly 20%.
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Things only got worse in 2015 with the rise of the Islamic State.
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The Syrian civil war was drastically escalating and millions of Syrians abandoned their homes to seek refuge.
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Although many settled in neighboring countries like Jordan and Turkey, others decided to flee westwards and try their luck in Europe.
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Considering the Arab Spring destabilized the entirety of the Middle East five years prior, Others from neighboring countries also joined them.
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The EU at the time had a very humanitarian-minded leadership that opened its borders wide for this upcoming migrant wave.
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Others from South Asian countries far away from the conflict in Syria, like Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, also took advantage of this open migration policy.
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Suddenly this stopped being a caravan of asylum seekers, but a wave of economic immigrants flocking to Europe and a good chunk of them setting their sights on Britain.
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By 2016, the country had changed drastically.
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London, its capital, ceased being majority British.
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In 2011, violent crime was on the rise.
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Social services, like the healthcare and education system, were overburdened with the influx of new people.
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And although immigration wasn't the primary culprit in the drastic rise of housing prices, it certainly wasn't helping.
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The country of many older Britons, especially those that lived in London, Birmingham, Manchester no longer existed.
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As such, many became frustrated and wished to stop this mass migration hysteria.
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In the eyes of Brits, the EU as a whole was seen as the main perpetrator of this crisis with its open border policy.
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And so in February, the same year, a referendum was held on whether or not to leave the EU, as a way to curb migration, amongst other agreements.
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In a tight race, 52% of the people voted in favor of leaving.
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Officially, the The UK left the union in 2020.
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Migration into the country started to decline, but in doing so, the country started experiencing loads of economic hardships,
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now that it was outside of the European single market.
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Prices of goods continued to rise, labor shortages in key sectors like healthcare remained, and the nation's birth rate continued to decline.
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So to solve this, the government loosened the rules on immigration.
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In 2019, Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to reduce net migration into the country below 250,000 per year.
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In 2021, net migration reached 488,000.
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The same government under Boris Johnson, who vowed to lower immigration and exit the EU because of it, opened the doors wide open for immigrants all across the globe.
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By 2023, net migration reached a record high of 944,000 new people entering the country.
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For most of English history, more people were leaving than coming in.
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But after the UK left the EU, annually the country was getting 1.25% of its population in immigrants.
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And the situation today is worse now than ever before.
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Researching this video, immigration to UK started piquing my interest.
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Surely, if the country is getting this many migrants annually,
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I, as a person with three quite powerful passports and a bachelor's degree could easily move there as well, right?
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You'd think so, but on paper, moving to the UK is quite difficult.
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Since leaving the EU, your ability to move and work in Britain is dictated by its revised points-based system.
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Basically, to be allowed into the country, you must obtain a total of 70 points from this chart, 50 of which are gained through three mandatory terms,
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like getting a job offer from an approved sponsor, that job being skill demanding, and speaking English.
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The other 20 can be substituted by having a PhD, working in a sector with a shortage, or earning a high salary.
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Now, I possess a bachelor's in economics, and 68% of British citizens with such a degree are able
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to find a job in their field within 15 months of completing their degree.
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If you're a citizen and possess a masters, this number goes up to 91%.
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However, if you're a foreigner like me, then securing a job in the UK becomes quite difficult.
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Due to the high competition for an entry job in economics, most employers in the field are unwilling to sponsor foreigners.
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Furthermore, these entry jobs would be paid below the threshold for the point system requirement.
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So, despite being a high-skilled worker, the chances of me moving to the UK anytime soon are quite slim.
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Yet, in 2023, the UK accepted 1,469,000 new immigrants.
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To put this into perspective, the population of Birmingham is 1.1 million.
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In one year, the UK got the entirety of its second biggest city worth of immigrants, and then some, moving in.
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With that said, London definitely by any means is not full of doctors and engineers.
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So, how the hell are so many people coming into the country.
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Your first instinct might be to say illegally, via boats across the English Channel, but this is not the case.
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Boats are a form of legal migration, which makes up less than 2% of migration cases.
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But they look the most shocking, so of course politicians scapegoat them with the Normandy landings of brown people.
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In 2025, illegal immigration only made up 4.8% of all immigration into the UK.
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The vast majority of immigrants are coming in via a plane and a visa in their passport.
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Most new arrivals in Britain come as either students or workers, and this is where the problem lies.
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The vast majority of these visas are issued under false pretenses.
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During Boris Johnson's tenure, the government has made it easier for foreign students to come and study.
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But those coming in aren't coming to famous universities like Cambridge and Oxford.
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Hell, they're not even coming to regular universities.
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Instead, they're heading to diploma mills.
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Over the past several decades, hundreds of fake universities have popped up all over the country, offering no actual courses or accredited diplomas.
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Instead, they sponsor foreigners from abroad to come into the UK.
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According to the Home Office, 59% of non-EU foreign students upon arrival for their studies get a new visa.
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When it comes to those coming in on a work visa, however, things aren't any better.
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Hundreds, if not thousands, of fake companies have also popped up throughout the country who registered themselves as care companies.
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Instead of providing actual healthcare and care services, these companies hire workers from abroad, whom they also charge for sponsoring them.
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A highly illegal act.
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Then, once here, these immigrants realize that the job they applied for does not exist.
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Then, they're forced to work for another illegal company
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that fraudulently hires illegal immigrants to work in food delivery via a shared account.
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A lot of immigrants take out large loans at home from banks
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and their families and friends so they can afford to be sponsored by one of these companies.
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A lot of families in South Asia also see this as
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an investment to send one of their family members abroad to work as they'll be able to send remittances back home.
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In Nepal's economy, for example, remittances make up one quarter of the GDP and if they can't find any agency to take them across,
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then they resort to illegal crossings via the English Channel.
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So, it's safe to say that immigration to the UK is big business.
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Okay, that's a lot to take in, and certainly a lot of immigrants.
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But there's one question we still didn't answer.
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Why are so many going to the UK?
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Out of 38 OECD members, the UK has the second biggest amount of permanent immigrants and the biggest amount of student immigrants.
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Yet, for For two decades, the British economy has been stagnating.
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The country's wages have barely seen any growth, housing has exploded in price, and the healthcare system has been more inefficient than ever,
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with non-urgent treatments having an average wait time of around three months.
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Meanwhile, Britain's poorest households are now technically worse off than those in ex-Yugoslav Slovenia.
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By all accounts, the UK doesn't seem like the ideal place to immigrate to, so what gives?
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Well, the first factor that plays into this is, as I mentioned before, immigration into the country has turned into a business.
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Thousands of fake companies and diploma mills make false promises of economic prosperity in less developed countries.
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Their entire business model relies on being paid by people to bring them in.
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Those desperate to look for work elsewhere are not the most educated in Britain's economic standing
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and still have this rosy picture of the British economic tiger 50 years ago.
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Secondly, the UK has very generous social benefits.
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People coming into the country applying for asylum are granted shelter and food while they wait for their status to be approved.
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Due to the sheer amount of people coming into the country, several tens of thousands are now being housed in over 400 hotels across the nation.
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A lot of conservative politicians were found to have ties to these hotels
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and have been benefiting tremendously from continuously housing them there as
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the public has been spending over 17.6 billion euros on contracts with these hotels.
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Major hotel chains like the Britannia Hotels Group have received hundreds
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of millions from the Home Office to keep their properties occupied by asylum seekers, leading to substantial revenue gain for their owners.
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In addition to that, if an asylum case is approved, which on average happens 67% of the time,
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the refugees become eligible to apply for council housing due to being at risk of homelessness.
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In recent years, authorities have provided social housing to approximately 21,400 refugee households annually.
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This all has left people smugglers promoting the UK as the ultimate asylum destination.
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They market the UK as a place where the government will give you a free hotel room, a place where you can get rich from just your mobile phone and riding a bike,
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all the while making them take on tremendous amounts of debt just to get them across
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and put to work in another illegal company as they have to pay them to rent their bike and food delivery account,
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which in part is allowed to continue due to lax legislation when it comes to identification and the misrepresentation of asylum law.
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Although food delivery apps require its contractors to have legal status in the country,
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many are able to circumnavigate this due to the UK not having any formal ID system.
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To identify oneself, many Brits need to use their birth certificate or passport.
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But when dealing with authorities, the system relies on high-trust society principles like just saying your legal name and address as there are no national ID cards,
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which makes regulating abuse of the immigration system much more difficult.
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The NHS remains understaffed.
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Housing is more expensive than ever, productivity growth has stagnated, the country's birth rate continues to fall, and government finances remain under pressure.
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For decades, successive governments argued that higher immigration was necessary to fill labor shortages, support economic growth, and offset an aging population.
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Yet, despite record levels of migration, many of these shortages still exist.
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Some of the doctors, engineers, and skilled workers Britain needed certainly arrived, but so did millions of other people with their own needs for housing,
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healthcare, schools, infrastructure, and public services.
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As a result, Britain finds itself trapped in a strange paradox.
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The public consistently tells pollsters that they want immigration reduced.
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Politicians repeatedly campaign on promises to lower migration.
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Brexit itself was in large part driven by the desire to regain control over the country's borders.
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Yet, every government that comes to power eventually reaches the same conclusion.
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The economy has become dependent on a constant inflow of new workers, students, and migrants.
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And so, immigration continues.
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At the same time, rapid demographic change has transformed many parts of the country.
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In some communities, integration has been relatively successful.
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In others, not so much, as tensions emerged over culture, identity, religion, and social cohesion.
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Debates that once sat at the fringes of British politics now dominate headlines, elections, and dinner table conversations.
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Whether immigration Immigration has ultimately helped or harmed Britain depends largely on who you ask.
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But one thing is difficult to deny.
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For over half a century, immigration has been Britain's most controversial political issue.
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Governments have promised to solve it, voters have repeatedly demanded change, entire elections revolved around it, and yet here we are.
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More people are arriving than ever before, the arguments are louder than ever, and Britain is still searching for an answer that nobody seems capable of finding.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Britain Can't Fix Immigration”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: immigration, immigrant, Britain, migration, economic. This video has 216 sentences and 3217 words to shadow. The speech runs for 20:32. The speaker talks at a natural 157 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| immigrant noun | /ˈɪmɪɡɹənt/ | A non-native person who comes to a country from another country to permanently settle there. |
| asylum noun | /əˈsaɪləm/ | A place of safety or refuge. |
| shortage noun | /ˈʃɔː(ɹ)tɪd͡ʒ/ | A lack or deficiency; an insufficient amount. |
| sponsor noun | /ˈspɒn.səː/ | A person or organization with some sort of responsibility for another person or organization, especially where the responsibility has a religious, legal, or… |
| drastically adverb | To a drastic degree. | |
| migrant noun | /ˈmaɪɡɹənt/ | A migratory animal, in particular a migratory bird. |
| behead verb | /bɪˈhɛd/ | To deliberately remove the head of; to cut off (someone's) head. |
| foreigner noun | /ˈfɔɹ.ɪ.nɚ/ | A person from a foreign country. |
| remittance noun | /ɹɪˈmɪtəns/ | The act of sending money to someone. |
| seeker noun | /ˈsikəɹ/ | One who seeks. |
| influx noun | /ˈɪnˌflʌks/ | A flow inward or into something; a coming in. |
| entirety noun | /ɪnˈtaɪ.əɹ(ə)ti/ | The whole; the complete or amount. |
| diploma noun | /dɪˈploʊmə/ | A document issued by an educational institution testifying that the recipient has earned a degree or has successfully completed a particular course of study. |
| neighboring adjective | /ˈneɪbəɹɪŋ/ | Situated or living nearby or adjacent to. |
| demographic adjective | /ˌdɛm.əˈɡɹæf.ɪk/ | Of or pertaining to demography. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| make up verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | To constitute, to compose. |
| pop up verb | To come up with a "pop" sound. | |
| calm down verb | To become less excited, intense, or angry. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| take out verb | To remove. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | has been stagnating · have been benefiting · has been spending |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · has only gotten · has made |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being called · being published · were destroyed |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 17 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, wasn't, aren't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: shortage /ˈʃɔː(ɹ)tɪd͡ʒ/, institutional /ˌɪn.stɪˈtju.ʃə.nəl/, sheer /ʃɪɚ/, threshold /ˈθɹɛʃ(h)oʊld/
- Long words — get the stress right: entirety /ɪnˈtaɪ.əɹ(ə)ti/, demographic /ˌdɛm.əˈɡɹæf.ɪk/, incorporate /ɪŋˈkɔɹ.pɚ.eɪt/, prosperity /pɹɑˈspɛɹ.ɪ.ti/, humanitarian /hjuˌmæ.nəˈtɛ.ɹi.ən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like immigrant, asylum, shortage.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.