In anticipation of the next influx, the familiar routines are being acted out in parliament and Whitehall. Those who speak out and warn of potential tensions, as Labour's former Home Secretary David Blunkett did last month, are rubbished and denounced as xenophobes. There is a certain irony here. This is what the Labour leadership used to do to those who dared to issue warnings a decade ago about the last round of immigration. 

To their credit, some of those involved back then are attempting at last, manfully, to process their guilt. Last month, Jack Straw, the former Home Secretary under the last Labour government, made an admission: "One spectacular mistake in which I participated (not alone) was in lifting the transitional restrictions on the Eastern European states like Poland and Hungary which joined the EU in mid-2004."

The Home Office statisticians had estimated that only a few thousand Poles or Hungarians would want to come to the UK. In the event they came in their hundreds of thousands.

"Lots of red faces, mine included," says Straw now.

"Lots of red faces", is a rather mild way of describing the results of Straw's miscalculation. More than half a million Poles have come here, and Polish has replaced Welsh as the UK's second most common language. On one level it is entertaining watching these gyrations by those who at the time would not listen when opponents warned them about the scale of what was coming. On another level it is utterly maddening. In the middle of the last decade, around the time of the 2005 UK general election for example, those who dared to voice worries were smeared as racists and treated with disdain by broadcasters.

But, Bulgaria and Romania apart, complaining about this is beside the point. It is too late. The immigration has already happened, past tense. Peter Hitchens put it well, writing in the Mail on Sunday earlier this year: "The greatest mass migration in our history has taken place. The newcomers are lawfully here. They have the jobs, live in the houses, use the NHS. Their children are in the schools. Come to that, they are paying tax."

Hitchens is right. An argument about whether or not the bulk of the newcomers should be here is increasingly irrelevant. Those who are not illegal migrants are here lawfully. They are raising families. Roots are being put down. 

That being the case, it is curious that there is so little interest from the political parties in who these people are and what they want for themselves and their families. In any other business, the new arrivals might be seen as potential customers to be studied and wooed. Might the millions of new arrivals be tempted to vote, and if so which way?