SEVERAL correspondents are ever ready to spring to the defence of immigration. Are they reacting against some supposed suggestion that foreigners are not nice people? I make no such claim. For me, the bottom line is quite simple: this is ours.

Does this mean that I am opposed to sharing? Far from it, but I would expect this to be a two-way process. I see no new English communities taking permanent root in Asia or Africa.

Even if the wilfully high birth rates of these continents left scope for such settlement, and even if their economies attracted it, I do not believe that it would be tolerated.

The people there have a highly developed sense of what is theirs.

Do I oppose mixing? No. I fully expect humankind in the future to be brown. The question is whether they will be dark brown, or light brown with some significant contribution from ourselves. I am not content for us to be written, or bred, out of history.

Those who would concede our living space are like drivers who let queue jumpers in ahead of them.

They may feel they are performing an act of selflessness, but they are letting their side down.

John Riseley, Harrogate, North Yorkshire.