Yesterday I commented on the ferocious competition among the leading UK political parties to prove their anti-immigrant bona fides, with UKIP trying to stake out an unassailable position by arguing that they need to stop children of immigrants from going to school. Today the Conservatives are fighting back, arguing that that’s not enough, they need to stop immigrants from having children at all. With this we’re back to 2008, when I first came to Britain (as an economic migrant), and the BBC was fulminating against the “foreign-born mothers” who were costing the NHS £350 million a year in maternity services. The fact that the NHS would grind to a halt if some of those foreign-born mothers were not working as nurses, in the intervals between popping out their expensive babies, was not mentioned.
Tag: immigration
How to stop immigrants from competing for our jobs…
… don’t let them go to school.
When the UK political establishment goes through one of its periods when everyone is competing to prove that they hate immigrants the most, it must be hard to be the putative anti-immigrant party trying to hold on to your market share. You need to do something outrageous to prove that you really really hate the immigrants more than anyone else. That’s the only way I can explain this proposal by the head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage to ban immigrant children from state schools for five years. Not illegal immigrants, mind you. Legal immigrants. His idea seems to be that the hedge-fund managers will pay to send their child to Eton, and people like me will either stay away or move here without my family. We can provide the British people with services that they’re not willing to do themselves, or not willing to pay to train their own people to do, and pay taxes, but not receive any government services in return.
I’m not sure whether the core UKIP voters are going to be thrilled about them shifting the immigrant population to mainly unattached young men.
Where to hold the negotiations?
The Tories are obsessively trying to find something to complain about with regard to EU migration, so that they can puff up their chests and say, “We’re standing up to those meddlers in Brussels! You don’t need to vote for UKIP.” The Tories will go into the next election with the slogan “We hate foreigners too. (But we’re not crazy about it.)”
Lacking a British equivalent to FOX News their polemics about “benefits tourism” have gained little traction because the phenomenon barely exists. Migrants come to work. So now they have a new strategy. He wants to be able to deny benefits — such as Jobseeker’s allowance — to EU migrants who have been here less than 4 years.
I have no strong opinion about the merits of this proposal, though I tend to oppose it. But how do I know that this is a very serious proposal directed at making the UK’s cooperation with Europe all that much more harmonious, and not merely a cynical electioneering ploy?
The proposal, which would require a rewriting of the EU’s social security rules, and possibly treaties, is to be delivered in an address in the West Midlands
Of course, that’s just where a British leader would present a proposal to rewrite treaties to allies whose concerns and opinions you take very much to heart. Will the negotiations be held entirely inside David Cameron’s skull, or will there be room for wider participation?
Billions, schmillions: Immigration edition
The Telegraph writes in big text
New report shows immigration over the Labour government years cost the public purse billions of pounds, while recent migration from inside Europe generated a £4 million surplus.
Then, in the main article, the study found
that recent immigration from Europe – driven by the surge in arrivals from eastern European – gave the economy a £4.4 billion boost…
More billions schmillions.
Scotland’s European future
I commented before on the interesting way an independent, increasingly cosmopolitan Scotland, and an increasingly suspicious and insular rump-UK might pass each other on the way through the EU door. I was interested to find out who is permitted to vote in next week’s independence referendum in Scotland. You might have supposed that an attempt was being made to appeal to the inbred Bannockburn nostalgia voters, perhaps even extending the franchise to self-identified Scots by birth. Instead, the voting eligibility criteria seem sedulously post-nationalist and forward-looking. Birth plays no role, only residence and citizenship. In addition to admitting 16- and 17-year-olds to the franchise, they are permitting — in a move that seems stunningly self-assured to anyone who remembers how the aftermath of the 1995 Quebec referendum descended into ugly recriminations against “money and the ethnic vote” — EU citizens ordinarily resident in Scotland to vote. There’s no clearer statement, I think, of how differently the Scots view their future from how the English view theirs.
And if the nationalists win the referendum on this basis, it will be hard to argue that they haven’t earned their independence honourably.
Betrayal
After the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many physicists felt that their discipline’s principles had been betrayed. Oppenheimer said that physicists had “known sin”. Their abstruse subject, seen as a pure source of enlightenment, had revealed its enormous destructive potential. The healing arts, the quintessence of noble pursuits, have also been showing their dark side, as the power to cure disease is inseparable from the power to cause disease. An Oath Betrayed was the title of a recent book on the role of U.S. physicians and psychologists in facilitating torture in Guantanamo. And now, yet another betrayal: The BBC reports that
What of goodness and purity remains in the world, when even English accents may also be deployed for nefarious ends? (Of course, in Hollywood films they are used for almost nothing else.)
More profoundly, two thoughts occur to me: Continue reading “Betrayal”
Weird Ed
Thursday were elections — local council elections and European parliament. The European results are being held back until Sunday, when other countries will be voting, but the local results show what look like solid improvement for Labour, big losses for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and substantial increases for the anti-immigrant UKIP. (Substantial because they held only two council seats before, and now they have over 100.) So the main topics of the news coverage were, of course,
- Labour is floundering.
- UKIP expected to do very well, perhaps get the most votes, in the European elections.
The best I can understand, the opposition is expected to gain a protest vote against the government currently in power in non-national elections*, so the fact that much of the protest vote was soaked up by UKIP makes them look like losers, because their gains were less than expected (if you ignored UKIP). Except, that reasoning is odd: Labour didn’t do badly in an absolute sense; they didn’t do badly in a prognostic sense — the protest vote is fleeting anyway, and their ability to hold it against a clown parade like UKIP says little about their performance in a general election.
But really, this was just an occasion, however inappropriate, for some anonymous Labour grandees to gripe about Ed Miliband. In particular, The Times quoted one as saying Miliband
looks weird, sounds weird, is weird.
American exceptionalism: Harassing tourists and others
A discussion broke out on The Dish about the high-handed and sometimes abusive treatment that foreigners entering the US are subjected to, even citizens of international peers, like the EU, compared with the treatment that Americans (and others) receive entering most European countries. All foreigners entering the US are, by law, treated as “an intending immigrant” when they arrive, and need to prove otherwise. Now, a former immigration official has replied with a justification:
Congress demands by law that every applicant for a tourist visa (or any nonimmigrant visa) be considered “an intending immigrant” until they prove otherwise. With good reason – a lot of them are intending immigrants. Why is it Americans have such an easier time traveling to other countries than citizens of those countries have traveling here? Because Americans go home, that’s why.
Even when US citizens work off the books for a year or two overseas, they almost always wind up coming home. The same can’t be said of most foreigners who come here, even Europeans.
Sounds pretty convincing. But is it true? How would he know? I’m always suspicious of categorical claims like this, even when I make them myself.
How about if we compare the number of people from different countries living abroad. According to the French government, there are 1.6 million French citizens living abroad, so about 2.7% of the population. About 2 million Germans (not counting the 600,000 or so Russians who are officially considered “Germans” by ancient descent), so about 2.5%. And Americans? According to the Bureau of Consular Affairs (part of the State Department) there are 7.6 million Americans living abroad. Divided into a population of 316 million, we get about 2.4%. Even if some of these estimates are off, it’s clearly not a qualitative difference.
Sorry, America, the world just isn’t as into you as you like to imagine.
“Rivers of Blood”: An insult (except when we say it)!
Conservative MP Nigel Mills has attacked Liberal deputy leader Vince Cable for criticising Tory anti-immigration panic with a comparison to Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, calling on the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills to resign:
It would be very hard for him to sit around the cabinet table having effectively compared his Conservative colleagues to Enoch Powell, which is an utterly ridiculous thing to have done.
The thing is, my understanding was that Powell was always a member in good standing of the Conservative party, until he left of his own accord. And given that he left in protest over Britain’s entry into the EEC — a move that Mills and his faction would like to reverse — it’s not clear what the objection is. Thatcher’s government offered him a life peerage, which he refused. If the Conservatives ever officially repudiated him, I never heard of it. Certainly they never objected when he was bringing in votes from the extreme right in the early 1970s.
It seems like typical family dynamics — “Rivers of Blood” is fine within the Tory family, but it’s an insult when outsiders say it.
November’s top deportation stories
I don’t mean to make light of the plight of the ordinary immigrants caught in the slow-grinding mills of the UKBA, but faced with a political climate where parties are competing to outflank each other to the right on immigration — If you want to join our government, you’d have to REALLY hate foreigners — they’ve managed to produce a year’s worth of absurd deportation stories in just a few days.
It’s hard to pick a favourite. First there was the American head teacher of a school in rural Scotland, married to a UK citizen, who was issued with a 28-day deportation order when he tried to replace his temporary visa with an application for permanent residency. (That one got resolved in his favour when the case provoked a crisis in relations between Westminster and the Scottish government, owing to the enormous difficulty of finding any qualified people who want to be head teachers in rural Scotland.)
Then there was another valuable worker, an Australian NHS therapist for children and adolescents who has been living and working in the UK for 9 years, also issued with a 28-day deportation order. And to round off a great week’s work undermining children’s education and welfare, the UKBA went right for the children themselves, sending a letter to a 7-year-old boy (whose mother is a British citizen), informing him that “you should now make arrangements to leave [the UK]. If you fail to do so voluntarily your departure may be enforced.”
Just yesterday, there was news that an asylum seeker who was nearly dead, after three months on hunger strike, had been summarily deported back to Nigeria on a private plane at great expense in order to make the point that the Home Office won’t be pushed around. Maybe they won’t, but they could at least have taken advice from the Foreign Office. Today, the news is that the plane and its passenger are back in Britain after 20 hours, having been denied entry to Nigerian airspace.
Well, at least they don’t assign their immigration agents with quotas to find sufficient numbers of harmless long-term legal residents who they can deport on a technicality, the way some countries do.
Common Infirmities 