The huddled masses have a new destination. As a proportion of its population, and in absolute numbers, London now has a higher inflow of foreigners than do either New York or Los Angeles. According to many voices in the papers, politics and pressure groups, this must be a time-bomb as more are coming, and staying, than ever before. For 20 years, until the early 1990s, net immigration to Britain hovered around the zero mark, plus or minus 50,000. Then numbers started rising. The end of the cold war led to civil conflicts that drove people out of their homelands. Growing prosperity gave more and more people access to air travel. The trains through the Channel Tunnel, which started running in 1993, offered them another route in to Britain. And there were good reasons to come to Britain. Its economy has done better, over the past ten years, than those of the other big European countries. London was the magnet. Big Bang-the liberalisation of the financial services industry in the late 1980s-led to a decade-long boom in the City. That meant jobs not just for American and French bankers, but also for Colombian and Somali cleaners. London, where the police never check your identity papers, is a great place for a foreigner, legal or illegal. Anybody can find a comforting bunch of people of their own nationality somewhere in the city. Anybody can turn up one evening and find a job, of some sort, the next morning. Anybody can disappear. Read full Economist article