Skilled Indians rally to oppose UK immigration laws

100,000 Indians take British government to court

London: Likening the British government to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, 49,000 mostly Indian professionals and their families are to get a court hearing next week over their bid to block changes to the terms of their stay in Britain on the grounds of human rights and race relations.

To stay, migrants have to prove they are earning at least 40,000 pounds a year and were below 32 years of age when they first applied.

Why, despite perennial griping, doesn't immigration matter more in the U.S.?

VDARE asks the question.

And, because of the magnitude of their defeats, we now have to endure the slings and arrows of the MainStream Media and its non-stop pontificating about how immigration reform doesn’t resonate at the polls.

See, for one example, Collins’ editorial cited above with its reference to the “fringe”.

Or read former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda’s gloating conversation with a Miami Herald reporter wherein he called Hunter and Tancredo “two crazies…who went nowhere…” in the presidential primaries. [A Mexican view of U.S. immigration debate, By Casey Woods, Miami Herald, February 17, 2008]

Growing, but still tiny, opposition to the new UK laws (part trois)

Small businesses are complaining because the immigration laws in the UK demand their enforcement. If they make a mistake, say, and hire an illegal, there is a ten thousand pound penalty, up from five thousand before the new law was passed.

Are liberals less pro-immigration than traditionally?

Cultural studies; from John Lloyd in the FT:

A cultural movement is happening within liberal opinion. It no longer greets immigrants with open arms. They are welcome – but with tighter conditions, aimed at encouraging, even mandating, integration. The old, cross-party order that strove to see immigration “not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance” – in the words of the late Roy Jenkins, a Labour home secretary in the mid-1960s – has been diluted. All these orotund concepts – assimilation, cultural diversity and mutual tolerance – are now in contest. The growing opposition, especially among Labour’s key working and lower middle class supporters, to the huge surge that saw some 1m people given legal residence in the UK in the past decade, according to endlessly contested government figures, is too great to ignore.

This political shift has now spilled into Britain’s most important cultural institution, the BBC. ...

Now comes a larger revision: a “White” season of programmes, stretching across the next two weeks on BBC2, which includes Last Orders, a lyrical evocation of a dying working men’s club; Rivers of Blood, a sympathetic analysis of Enoch Powell’s speech of 40 years ago, prophesying violent ethnic conflict; All White in Barking, an account of the high-immigration east London suburb, whose central character, Dave, a BNP activist, is evenly portrayed; and The Poles are Coming, a vision of Peterborough as a city that has become semi-Polish, or “swamped” as some of its older citizens see it. Any one of these programmes would probably not have been aired three years ago. They would certainly not have been combined in a season the existence of which is at least a partial “sorry not to have paid you more attention” gesture.

Richard Klein, the initiator and commissioning editor for the series, says: “I feel the white working class has been ignored by the political classes. They feel the pressure of ‘political correctness’ – and the BBC has been one of these pressures. ... I think there has been a loss of nerve in the past to grapple with challenging issues”.

Why can't the Bush administration build a 28-mile fence?

Delayed for three years. Borjas calls it "#13,243,478 Why The Bush Administration Can't Be Trusted."

Burkini-clash

The Hanzebad pool in Zwolle asks a woman swimming in a burkini to leave because it might scare off other visitors. Instead, they offer separate hours for religious women, sort of like Harvard's QRAC.

If you don't know what you're doing next year...

In light of record-low unemployment, the Australian government...

"will also ease the rules for backpackers visiting Australia on working holidays, allowing them an extra year on their visas if they spend three months in construction jobs in regional Australia."