Last week a Lords committee said immigration had brought little economic benefit to Britons. A black “Times” correspondent tours Britain and finds similar sentiment on the ground. And expression of that sentiment can no longer be suppressed

Enoch Powell’s explosive “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 effectively closed down public debate about immigration for several decades. His inflammatory language made the topic radioactive, while at a stroke destroying his political career. Forty years on, immigration is being discussed up and down the country and occupies centre-stage in parliament. It’s a topic that presses emotional buttons in everyone – white, black or Asian – as I found during a journey across Britain to discover whether Powell’s apocalyptic visions have any basis in today’s reality.

It has been a fascinating experience for me – a Briton born in Somalia barely a year before Powell’s speech – to listen to these concerns. As an overseas reporter I have been more used to hearing villagers’ grievances against another tribe of a different ethnicity. Yet in a sense these were familiar scenarios – whether I was talking to a white family who felt under siege in picture-postcard Lichfield or a second-generation black worker in Brixton who was complaining about Polish workers undercutting his business.

It was striking how ill-informed we are about immigration. There are so many half-truths bandied around that none of us feels we have been given the full picture. What became clear to me is that the issue is less about colour and cultural differences – in the way Powell portrayed – and more about the sense that people’s jobs and livelihoods are being threatened.

My point of departure was the room in the Midland hotel in Birmingham where Powell made his fateful speech. First I talked to people who had been there at the time. A friend of Powell, a policeman from Wolverhampton, told me that he thought the speech was one of Powell’s worst: the MP, he said, had looked self-conscious and worried as he delivered it. Even today it still has the power to shock with its bleak vision and Powell’s warning – in messianic, racist tones – that Britain was about to change for ever. However, stripped of its poisonous rhetoric, it is impossible to deny that some of his predictions have been borne out by events. In effect, Powell was articulating a critique of multiculturalism – before multiculturalism became official policy. At the time he called it communalism, a “canker” that would isolate communities and which the majority, native British population would struggle to understand.

Most people now believe that multiculturalism – the celebration of ethnic diversity without the need to integrate – is imploding. Powell’s spectre of “the River Tiber foaming with much blood” was in fact a reference to the racial ferment in America, which many people at the time – including Richard Nixon – thought might be on the verge of civil war. In Britain people pointed to the race riots of 1981 as a fulfilment of Powell’s prophecy.

In some ways we are still stuck with the parameters of his speech, with its emphasis on people coming to live here permanently. By combining the issues of race and cultural identity, it continues to divide people and evoke anger. However, I think we have moved far beyond the kind of world that Powell predicted. To me the real revelation is the way in which second and third-generation immigrants feel embedded in Britain – and now talk about east Europeans with the same sense of fear, foreboding and anger that white people expressed about Asians 30 or 40 years ago. According to a YouGov survey commissioned by Channel 4, 58% of settled British migrants feel there is an immigration “crisis”. Among the total population this view is echoed by 83% – with 84% in favour of halting immigration altogether. The poll also found that 66% feel that their jobs are being undercut by migrant workers and 69% believe the latter are given special treatment.

One of the most striking interviews I conducted was with Ricky Scott, a carpet cleaner from south London whose grandparents had emigrated to Britain from Jamaica in the 1950s. Concerned that east Europeans were undercutting his charges with rates of 30 pounds a day, he also complained about the number of newcomers on the streets who were speaking foreign languages. In an uncanny echo of Powell – who spoke of the majority British becoming “strangers in their own country” – the carpet cleaner said: “I can’t be understood in my own country.”

It is not just second and third-generation immigrants who are directing their ire at east Europeans. In Lichfield a white working-class family told me that it was only a matter of time before “rivers of blood” became a reality. Dave James, who had experienced difficulty in finding work, recalled going to a job-seeking agency and finding himself at the end of a queue of east Europeans who were receiving priority treatment. He walked out. “It makes me feel like a second-class citizen,” he said. I met many others from the so-called white working class who feel they can no longer compete for the jobs that are now taken by Polish electricians and other skilled workers. They feel utterly marginalised and ignored by everybody – which makes their stories compelling and sad.

Because Poles are white and Christian, attracting little racist sentiment, they are to some extent seen as fair game. They represent the lightning rod of immigration: the focus for people’s fears about their livelihoods being threatened by the sheer numbers arriving from abroad.

This is very like the scenario that Powell described – people unable to find jobs, changed neighbourhoods and different languages spoken at schools. But immigration these days is a matter of constant churning change. I interviewed many Polish people who said they would definitely be going back home. They do not see themselves as immigrants but as part of the global workforce. Our economy – Europe’s most open, wealthy and diverse – beckons them to a place where they can use their skills and then move on.

This is perhaps the crucial distinction from Powell’s frame of reference. The new transient immigration is all about the needs of our economy. Meanwhile, a huge number of indigenous British people have been failed by the education system and are not prepared for such a dynamic globalised workplace.

Last week a House of Lords committee declared that immigration had brought “little or no” economic benefit to the majority population. But after speaking to a range of employers – from City bankers to people who employ immigrants on building sites – I am convinced that they are wrong. Our economy has outshone that of every other European country: immigration certainly has not held it back. In rejecting the committee’s conclusion, Gordon Brown ruled out an annual limit on immigration, favouring a new points-based system that will allow only highly skilled workers into the UK. Immigration, it seems, is now part of our economic policy and therefore extremely difficult to control.

This will be of no comfort to indigenous Britons such as Richard, a middle-class writer who told me that his area of Wibsey is the last bastion of British civilisation in Bradford. Feeling outnumbered by Pakistanis in areas of the town where he says “whitey is not welcome”, he dreams of going down to Whitehall and seeing it “lined with politicians and civil servants hanging from the lampposts” – a fitting punishment, he feels, for having destabilised this country.

Pakistanis, of course, have worries of their own. Indeed, I spoke to many Asians in the Midlands who felt they were suffering from discrimination. One said: “I’m British and if I want to bring my wife and uncle from Pakistan, why do I have a harder time than a Polish guy who can just walk in?”

For me the most positive aspect of the immigration issue is that it is no longer a no-go area. Today it is being discussed openly by people of all colours, from many points of view. And it is surely better to debate the pros and cons of immigration than to close the argument down – as Enoch Powell did all those years ago.

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