Immigration: The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Skilled Indians rally to oppose UK immigration laws

2008-03-01T13:32:00.002-05:00

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.?

2008-03-01T02:16:00.002-05:00

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)

2008-03-01T02:03:00.004-05:00

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?

2008-02-29T19:03:00.002-05:00

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?

2008-02-28T13:02:00.001-05:00

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

Burkini-clash

2008-02-28T12:32:00.002-05:00

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...

2008-02-27T13:30:00.001-05:00

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."

Why are highly-skilled Britons and Western Europeans leaving for the U.S.?

2008-02-27T03:24:00.003-05:00

The new OECD report shows a brain gain for Britain: 1.26 million immigrants live in the country, but 1.1 million immigrants left, which gives a net "brain gain" of more than 100,000 people.

Here's what the article doesn't say: these immigrants are disproportionately coming from the third-world. In fact, all Western European countries are losing their own skilled workers and trying to replace them with third-world workers.

Where are the British and Western European workers going? To the U.S. of course. The same OECD report noted that the US was the only country to receive more highly-skilled immigrants from OECD countries than it lost. It had a positive balance of about 1m highly-skilled migrants from the EU 15 (pre-2004-accession)

More opposition to UK immigration laws

2008-02-27T03:15:00.003-05:00

More opposition to UK immigration laws, this time from the MPs on the Joint Commission of Human Rights, which claims that a system asking workers to commit to residing in the UK before moving the goalposts that will make it so that 40,000 workers have to leave, is an injustice. Byrnes dismisses this as an "emotional" argument and suggests that there are many people abusing the system. "It was quite clear people were coming to the UK and spending extended periods of time without working." How many people is a good question. There will be a judicial review on the new laws next month.

Random think tank is wrong about something

2008-02-27T02:56:00.006-05:00

A Public Policy Institute of California study has been released suggesting that immigrants incarcerated less frequently than natives. Relatively big media coverage.

Several immediate problems before I have read anything:

1. Petty crimes like shoplifting and vandalism are not counted.
2. The children of immigrants are not included.
3. Most importantly, the study also doesn't distinguish between immigrants who are here legally and immigrants who are here illegally.

A study on the 3rd point would be the most relevant, really.

Who says the U.S. doesn't have home-grown radicals?

2008-02-27T00:39:00.003-05:00

Who says the U.S. doesn't have home-grown radicals? Biographical basics of the Virginia Imam with recently-disclosed ties to Persian-gulf Al-Qaeda:

Anwar al-Aulaqi was born in New Mexico in 1971 while his father studied for a college degree. He spent part of his childhood in Yemen and returned in 1991 to study engineering at Colorado State University. After graduating, he became a mosque leader, first in Fort Collins, Colo., and then in San Diego.

States vs Feds on illegal immigration

2008-02-27T00:15:00.004-05:00

What's the difference between the states and the feds when approaching illegal immigration?
The key difference seems to be that the states go after everybody, everywhere, whereas the federal approach focuses on law-breakers.

Not only have state officials in Oklahoma, Utah, Indiana, and Arizona, among others, begun to deport illegal immigrants in the U.S., but statistics released today show the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has deported—get this—almost three times as many people as they did the preceding year. 64,000 from September 2005-September 2006 to what is now 164,000 from September 2006-2007. Money Quote:

"It used to be two parties in the courtroom: the state and the defense," said Marian C. Cordier, a Rockville defense lawyer. "Now you know immigration is waiting in the wings."

Ye Daily Counterfactual

2008-02-26T13:04:00.001-05:00

Sam Huntington: "Would America be the America it is today if it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil."

Exaggeration, but for the most part true.

Where international law meets necessity (was John Bolton right?)

2008-02-26T11:21:00.002-05:00

Why Europe cannot move to a skills-based points system immediately: "For most countries a radical shift towards employment-based immigrants is limited by international treaty obligations towards protecting families and providing sanctuary for refugees. So raising the share of employment-based immigrants up to the Canadian level (about half) would imply significant increase in total immigration – something that would make policy makers think twice."

The Sweet Hereafter

2008-02-26T01:32:00.001-05:00

A schoolbus driver crashes and kills four children. The driver survives, and is subsequently discovered to be an illegal immigrant. 24-year-old Olga Marina Franco of Guatemala is now being being handed over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of Homeland Security, and will be deported.

Why is this such a big story? As of now, there are 102 articles on Google News about this incident. There are two things I don't understand. The first is why this tragic but otherwise unremarkable event is getting so much press. Surely immigrants are not significantly more likely to crash vehicles than natives. Is this part of the "anti-immigrant" sentiment that liberal elites often accuse the country of being in the grip of? The second thing is why Franco initially lied about being from Guatemala and said she was instead from Mexico.

A feeble protest, but may be a harbinger of future opposition

2008-02-25T23:18:00.003-05:00

The first group, to my knowledge, to publicly oppose the new UK immigration laws. British-based Indian Workers Association cries racism; oppose new laws on grounds of discrimination. Calls for a national campaign, but unlike the U.S., where Latino groups do already have a presence in the political system, this "campaign" seems very low-profile. For one thing, aside from this statement, there has been no greater physical action. Second, no sign of this in the British press; this is coming from the Times of India.

Liebensraum

2008-02-25T16:57:00.007-05:00

Why 3.5 million Britons live abroad: better quality of life.

Alan Pettigrew....was contemplating a move to Nova Scotia, Canada and told Scotland on Sunday: "We live on a farm near Bonnybridge and for what I can sell that for I can get a place three times the size in Canada with no mortgage." He added that when you have a growing family the cost of living is also "a big factor".

Links for 2008-02-25

2008-02-25T14:44:00.001-05:00

The numbers in parenthesis are ratings. The most useful article is a 3, the least a 1.

Salt-lake Tribune: Op-Ed calls recent immigration laws anti-family and anti-Mormon (1). Theological argument proffered, of the desire to see " a Lord's house" on the mountains to which "all nations shall flow."
Harsher immigration laws in Oklahoma, Arizona (3), see declines in school enrollments, a scarcity of construction workers and emptying of rental homes. Supporters say jobs left open by fleeing immigrants are filled by unemployed Americans....Moreover, immigrants are bolting to Texas, California, or Minnesota. Legislators in 36 states adopted 244 immigration-related measures last year, according to National Conference of State Legislatures....(randomly) ruins the circus industry.
Jyllands Posten praises new British immigration laws as "another wind" free of "political correctness." (2)
Agriculture visas (1): "The 66,000 slots available under the existing visa program for temporary seasonal workers are not nearly enough to satisfy the demand and usually are snapped up within a day or two."
Bush is often praised on immigration...(3) the platforms of all three candidates today reflect the consensus around his actions....By the end of this year the border patrol will be 18,000, from 9000 in 2001. DHS has increased funds for border security from $4.8 bn in 2001 to $12.3bn in 2008....AA repudiation of the "catch and release" policy, where aliens caught would simply be given a Naotice to Appear, to which they would simply not turn up. Now a "catch and return" policy....Tightened the Canadian border by requiring the use of a passport and not merely an oral declaration of citizenship; precursor to Congressionally mandated full implementation of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative in June 2009. ...E-Verify program...U.S. removed or returned almost 1.2 million illegal aliens from the United States.