Suella Braverman has declared that multiculturalism has “failed” in Europe and threatens social cohesion in the nation state.
The Home Secretary, giving a speech on migration in the United States, said a “misguided dogma of multiculturalism” has allowed people to come to the UK with the aim of “undermining the stability and threatening the security of society”.
Setting out the “civic argument” against illegal migration, Ms Braverman said: “Uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism have proven a toxic combination for Europe over the last few decades.
“Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it. They could be in the society but not of the society.
“And, in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society.”
She said “the consequence of that failure” are evident “on the streets of cities all over Europe,” pointing to clashes in Leicester as an example.
Migration to the UK and Europe in the last 25 years “has been too much, too quick, with too little thought given to integration and the impact on social cohesion”, she said.
“If cultural change is too rapid and too big, then what was already there is diluted. Eventually it will disappear.”
It “does not make one anti-immigrant” to say that the nation state must be protected, Ms Braverman added.
The senior Cabinet minister, a child of migrants from Mauritius and Kenya working under a Hindu Prime Minister, said: “It is no betrayal of my parents’ story to say that immigration must be controlled.”
She contrasted her parents migrating to the UK “lawfully” with those who “are coming here gaming the system”.
“They both signed up to British values wholeheartedly,” she said.
“What, I think, angers many people in Britain, whether they are from the migrant background or not, it’s the sense of unfairness that people are jumping the queue, that they are breaking our rules,” the Conservative MP for Fareham said.
Related: West faces existential threat if global asylum rules not tightened – Braverman