A new year family history lesson

While visiting a friend of a friend's FB timeline, I was dismayed to see that she 'liked' a group that declared England was full. A short scroll down, however, came a mild reproach from an older relative. This reminded her that great grandma came here as a Jewish refugee from Tsarist Russia, and how she met and married great granddad, whom she then nursed for the rest of his days because he was gassed while fighting in WWI.
There are few families, and my own certainly isn't among them, that can trace a presence here going back more than a few centuries. Indeed, the  vast majority of people have at least one grandparent who came here from somewhere else, but a depressingly high proportion of us seem to want to pull up an imagined drawbridge.
I've never been frightened by an immigrant/asylum seeker/ foreigner (insert word of choice), but racists scare the crap out of me. Hold that thought in 2015.