Editorial: Concerns about immigration are fair, violence and vandalism is not

​​The clashes and violence in Belfast at the weekend after demonstrations in the city centre were bad enough. The attacks on immigrant businesses, however, were outrageous. The culprits are clearly deserving of jail terms for such attacks.

Abdelkader Al Alloush had run a supermarket on the Donegall Road, which was almost destroyed on Saturday, despite him shuttering it. A man who had fled the Syrian civil war, he had shown enterprise by opening a shop in Belfast.

Two issues need to be separated, however, in assessing the violence that has happened across the British Isles, including in the Republic of Ireland. The first is the utter wrongness and criminality of vandalism or intimidation, let alone violence.

The second is the legitimacy of the concerns that millions of people have in Great Britain, and both sides of the Irish border, about immigration. These concerns indeed are shared across Europe and North America. Country after country has lost control of its borders, either through incompetence or at the hands of politicians who did not think large scale immigration problem.

There is, indeed, hypocrisy about this, and not just among politicians. Much of the public spurns jobs that either have to be taken by immigrants or not done at all. That is linked to a political failure, at Stormont and Westminster: a refusal to amend the benefits system so that existing able-bodied citizens can’t easily turn up their nose at such work.

A degree of immigration is not only feasible, it has enriched western countries, culturally and economically. But the UK, already one of the world’s most densely populated nations, has seen millions of people move here, some from anti western societies, in a short time.

This causes cultural strain and a strain on services. The people who suffer the most are the poorest members of the existing population.