I'm John Batscher with my friend and colleague Joseph Sternberg.

He is in London and life in London is an exciting topic for me.

I always dreamed about living in London.

Joe does. So he can see the changes underway. He writes for the Wall Street Journal.

He writes the political economics column. And now we come to news that I greet as good news because the

larger the population the younger the population the more prosperity available

for everyone this according to a headline in the Times, immigration to

propel UK population to 70 million by 2026, heretofore the date had been

2026. Here at the four the date had been 2036. The number of immigrants coming to the

UK they thought would be 245,000 a year. It's now coming in at 315,000 a year.

Joe, I read this as good news.

Does London regard it as good news?

Well, economically, I think there's a sense in which it's very good news,

but politically it's going to be terrible news for the governing Conservative Party.

And there are a couple reasons for that. I think that part of Britain's problem is that the immigration debate here has become very badly skewed so you conflate two issues.

You conflate legal immigration, which the UK's economy needs a lot of in order to sustain economic growth and in order to be able to afford

its generous welfare state.

And that legal immigration issue gets conflated with all of the illegal immigration that the Conservative Party is

struggling to crack down on. These are the boats crossing the English Channel and the human trafficking

gangs and that sort of thing. So I mean certainly more legal immigration would be

good news. They're going to have to figure out how to deal with problems like

the Socialized National Health Service that struggles to provide services to a growing population.

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