Bill Carmichael: The immigrants we can welcome

It turns out she is Bulgarian, and very proud of the fact. We made it up by smiling and nodding – she doesn't speak much English – and she pressed a few business cards into my hands.

I learned that she is a fully-trained beautician and, in the unlikely event I ever want a face pack or my eyebrows plucking, she can offer me a tidy discount.

A few days later, I called into one of those car valeting and hand wash places that have sprung up all over the country. Here the manager was Polish, although the guys doing the actual work were Iraqi Kurds. And a fine job they did, too. When they had finished, my old banger looked as though it had just rolled off the forecourt – and all for 18.

The next day I popped into a caf while waiting for a train, where I was served by a stunning blonde, blue-eyed Lithuanian girl who wouldn't have looked out of place on the front page of a fashion magazine.

The face of Britain is changing – and I'm not convinced that is necessarily a bad thing.

Let's be clear – I am not in favour of the sort of lax immigration policy pursued to such catastrophic effect by the Labour government for the last 13 years. Labour wanted to change Britain by "rubbing our noses in diversity", but their crazy open doors policy simply made the UK a magnet for every criminal, terrorist and benefits bandit from the four corners of the earth.

But carefully controlled immigration can benefit a society. Let's not forget that some of the most successful countries – the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – were built on the labour of immigrants.

The clue to successful immigration lies in the examples quoted above – in each case the visitors to this country were working hard, doing the sort of jobs our native unemployed think are beneath them.

There are three golden rules:

n Immigrants should work and pay tax. You can only truly belong to a society if you are prepared to contribute to it.

n Immigrants should obey the law. If you break the rules, you should be sent home. We've enough home-grown criminals without importing more from abroad.

n Immigrants should learn English. Not only does this help integration, but fluency in English is of enormous economic benefit to the individual.

This, I think, is more important than any artificial cap on numbers as proposed by the coalition Government (which doesn't, incidentally, include immigration from within the EU).

Of more concern than hard-working immigrants is the eight million "economically inactive" Britons who rely on benefits provided by the working population.

This week, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith revealed that 1.4 million of these had been on benefits for nine or more of the last 10 years.

I'd happily swap these parasitical freeloaders for a few more Bulgarian beauticians, Iraqi car washers and Lithuanian waitresses.

If you please...

Please may I have your attention? Forgive the formal expression, but it is the way I was brought up.

My first primary school teacher insisted we prefaced every request with the same verbal formula – "please may I have?"

Even then it sounded a bit quaint, if not positively archaic. One evening after school I piped up: "Father, please may you pass the butter?" My dad, a rough-hewn stevedore who spent his working days in the bowels of rat-infested rust buckets down at the docks, gave me a look I can remember vividly to this day.

But old fashioned or not, "please may I have?" is infinitely preferable to the current craze for the ugly expression "can I get?"

Where did this one come from? You hear it all the time. "Can I get a day return to Birmingham?", "Can I get a black coffee?" Ugh! A small thing I know, but I can't help thinking that this change from "please may I have?" is evidence of a decline in standards.