At what cost to our social services?

thousands will have little effect if spread evenly across the country. That said the government is playing politics - successfully - by underfunding public services (via major cuts to local government especially) and then getting it's lackeys in the press et al. to blame the consequent limited supply on migrants. That said refugee's are an altogether different thing since they overwhelmingly return to their country of origin when the violence that ejected them has lessened.

All questions the left seem to be deaf to.

because they aren't real question at all. They are faux questions, illusory, that hide the real problems faced today. They are also premised and imply lots of very dangerous tropes and stereotypes. If the British populace perceive some thousands of migrants and refugees as a threat to their way of life, their welfare state etc. that only represents a deeper hidden crisis in the British nation-state that's nevertheless been refracted onto an 'other', an other with little influence, power or consequence. Migrants on the whole have little effect on our society insofar as they're unlikely to claim benefits from the state in any form, and generally take up precarious and casualised jobs. They have few and disparage organisations representing their interests which are pretty much never contemplated by the ruling-powers.

The economic ruptures since 2008 has required a re-assertive capital. Migrant's cheap labour and the privatisation/outsourcing of state assets (together with reducing the state from economic affairs more generally) – i.e. austerity – represents the need to attain profitability and growth in British capital. That capital has so far managed to mediate dissent into an anti-immigrants politics would be ironic if it wasn't tragic. As long as everyone dances around the real motivator of change in our society, and place the focus on the symptoms rather than the causes, we can't even begin to offer any solutions (since we've yet to ask even the correct questions).

A problem is that of multiculturalism and the 'integration' of British migrants from the 20thC. The various muslim communities which are endlessly posed as some-kind of anti-thesis to Britishness "and their unwillingness to assimilate" are repetitively confused by the right-wing press with that of migration, as if second-generation migrants - i.e. citizens - bare any similarity to migrants of the last 10ish years. To often the populist right-wing essentially preforms its reactionary politics on anyone who's not British, a definition which is always implicitly white (after all muslim citizens are barely posed to be British at all), which means they confuse very different phenomena in society (not least the distinctions between refugees, migrants, and second/third generation migrants).