More immigration nonsense from Damian Green
Fresh from his insight into immigration control delays at Heathrow Airport (“wind was in the wrong direction”) the UK’s hapless immigration minister, Damian Green, has come up with another reason for doing nothing – this time to stem the flow of EU nationals into Britain in search of work and benefits – which for those under 50 includes free schooling and medical care for their children.
According to Green, temporarily limiting entry of EU nationals, as advocated by Frank Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead, would “close off the European market for jobs” and would “badly impact” British workers (Green means that British people would have even less chance than now of a job on the Continent).
What are the chances of British young people, not speaking the languages of Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Romania for instance, getting a job in these countries? – answer nil. What is the average wage in say Romania? – answer about £300 per month. The average monthly wages for computer programmers, miners, doctors at around £300-400 are not exactly enticing compared with even unskilled work on minimum wages in Britain – about £1,050.
Ministers don’t trouble with details
Minister Green may wish there wasn’t an immigration crisis in Britain. But there is – not just because of the half to three quarters of a million foreigners legally coming into the country every year, but in what is laughably referred to as the justice system being unable to remove the nearly one million which Migration Watch estimates are here as illegal, even under the UK’s lax administration of the legal entry criteria and its labyrinthine appeals processes – two tiers of appeal from the Immigration tribunals: the Court of Appeal and judicial review (see for example the Times law report of 29 May, the Justice Department versus the Secretary of State for the Home Department – Theresa May).
What should Britain do?
It should recognise that with an average income of £25,000 per head of population in a pleasant, basically safe and clean country, we will never reduce, let alone stop immigrant arrivals without new draconian limits being brought in and broadcast round the world. England, at 1,050 people per square mile, is now the most crowded Western country in the world.
As this writer published in the Times of 20 January 2003, only a complete moratorium on non-patrial immigration for 5 years, will allow the backlog of illegals to be tracked down and removed. At the same time Britain should use this 5-year breathing space to enact enforceable laws for future asylum and immigration (if any) after consultation with the British people by way of a referendum. Specifically, in this writer’s opinion, new statutes should make it impossible for the courts to interfere in decisions relating to foreigners’ requests to enter and stay in the UK – as in the absurd Abu Qatada Case[1]. Clearly, such far reaching changes would require Britain to leave the European Union and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights – steps ardently desired by an increasing number of our people – a number which will grow to a large majority if the prospect of ridding ourselves of these twin torments is made clear to all.
[1] The latest decision is to keep him in jail so that yet another appeal against his deportation to Jordan can be heard (probably in October) by the Immigration tribunal – even though his is not an immigration case per se, but an extradition case.
June 7th, 2012 at 12:46 pm
It would also require Britain leaving the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees and the 1992 Dublin Convention.
The 1951 Convention was passed because of the shameful turning away of Jewish people in the 1930s as they tried to flee Nazi persecution. It is true that at the time no one could have imagined what would follow, but there was still ample evidence that the Jewish situation in Germany from 1933 was something no civilised nation should ignore.
The problem is of course in 1951 people did not really foresee the massive expansion of the welfare state, and the ease of travel to Europe from what was then still called the third world. Thus they did not think that the 1951 Convention would become a means by which people in worse-off countries would try to move to better-off countries, i.e. economic migrants. Still less did they foresee the rise of people-smuggling gangs. And indeed for the first few decades they were correct – in 1971 a mere 200 people applied for asylum in the UK.
During the 1980s the UK and French authorities had a gentleman’s agreement whereby anyone arriving from the Continent without appropriate travel documents was returned to France. This removed any incentive for migrants to seek to come to Britain via France.
Not for the first time, however, the lawyers managed to ruin things, by seeking to formalise the arrangement by the Dublin Treaty of 1992, just as numbers were starting to increase. This required any would-be asylum seeker to claim asylum in the first safe country in which they arrived. In theory this was fine. But the reality was this: most asylum seekers, then as now, arrived first in Spain, Italy or Greece, and not France. Once someone had travelled into France and then to Britain, it would be impossible to prove what the actual first country was. So Britain could not return them to France, because it would be obvious France was not the first safe country. Nor could she return them anywhere else, because it could not be proven where that other place should be, save in very rare cases.
The French spotted this and, rather than return anyone back over the border from whence they came, shipped them over to Britain. The asylum seekers/economic migrants were happy about this because they saw Britain as a nirvana where they would be looked after.
It got worse. On arrival in Britain they were forbidden to work while their claims were being processed. This encouraged them to work on the black market – devoid of union or employment law protection and unknown to the taxman. Employers could treat them like garbage accordingly, and many did. For example, the repulsive hell that is London fast food outlets – chains that whilst tasteless and souless elsewhere are at least hygienic and respectable – dates from this time.
Worse, the prevailing ideology of multiculturalism at this time was actively to prevent newcomers to these shores learning the language, adapting to the culture or otherwise integrating with society.
Thus the first experience of hundreds of thousands of newcomers was that they were told to live in ghettos, have nothing to do with the indigenous culture, and given every incentive to cheat the taxman and the authorities generally, whilst working in conditions that weren’t much better than where they had come from. Quite what picture they formed of Britain after this I am not sure.
For the economic migrants, though, even life in a very shabby corner of Britain under hostile conditions remained superior to the countries which they had left behind, so despite the lack of welcome they had no incentive to leave. Also, being used to far worse living conditions than even a London housing estate, many were happy to share accommodation to an extent no native Briton would contemplate, and rent out the rest. As children received more assistance many claimed to be under 18 when they were in their 20s (again, British laws encouraging falsehood). Meanwhile the people-smuggling gangs began in earnest, trading on the reputation of Britain being a safe haven and paradise for anyone outside the EU (or inside the former communist countries).
Thus the trickle of 1971 became a veritable flood long before 2001.
All the cheap labour and increasing numbers left unskilled British working class people out of work and with inferior housing than would otherwise have been available. The idiotic British benefits system removed any incentive to accept such work as was available. And the traditional party of the British working class, Labour, more or less openly declared its new allegiance to recent immigrant communities by forebidding any debate on immigration whatsoever, claiming that it was racist, whilst as we have seen elsewhere keeping the driving purpose of the immigration policy (to make Britain truly multicultural and therefore put the hated Tories out of business) silent, so as not to alienate any working class British who had failed to notice what they were up to.
Yet the people I feel the most sorry for are the geninue refugees from countries with corrupt and/or extreme Islamic regimes. Imagine – they travel continents, abandoning everything they might have had, including their families, to seek refuge in the promised land in Britain. On arrival they are told they should have nothing to do with the evil British culture and instead live in a community governed by Sharia law (thank you Archbishop of Canterbury) – the very thing they’d fled – whilst at the same time being prohibited from working legally. I imagine they are left agreeing with Ghandi, who when asked what he thought of Western civilisation said “yes, that would be a good idea”.
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June 11th, 2012 at 11:35 am
I should also have added what Britain should do.
It should declare that anyone entering the country from a safe point of departure – ie anywhere in Europe for a start – is deemed not to be an asylum seeker and will therefore be returned to the point of departure immediately. There is no need for a judicial process here. Anyone getting off the Eurostar has come from Belgium or France. It is the responsibility and fault of Belgium or France for letting them get on it. So too with the lorries arriving at Harwich or wherever else. The only reason an asylum seeker could get to Britain via Europe is because of incompetence (or collusion) of the Border authorities in other EU countries. It cannot be stressed too highly that that is their problem (the other countries’) and not ours.
This would limit possible claims for asylum to flights from endangered countries direct to Britain. This massively reduced number would be something that the beleagured and frankly inept Home Office might have a chance of processing.
Secondly, all asylum seekers of working age should be given a six month temporary working visa, with the understanding that if they decline work then they lose any right to benefit, the same as a domestic claimant, and also lose the right to claim asylum.
This would mean they would be less of a drain on the taxpayer (though still a drain) and mean they would actually start making a legal and positive contribution.
Next they must accept housing wherever suits the state, not them. If I offer shelter to a neighbour who has lost her house or is fleeing abuse, I do not expect her to demand any room in the house, she would have to accept whichever room suited me. Similarly those seeking the protection of the British state should accept that protection wherever is convenient to the state, not congregating in ghettos in the already overcrowded inner cities. Already Britain has a mass of ethnic ghettos which have little or no interaction with the main culture of these islands and as a result it is breaking down as a nation into small groups competing on racial lines. The undesirability of this should not need elaboration. The burden has also disproportionately fallen on the English; comparatively few ethnic minorities live in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
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