IMMIGRATION CONCERN

NEWS AND VIEWS - BY SUBJECT

Quotations of news and views by subject

ASYLUM

Asylum
Britain top spot in Europe for refugees
Tom Lawrence
Daily Star, 21 June 2010

     More asylum seekers flooded into the UK than any other country in Europe last year.
     Britain took in 12,510 refugees in 2009, which was an annual rise of 22%.
     More than a third came from Zimbabwe, despite the Government offering £6,000 to help them return home. Refugees from Afghanistan made up the second largest group.
     The latest figures released by the EU underline how the UK has become one of the most popular destinations for refugees.
     It now grants protection status to more people a year than either Germany or France.
     Britain came top of the asylum table followed by the Germans, who let in 12,055 refugees.
     France came third, allowing 10,415 asylum seekers over its borders and Sweden was fourth with 9,085. ...
     A total of 26.9% of the 44,890 asylum applications were accepted by the Home Office, about average for the EU.
     However, 30% of the denied applications were approved on appeal, 11% higher than the EU average.
[Site link]

Asylum
More than 40,000 still waiting for asylum ruling
Daily Telegraph, 15 April 2010

     An asylum backlog of more than 40,000 cases has built up, with some four years old, Home Office figures show.
     The delays have developed while officials focused on clearing a larger, historic backlog discovered in 2006.
     Since then, 95,990 asylum applications have been made, of which 40,640 have not been concluded.

Asylum – backlog
[Backlog of asylum claims]
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 7 April 2010

     The Home Office will not clear a backlog of 450,000 historic asylum claims by next summer as promised, MPs warn today. The home affairs select committee said concerns by the new chief inspector of the border agency that work was not on track "confirmed our fears that the historic case-load of asylum applications will not be cleared by the deadline".

Asylum – border security
We punish those we should protect
The Observer, 14 March 2010
[Leading article]

     In September 2004, Tony Blair set out a new public sector performance target. By the end of the following year the number of failed asylum seekers being deported each month would exceed the number of new applicants.
     This benchmark has come to be known as the asylum "tipping point", the implication being that too many migrants were taking sanctuary in Britain under false pretences and most should be swiftly dispatched to their countries of origin.
     The target was missed, but only just, and not for want of trying. ... Some of the brutal consequences are now coming to light. An official report last week accused the UK Border Agency of failing to investigate claims of abuse in privately run detention centres for failed asylum seekers. ... ...
     A picture is emerging of a system in crisis, not because it is failing to deliver its objectives but because its zeal in pursuit of those objectives is making it inhumane.
     But seen from the government's perspective, asylum policy is a success story. In the last three months of 2009, there were 4,765 new claims, a 30% reduction in the number of applications compared with the previous year and the lowest level since 1992. The fact that fewer people seek refuge in Britain proves, according to Phil Woolas, immigration minister, that "our border has never been stronger".
     That might be true, but the boast contains a nasty subtext. The implication is that asylum applications are just another kind of immigration, one of the various channels that foreigners use to acquire the privilege of living in Britain; a breach in the fortress wall to be defended.
     By extension, the 200,000 asylum seekers whose cases have yet to be ruled upon are viewed by many officials, and much of the public, as "illegals" in all but name. The task is to expose their lies and throw them overboard.
     Around 70% of asylum applications fail. Even if the adjudication process is right every time that still means there are tens of thousands of genuine refugees in Britain in a state of desperate uncertainty. They are forbidden from working and cannot claim benefits while their cases are being processed, a measure designed to prove to the wider public that refugees do not take resources meant for the indigenous population. This too reveals the official assumption that most asylum seekers are really economic migrants.
     The distinction is vital. It is Britain's duty under the 1951 UN refugee convention to protect people fleeing persecution. Since that treaty was signed, the world has changed enormously. ...
     It is easier to condemn a broken system than to design a perfect one. There were grounds for the widespread suspicion a few years ago that asylum status was being fraudulently targeted as a shortcut to British residency. That public fear had to be addressed. But it was never proven that Britain was, as the Conservatives liked to allege, a "soft touch". Labour simply swallowed that charge and launched a crackdown. ...
     It should be a source of national pride that Britain is thought a desirable destination by refugees, who have throughout history enriched the countries that welcome them. Instead, people who turn to us for help are vilified and punished for asking. It must also be possible to distinguish humanely between real and false claims to refugee status. The investment required is not financial, but political. It requires a leader who will look at the current system and say plainly what is there: cruelty, injustice and shame throughout.
[Site link]

Asylum – costs, legal aid
£610 free legal aid for each asylum seeker
Christopher Hope
Daily Telegraph, 5 January 2010

     Taxpayers are paying for hundreds of pounds in free legal advice for every asylum seeker in Britain, figures show.
     Asylum seekers receive an average of £610 of legal advice once they have applied to stay. If the case is taken to a tribunal, the cost of the legal advice rises by an average of £1,670 for every application, according to a parliamentary answer.
     In 2008-09, nearly 47,000 asylum cases were heard, meaning the cost of the initial advice alone stood at an estimated £28 million a year.
     Separate figures also showed there were currently 4,857 appeals outstanding. ...
     The Ministry of Justice said legal aid was not automatically available and each application was considered on the basis of an individual's means.

Asylum – piracy
Pirates set free in case they claim asylum
Nick Britten
Daily Telegraph, 30 November 2009

     The Royal Navy has regularly been allowing Somali pirates to go free because of the risk they would claim asylum if prosecuted in Europe.
     Pirates terrorising ships in the Indian Ocean are often given medical checks and life jackets and fed after being caught, before being sent on their way.
     This is sometimes because, although they are carrying guns and even holding hostages, they have not been caught in the "act of piracy".
     More than 340 suspected Somali pirates have been captured by international navies in the past year and released.
     Julian Brazier, Conservative shipping spokesman, said: "The fault lies not with the hard-pressed naval commanders, but the ridiculous rules of engagement and operating instructions they are given by their political masters."

Asylum
Welcome to heaven, how about a cup of tea? Mail on Sunday special investigation into why asylum seekers head to Britain
Edna Fernandes
Mail on Sunday, 15 November 2009

     The latest figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) show asylum applications in industrialised nations rose by ten per cent in the first half of 2009 to 185,000, compared with the same period last year.
     Europe received 75 per cent of all asylum applications, although the United States remained the largest individual recipient with 13 per cent of the total number of applications filed in rich nations.
     France ranks as the second largest with 19,400 claims, followed by Canada (18,700), the United Kingdom (17,700) and Germany, ranked fifth (12,000).
     Over the whole of last year, Britain received 30,500 claims, including dependants. That figure has fallen from a peak of more than 80,000 eight years ago.
     Iraqis, Afghans and Somalis make up the biggest groups of claimants. Those heading to Europe are drawn by different factors ranging from personal to economic to which country offers the best chance of approval. ...
     Between 24 and 30 per cent of people claiming asylum in Britain win their case - and this includes their dependants. Greece, by contrast, has a one per cent approval rate for cases. Many of those whose applications are refused in Britain end up staying anyway, according to the UK Border Agency.
     Abdul Samad Samadi, chairman of the Afghan Association of London, says the traffickers are keenly aware of the commercial value of a one-way ticket to Britain. He estimates there are now 75,000 Afghans living here. He says 80 per cent of them used a trafficker.
     'The asylum seekers are big business for the traffickers. People are paying $10,000 to $20,000 per person to come to Britain,' he says. ...
     The lure of Britain is complex and there are many factors involved. But one commonly cited reason for it being a popular destination is that this country is a 'soft touch'. How true is this?
     Groups such as Migrationwatch UK, which lobbies for controls on immigration, argue that, under European Union law, asylum seekers are meant to lodge their claim in the first EU country they land in.
     In reality, many hold out for Britain where they believe they will get a better deal. Europe does not have a standard asylum procedure.
     Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch UK, says that in theory, an asylum seeker's first country of arrival is where their case should be decided. 'But that doesn't happen. Traffickers tell their clients not to allow themselves to be identified in any other country but the UK. They say, "Don't be fingerprinted until you get to the UK, until you arrive in El Dorado."' ...
     The cost to the British taxpayer in the last financial year was £478 million, down slightly from £485 million the previous year. ...
     Of the 30,000-plus cases a year, one third of claimants and their dependants are approved, one third go home either voluntarily or through enforced removals and one third remain here illegally. These 'failed asylum seekers' are a massive political headache. ...
     There are more than 140,000 failed asylum seekers still in Britain, says Migrationwatch UK's Sir Andrew. Each year, thousands more will join them.
[Site link]

Asylum – European Union
EU could force Britain to take more refugees
Martin Banks
Daily Telegraph, 22 October 2009

     Britain would be forced to take a greater number of asylum seekers under European Union plans that would create a common asylum policy with uniform criteria for deciding on cases.
     Commission officials yesterday announced that the "final building blocks" had been put in place to "harmonise" immigration.
     However, critics condemned the proposal, saying it would strip Britain of its sovereign powers to determine asylum policy. ...
     But Jacques Barrot, the European Commission's justice commissioner, said the system would "eliminate differences" and set out procedures to follow to avoid unequal treatment.
     He said the plans were designed to ensure asylum seekers would have the same chance of being accepted or rejected in all EU member states. ...
     The EU has made it clear it would like the allocation of asylum seekers to be "proportionate" based on population so that each country "shares the burden" of asylum applications. ... ...
     The proposals will be discussed by the European Parliament in November.

Asylum – border security
154,000 asylum seekers to be granted 'stealth amnesty'
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 12 October 2009

     At least 154,000 asylum seekers will be allowed to stay in Britain after the Home Office allowed a backlog of applications to build up, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
     Ministers have promised to clear the 450,000 so-called "legacy" cases, some of which date back to the 1990s, by 2011. Just under 200,000 cases have been dealt with so far, of which 63,000 immigrants have been told they could stay.
     A memo seen by this newspaper contained an official projection of how the remaining cases would be dealt with.
     The memo said that by completion, 154,000 cases would have been approved for indefinite leave to remain. By contrast, fewer than 40,000 would face removal.
     Tens of thousands more asylum seekers were unlikely to be traced at all, officials said.
     Most of those allowed to stay would be granted leave to remain under human rights laws because the delay in dealing with their claims meant they had effectively settled in Britain. ...
     Damian Green, shadow immigration minister, said: "However you look at this, this is an amnesty by stealth. ..."
     The memo, which was written in July by Matthew Coats, head of immigration for the UK Border Agency, was signed off by Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, and sent to Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary.

Asylum
Asylum rules relaxed to meet deadline
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 9 October 2009

     Ministers agreed to quietly relax immigration rules to clear a backlog of asylum cases, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
     Three years ago, the Government pledged to deal with an embarrassing backlog of 450,000 historic asylum claims by 2011.
     However, officials realised that in the case of 40,000 claimants, it was going to be too difficult to remove them from Britain because they came from countries with poor human rights records.
     These included Zimbabwe, Somalia, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Algeria, Nigeria and China.
     A secret memo shows how ministers agreed that Home Office officials could change the guidelines to grant them indefinite leave to remain.
     The memo was written by Matthew Coats, the head of immigration for the UK Border Agency, and sent in July this year to Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, and Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, who signed it off. In it, Mr Coats warns that under the existing guidelines, the 40,000 problematic claimants cannot be granted indefinite leave to remain. ...
     He suggests they could be allowed to stay after having been here for as little as four years, rather than 10 to 12 years as the rules stated. ...
     In another setback, the memo also discloses that the Home Office has lost track of 40,000 migrants who were refused extensions on their visas at least six years ago and does not know where they are.

Asylum
Allow one group to stay, then why not everyone else as well?
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 9 October 2009

     For the past three years, the Home Office has been grappling with the consequences of Labour's failure in its first eight years in office to control immigration and asylum.
     So many people arrived claiming to be political refugees that the system could not cope. ...
     In 2006, the Government decided to get to grips with this. Officials identified 450,000 of these "legacy cases" and set a target either to reach a decision about their right to stay or to remove them by 2011. ... In order to have a chance of hitting the deadline, officials have had to bend the rules so that 40,000 of the hardest cases are dealt with by simply allowing them to stay, whether they are entitled to or not. ...
     There are an estimated 6.5 million "irregular" migrants in the EU alone. How to deal with these people, many of whom are for the large part tolerated but do not have a legal status or a right to remain, is a problem that governments will struggle with for years to come.

Asylum – European Union
Britain's part in EU plan to share out asylum claimants between countries
Roland Schilling, UNHCR Representative to the UK
Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2009
[Letter to the Editor]

     Some states, mainly on the EU's southern and eastern flanks, such as Greece and Malta, are receiving disproportionate numbers of asylum claimants.
     Regrettably, reception conditions and chances for refugees to find protection differ among EU countries. So asylum seekers will move to France, and even onwards, unless better standards are implemented across the EU. ...
     Considering the long tradition of refugee protection in Britain, as well as the competence of its institutions, this country is well placed to encourage better practice and to share its expertise.
     Of the 42 million uprooted people in the world last year, only some 0.7 per cent entered Europe and 0.074 per cent reached Britain. Britain is not in danger of being "swamped" by asylum claimants, as some media reports have suggested, but it is certainly in the position to extend its support to states elsewhere in Europe which, due to their location, bear a disproportionate refugee burden.

Asylum – European Union
Europe to push for more asylum seekers in Britain
Robert Winnett
Daily Telegraph, 14 September 2009

     A powerful new European commissioner for human rights who is expected to push for the protection of asylum seekers and workers is set to be appointed later this year.
     The commissioner for fundamental rights and social rights is expected to put pressure on Britain to accept more asylum seekers from across Europe. Several Mediterranean countries claim that they are being put under undue strain from increasing numbers of migrants arriving from Africa. ...
     The establishment of the powerful new role is a centrepiece of José Manuel Barroso's campaign for re-election as the president of the European Commission. Mr Barosso, who is expected to be re-elected on Wednesday, pledged to increase the human rights role of the EU to win the backing of liberal and socialist parties across Europe.
     Europe's previous involvement in the rights of asylum seekers and workers has proved controversial in Britain. It is blamed for contentious legal decisions which have protected the rights of foreign criminals. ...
     Although the role of the new commissioner has not been defined, it is expected to lead to greater intervention from Europe.

Asylum – health care
Free care for failed asylum seekers
Rebecca Smith and Rosa Prince
Daily Telegraph, 21 July 2009

     Tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers will be able to obtain free health care following a Government rethink, it was announced yesterday.
     The decision was taken to allow treatment for some asylum seekers after doctors gave warning that they would not act as immigration officers by demanding to check passports before providing care.
     An estimated 450,000 failed asylum seekers in Britain are currently denied free treatment on the NHS.
     However, a joint review of the policy by the Department of Health and the Home Office ruled that up to 20,000 would now be allowed free health care, including children and those who would "otherwise be destitute", or could not return home "through no fault of their own".
     With health charities claiming that the NHS faced the most challenging financial period in its 60-year history, ministers were last night accused of "jamming the door open for illegal immigrants".
     Migrationwatch, the pressure group, said that over time, as many as a million foreigners could take advantage of the rethink.
     The decision, details of which were released on the day before the parliamentary recess begins, follows five years of consultation. It was hailed by ministers as protecting the rights of the vulnerable. ...
     However, Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch, said: "No wonder they are queuing up in Calais. These proposals amount to jamming open the door for illegal immigrants to access the National Health Service."
     He said the Government "dithered" about the issue for years and chose "almost the last day of Parliament to announce their surrender to the immigration lobby."
     "We accept that medics cannot be used as immigration officers. That is why we have proposed that each primary care trust should have a small office of trained personnel who could decide whether or not non-British nationals are entitled to NHS treatment." ...
     A public consultation will be held on the changes.

Asylum – deportation
144,000 asylum seekers here to stay
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 9 July 2009

     At least 144,000 asylum seekers will be allowed to stay in Britain because of a backlog of claims.
     More than 63,000 subjects of 450,000 historic cases that were found to have slipped under the radar for years have now been told they can stay.
     Human rights laws mean that because they have been in the country for so long, the Home Office would have difficulty trying to remove them.
     Officials working through the so-called "legacy" backlog have examined 197,500 cases and there has been a 32 per cent approval rate, Lin Homer, the Chief Executive of the UK Border Agency, told MPs yesterday.
     If that continues then some 144,000 will be able to stay once all the case files have been looked at, in what the Tories have labelled an amnesty by the back door. ...
     The 450,000 files in the Case Resolution Programme were unearthed in 2006. Among them are claimants who should have been deported as far back as the mid-1990s.
     Ministers have promised to work through all the cases by 2011, while also having to deal with all fresh asylum claims and those failed cases still awaiting deportation.
     Miss Homer told the home affairs committee that she was confident that target would still be met.
     Human rights laws will be the reason most cases were approved, either because it is unsafe to return the asylum seekers or because they have been here so long they now have families and are protected under the right to family life.
     The list includes 5,150 from Zimbabwe, 4,900 from Pakistan and 4,500 from Somalia.
     Miss Homer also said that at least 7,000 may never be traced and their files have been archived.

Asylum – deportation
Flawed £1m asylum project results in only one family leaving Britain
Alastair Jamieson
Daily Telegraph, 25 June 2009

     A £1 million government scheme to help failed asylum seekers resulted in only one family leaving Britain, a report has found.
     The UK Border Agency pilot project ran for less than a year and was "mismanaged from start to finish", a review by the charity, the Children's Society, claimed.
     The scheme, in Kent, aimed to help families whose asylum applications had failed by taking them out of detention centres and placing them in a residential hostel. It was hoped some would leave the country voluntarily while others could obtain schooling and health care before deportation.
     In a similar trial in Glasgow, failed asylum seekers will be housed in private flats rather than held in Dungavel detention centre.

Asylum
New law may give asylum to 22,500 refugees
Nick Fagge
Daily Express, 29 April 2009

     Controversial plans will require the UK to accept one in eight of all migrants who set foot in any of the 27 European Union countries and demand refugee status.
     It could mean an estimated 22,500 more people coming to Britain.
     Taxpayers will be expected to foot the bill for their food, accommodation and clothing, plus legal fees while they apply for international protection.
     Asylum seekers must also be given the right to work within six months of their arrival, enabling them to claim thousands of pounds in benefits if they cannot find a job. Their children must also be found school places.
     Migrants can only be detained as a last resort and must not be held in secure accommodation more than 72 hours without a judge's approval.
     The proposals, supported by Labour MEPs, are part of the EU's Common European Asylum System and will be put to the European Parliament in Strasbourg for approval.
     Last night Conservative MEP Philip Bradbourn said: "Economic migrants posing as asylum seekers would have an easy ride under these plans.
     "Once again, the EU thinks the only answer to justified immigration concerns is to take control of asylum policy. Controlling our borders is one of the most important roles of government.
     "For more than a decade, Labour has been unable to form a coherent immigration policy, but that should not justify handing it to Brussels."
     UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage said: "Brussels will soon be dictating who has the right to live and work in Britain. The EU is pushing for a common asylum and immigration policy but it is being pushed through without proper thought."
     EU member states will be forced to take refugees or face huge fines under the proposals outlined on Monday.
     Migrants will be rehoused from states "confronted with a large number of asylum applications" such as Malta, Greece, Italy and Spain's Canary Islands to larger countries such as the UK – a reversal of the rule that requires applicants to seek sanctuary in the first safe country.
     Member states would be compelled to accept a percentage of applicants in accordance with their population.
     This would mean the UK taking in 13 per cent of all refugees arriving in the EU – or 22,500 of the 322,000 average arrivals over the last 10 years.
[Site link]

Asylum
Failed asylum seekers win right to stay amid hearings 'shambles'
Chris Hastings, Alex Ralph and Ian Johnston
Sunday Telegraph, 19 April 2009

     Failed asylum seekers are winning the right to stay in Britain because of "shambolic" failings in the immigration hearing system, ...
     Hundreds of appeal hearings are going ahead without a representative from the Home Office to defend its original decision to deny asylum.
     Immigration lawyers admitted that the situation is helping their clients to win cases they might otherwise have lost.
     The disclosure could help explain why the percentage of asylum seekers winning their appeals has risen from 17 per cent in 2005 to 25 per cent for the third quarter of 2008. ...
     Over the last two weeks, reporters from this newspaper attended 25 hearings around the country. At 24 of them, no Home Office Presenting Officer (Hopo) – who is tasked with putting the department's case before the immigration judge – was present.
     In the one remaining hearing, the officer turned up late and admitted that she was unprepared.
     Senior sources close to the hearings have said the Home Office is failing to properly defend about a third of cases which come to appeal.

Asylum – costs
Failed immigrant loses NHS test case
Auslan Cramb
Daily Telegraph, 31 March 2009

     Failed asylum seekers are not automatically entitled to free treatment on the NHS, one of Britain's most senior judges has ruled.
     Individual hospitals have the discretion to decide whether to treat penniless patients who are not British residents, and should use it in the most urgent cases, the judge said.
     In the case of a Palestinian man refused free treatment for a liver condition, Lord Justice Ward ruled that it was not right to say that a failed asylum seeker who had been in the country for more than a year had "lawfully resided" in Britain for that period, and thus qualified for NHS care.
     The ruling at the Appeal Court in London was made in a test case brought by a 35-year-old, identified in court only as YA, who was told he was not eligible for free treatment at West Middlesex University Hospital and was charged £9,000. He was refused leave to remain in Britain but had no travel documents, so could not return to the Middle East.

Asylum
Asylum magnet
Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2009

     Britain was the third most popular destination for asylum seekers, the UN said yesterday. Some 159,000 people claimed asylum in Britain between 2004 and 2008, with the US and France receiving more out of the top 44 industrialised nations.

Asylum
Synod votes for asylum amnesty
Martin Beckford
Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2009

     More than 300,000 asylum seekers should be allowed to stay in Britain indefinitely, the Church of England said.
     The Church's governing body, the General Synod, voted overwhelmingly in favour of an amnesty for asylum seekers whose cases were still being decided. It said all those who wanted to live in Britain should be allowed to work.
     The Synod added that a solution must be found to the "intolerable" situation of people who were refused the right to remain but could not return to their home countries, and that children and families must no longer be detained in immigration removal centres. The Rev Ruth Worsley, a priest in the diocese of Southwell and Nottingham who tabled a motion on the issue, said: "The financial cost to our country, as well as the human cost which leaves people in limbo for years, not knowing what their future might hold, seems unconscionable.
     "The Gospel tells us that we are not a tribal nation but a global family."

Asylum – deportation
Asylum seekers 'face one in 10 chance of removal'
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2009

     Asylum seekers who were told that they could not stay in Britain could face just a one in 10 chance of being removed, the Government's auditors said yesterday.
     There was also no system in place to track those granted asylum, even though their cases were supposed to be reviewed after five years.
     Their report suggested that the Home Office was going to miss its promise of clearing a backlog of 450,000 asylum cases by 2011.
     Tens of thousands could not be dealt with because of "external factors," either in the person's home country or in Britain, the National Audit Office said.
     The report found that 70 per cent of escorted removals were cancelled and thousands of emergency documents obtained to help return failed asylum seekers remained unused. The backlog of new asylum cases coming to Britain that had not been dealt with doubled last year.
     The auditors found that of those who applied for asylum between January 2007 and February last year and were refused by new regional teams, between just seven and nine per cent were removed by August last year. In comparison, about 98 per cent of those under the detention fast-track system were removed.
     A Home Office spokesman said: "This in no way reflects the total number of failed asylum seekers removed in 2007.
     "In fact, we removed more than 13,700 people compared to an intake of 17,500 – that's a removal rate that's closer to eight out of 10."

Asylum – crime
80 foreign murderers welcomed to Britain: Albanian killers allowed to stay despite being on Interpol 'wanted' list
Sue Reid and Arthur Martin
Daily Mail, 23 January 2009

     Eighty foreign killers are exploiting the chaotic asylum system to set up home in Britain, it was revealed yesterday.
     The convicted murderers from Albania have been given British passports despite being officially listed as 'wanted' by Interpol.
     Most slipped across the Channel from Calais to Dover hidden in the back of lorries on ferries. They used bogus names and false papers to claim asylum, often pretending to be from the war-torn Balkan republic of Kosovo.
     The scandal came to light when Albania's chief of police complained that 100 criminals from his country have been granted British citizenship and now live here.
     The police chief said the criminals have been allowed to stay even though the Albanian government has informed the Home Office of the true identities of the men and their crimes, which also include rape and robbery.
     Many of the convicted criminals have been living in the UK for up to ten years and have started new families here.
     As the revelations exposed the shambles within the asylum system yet again, campaigners expressed their outrage.
     Sir Andrew Green, of MigrationWatch, said: 'It is a real concern that people accused of, or even convicted of, very serious crimes should apparently find it so easy to gain asylum in Britain.'
     Rose Dixon, of victim group Support After Murder and Manslaughter, added: 'I'm astounded. If this is correct, I'm appalled that these people are walking the streets of Britain. I think we should be told a lot more about this.'
     After the Home Office was informed about the true identity of the asylum seekers, extradition proceedings against them were lodged by the Albanian Government.
     But complex legal arguments and the need to find interpreters and psychologists has led to lengthy delays.
     Albanian criminals use myriad loopholes in the extradition laws to avoid being sent home.
     Their lawyers often claim they will suffer human rights abuse on their return, or that trials in their absence were unfair because they could not give their side.
     The situation is even more complicated if they have become British citizens. Under the Human Rights Act 1988, this gives them further protection against being removed because their family life would be disrupted. ...
     Ahmet Prenci, the Albanian chief of police, said he felt as if all his force's hard work in tracking down the culprits had been in vain.
     'We have made a list of our people who are hiding in the UK,' he said. 'There are 100 criminals, and more than 80 per cent are wanted for murder and have been convicted in absentia.
     'They have been given British citizenship despite our efforts to extradite them to serve prison sentences in our country.
     'We are working intensively to identify, locate, and then to arrest wanted Albanian people in Britain. Unfortunately, many have British passports obtained after they claimed asylum by pretending to be Kosovans.
     'We are unhappy that the courts repeatedly refuse extradition of these criminals. There is no reason for an Albanian citizen who has been involved in a crime not to be punished.'
[Site link]

Asylum – deportation
90% of failed asylum seekers remain in UK... and backlog of undecided cases doubles in a year
Matthew Hickley
Daily Mail, 23 January 2009

     As many as nine out of ten failed asylum seekers are being allowed to stay in Britain despite having no right to remain, a report from a Government watchdog reveals today.
     The backlog of illegal immigrants awaiting deportation is growing fast as the UK Border Agency fails to keep pace with the number of rejected applicants. The number of unprocessed cases is also growing.
     And Government rules stating that all successful asylum seekers must have their cases reviewed after five years - to see if their country is now safe enough to return to - have descended into farce, because the Border Agency has no way of tracking those living in Britain and no plans for a review.
     Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling called the report, from the National Audit Office, a 'shocking indictment of the shambles that is our immigration and asylum system'. Meanwhile, the Commons Public Accounts Committee, to which the NAO reports, claimed the Agency was 'struggling to cope.' ...
     Today's report acknowledges that the £800million-a-year system is now 'better organised than before', but highlights grave problems which in many cases are getting worse.
     A surge in the number of asylum claims saw the backlog of undecided cases more than double in a year, to almost 9,000.
     The NAO tracked more than 25,000 claims lodged from January 2007 to February 2008, of which almost 14,000 were refused.
     But of 10,719 cases processed in the seven regions around the UK, only 918 - less than 10 per cent - had actually been deported by the following August.
     The rate was higher for 3,000 false claimants who were fast-tracked in detention. Including these claims, the overall removal rate was just one in four.
     A severe shortage of detention spaces is making removals harder, the report warned, with much of the available capacity taken up by foreign criminals who have completed their sentences and are awaiting deportation.
     The NAO also highlighted glaring inefficiencies, including:
     • Seventy per cent of planned deportations - where security staff accompany deportees on flights home - are cancelled, often due to lack of proper coordination, leading to 'additional work and costs'.
     • The Agency often has to buy emergency travel documents from foreign governments to deport failed asylum seekers, but 13,000 of these have been wasted because individuals absconded, or because the papers expired.
     • Since 2005, Britain has granted asylum for five years only - after which cases should be reviewed in the hope that some immigrants will be able to return home.
     But astonishingly the Border Agency 'has no process' to track refugees living in Britain and 'no plans in place to review these cases'.
     There are 8,000 due for review next year.
     Last night, the Agency's chief executive Lin Homer confirmed there was 'no requirement' for asylum seekers to tell officials when they move house.
     Sir Andrew Green, of MigrationWatch, said: 'This is a shameful performance for the expenditure of hundreds of millions of pounds. It is no surprise that asylum seekers, many of them bogus, are queuing up in Calais.'
[Site link]

Asylum
180,000 to stay in asylum fiasco
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 10 December 2008

     At least 180,000 asylum seekers caught up in the claims backlog fiasco are likely to be allowed stay in Britain.
     More than 50,000 out of 450,000 who were found to have slipped under the net in 2006 have so far been permitted to stay, Lin Homer, the chief executive of the UK Border Agency, told MPs.
     If the 40 per cent approval rate continues, at least 180,000 will have been freed to stay once the backlog is cleared. Applicants whose cases have been ignored for up to a decade or more are now expected to be given the green light because sending them home would breach their human rights after they have effectively settled here.
     Some of the files date back to the mid-1990s.
     The list includes thousands of people from Turkey and Pakistan. Critics said the move was effectively an amnesty by stealth. ...
     The 450,000 files in the Case Resolution Programme were unearthed in 2006 after the foreign prisoners scandal.
     Among them are claimants who should have been deported years ago.
     Ministers have promised to work through all the cases by 2011, while also having to deal with all fresh asylum claims and those failed cases still awaiting deportation. ...
     Normally, just 10 per cent of asylum claims are granted in the first instance, although more are approved on appeal.
     Human rights laws will be to blame for most cases, either because it is unsafe to return the asylum seekers or because they have been here so long they now have families and are protected under the right to family life.

Asylum – border security
Children left at British ports
Daily Telegraph, 4 October 2008

     Children as young as three have been found abandoned at British ports and airports, it emerged yesterday.
     Home Office figures show 3,525 unaccompanied children under 18 applied for asylum in 2007, a two per cent increase on the previous year. Many of the youngsters were from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.
     Children were abandoned at Southampton docks, airport and service stations, Hampshire county council reported. The youngest was three years old.

Asylum – deportation
Rejected asylum seekers can stay
Christopher Hope
Daily Telegraph, 25 July 2008

     Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers whose cases were lost or overlooked by the Home Office and expected to be allowed to stay in Britain in what critics call an "effective amnesty".
     More than 100 foreign prisoners also remain on the run two years after the Government pledged to deport them, it was disclosed yesterday.
     The Home Office was engulfed in scandal two years ago when a backlog of 450,000 case files were found lying around in boxes, some dating from the mid-1990s and beyond.
     They included many would-be refugees whose cases had been rejected as bogus but who had not been deported.
     Figures released yesterday show that two years later officials have processed only 90,000 of the files, and almost half – 43 per cent – of the applicants have been told they can stay in Britain permanently. Many of the cases are still considered unfounded, but the asylum seekers and their families have been living in Britain for so long that the courts are likely to block any efforts to deport them on human rights grounds.
     All those allowed to stay will be able to claim benefits and seek citizenship, regardless of the merits of their original claims.
     The figures also show that only 308 of the 1,013 criminals who were supposed to have been ejected from the country have gone.

Asylum
Asylum refugees' treatment 'inhuman'
Patrick Sawer
Sunday Telegraph, 29 June 2008

     An inquiry will tomorrow brand Britain's asylum system inhumane and urge the Government to improve the treatment of refugees.
     The Independent Asylum Commission, whose members include senior clergy, lawyers and academics, will make 46 recommendations to the Home Office, including ways to speed up the handling of claims.
     The recommendations, which follow a two-year inquiry, aim to address the failings of the system from the moment claimants are first interviewed.
     The report says a "culture of disbelief" persists among officials which is stacking the odds against genuine refugees.
     The effect of post-traumatic stress as a result of rape and torture is not considered carefully enough by those interviewing claimants, say the commissioners.

Asylum – benefits and costs
Judge backs free NHS care for 11,000 asylum seekers
Daily Telegraph, 12 April 2008

     As many as 11,000 failed asylum seekers could qualify for free NHS treatment after a High Court judge declared that current regulations were "unlawful".
     The ruling by Mr Justice Mitting applies to asylum seekers who have had their claims turned down but who have become "ordinarily resident" in Britain because it would be unsafe for them to return to their native country.
     It follows a legally aided case brought by a Palestinian asylum seeker who was initially refused free treatment for chronic liver disease. ...
     The refusal was in line with NHS charges regulations introduced by the then health minister John Hutton in 2004.
     The Department of Health was immediately given permission to appeal.

Asylum – deportation
Number of asylum deportations falls
Daily Telegraph, 27 February 2008

     The number of failed asylum seekers being deported has slumped to a six-year low – just as the number arriving in Britain has leapt to its highest level since 2005.
     Home Office figures showed that the number of failed asylum seekers removed from Britain dropped by more than a quarter in the past year, down to 13,595.
     The news came as the number of asylum seekers arriving in Britain leapt by a fifth last year to the highest level since 2005. This includes a 40 per cent rise in the second half of 2007.

Asylum – border controls
Now wrongdoers have the grass on their heads to fear
Richard Gray
Sunday Telegraph, 3 February 2008

     Criminals who claim they were not at the scene of a crime can now be betrayed by their hair.
     Forensic scientists have developed a technique that allows them to track a person's movements by analysing samples of head and body hair.
     The technology relies on the distinct chemical "fingerprint" of air and water in different countries, and even in different regions of the UK.
     Each location has a unique cocktail of atoms known as isotopes in the air and water which get into the body when we eat, drink and breathe.
     As hair grows, it incorporates these isotopes, providing a record of where a person has been. ...
     The Home Office is believed to be interested in using the technique to weed out illegal immigrants who claim asylum using false documents. By analysing hair and nail clippings, immigration officers could determine when asylum seekers are telling the truth about the countries they claim to come from.

Asylum – deportation
Smith admits asylum error
Daily Telegraph, 24 December 2007

     The Home Secretary has admitted that the number of failed asylum seekers whose deportation flights are postponed because of their disruptive behaviour is almost double the figure previously released.
     Jacqui Smith has apologised after stating that there had been 1,173 such cases over two years when the real figure is nearly twice as high.
     In a letter to David Davis, the shadow home secretary, Ms Smith wrote: "It has now come to light that some of this information was incorrect and the figure is in fact 2,079.
     "Please accept my sincere apologies for the error."
     A Home Office spokesman said the mistake was down to an administrative error.

Asylum – repatriation
Asylum returners take cash and stay
Ben Leapman
Sunday Telegraph, 23 December 2007

     Failed asylum seekers are drawing benefits to which they are not entitled by claiming that they are about to return home – only to continue to live in Britain for years.
     The scam, which may have cost taxpayers millions of pounds, has come to light with the cases of four migrants who signed up for the Home Office's voluntary repatriation programme and who then went on to live off state handouts worth tens of thousands of pounds.
     They took advantage of a scheme that offers asylum seekers £4,000 to go home and set up in business. Last week The Sunday Telegraph revealed that £36 million of taxpayers' money had been spent helping 23,000 asylum seekers to start enterprises including an ostrich farm in Iran and a vineyard in Albania.
     However, millions more has been spent on supporting those who have signed up for the scheme but are still in the UK, some with no intention of returning home.
     Asylum seekers whose claims have been rejected, and whose appeal rights have been used up, are given 21 days' grace before being stripped of benefit entitlements and told to leave the country.
     However, if they agree to go home via the Voluntary Assisted Return and Reintegration Programme (VARRP), they become eligible for "Section Four support", an emergency handout consisting of free food vouchers worth £35 a week, plus free accommodation, with council tax and utility bills paid, worth about £100 a week.
     Most receive the benefit for two or three weeks until flights home have been arranged by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the agency that runs the assisted return scheme on behalf of the Home Office. ...
     The IOM said it always passed on to the Home Office the names of applicants who failed to leave the UK.
     The Home Office could not say why it had failed to stop payments in the four cases. It was also unable to say how many more migrants might be in similar positions or how much it spends on Section Four support.

Asylum – deportation
Had a bad day? Take it out on an asylum-seeker
Alasdair Palmer
Sunday Telegraph, 23 December 2007

     ... the Home Office's Border and Immigration Agency (BIA). They arrived at four in the morning at the foster home of a 15-year-old Iraqi asylum claimant in order to bundle him onto a plane out of Britain. ...
     ... It is an example of the bungling inefficiency that too often characterises the BIA. Its officials had known of J's arrival in the UK since April, and had tried to visit him in May, but J had not been at his address when they called. They then seem to have forgotten about him for nearly seven months, so that by the time they went back at 4am on November 8, the six-month time limit on removals in such cases had expired. That fact alone, said the judge, made the removal of the boy unlawful.
     The BIA's outrageous behaviour was wholly, and foreseeably, counter-productive: J will now have to be brought back to the UK, and will probably end up having his claim for asylum here approved. ...
     ... More than 20,000 children under 18 have arrived in Britain to claim asylum over the past few years: the Home Office won't say how many of those claims have been refused, still less how many children have been deported. Other agencies such as social and health services often refuse to co- operate with the BIA's attempt to identify and remove failed child asylum seekers. It makes the job of enforcing the law doubly difficult, and they mostly fail.
     There is a backlog of at least 200,000 people whose claims for asylum have been investigated and found to be without merit, but who have not left Britain. Many of them will not only never be removed: they will get their families into Britain, under the "right to family" reunion enshrined in the Human Rights Act. In asylum law, two wrongs make a right: if you can get here and stay here, you get the right to bring your family here. ...
     We need a tough asylum policy: one that makes sure that the law is enforced fairly and effectively. But this should not be confused with a brutal, inhumane 0one enforced by officials who behave in outrageous fashion. At the moment, however, we are getting the worst of both worlds: a feeble, ineffective policy, coupled with occasional bouts of outrageous behaviour from the officials charged with enforcing it.

Asylum – deportation
Immigration 'amnesty' for 160,000
Rosa Prince
Daily Telegraph, 18 December 2007

     More than 160,000 illegal immigrants due for deportation may be given asylum and allowed to stay in Britain amid claims that the Government has embarked on a secret "stealth amnesty".
     Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, disclosed last night that more than a third of the backlog of illegal immigrants reconsidered for deportation had actually been granted leave to remain since 2006.
     Over the past 18 months, the Government has reassessed only the cases of 52,000 illegal immigrants out of a backlog of 450,000. Of that 52,000, 19,000 have been allowed to stay – sparking fears that asylum could finally be granted to 164,000 previously due to be deported if the present rate of "amnesty" continues.
     The Conservatives said that despite previous Government plans to deport those here illegally, only 16,000 had so far been sent home – three per cent of the total backlog.
     Miss Smith disclosed the damning figures in a letter to the Commons home affairs committee, sent on the eve of MPs' Christmas recess. ...
     Many records covered people who had already left the UK, had died or were EU citizens with a right to reside here. Miss Smith said 900 caseworkers had been appointed to deal with the backlog.

Asylum – deportation
We can't buy our way out of asylum failure
Sunday Telegraph, 16 December 2007
[Leading article]

     So since 1999 the Home Office has operated a scheme which today hands failed asylum seekers £1,000 to leave Britain, and then gives them a further £3,000 towards setting up a business in their own country. The Government may have been proud of the programme, but it evidently did not feel proud enough to inform the public of its workings: today, we report the details of some of the scheme's beneficiaries, and what they did with their money, for the first time. ...
     The principal problem with any such scheme is that it rewards, and therefore provides an incentive for, bogus asylum claims – precisely the behaviour that it was meant to diminish. ...
     The reward scheme itself has not worked and should be abandoned, not least because it would send a strong signal that law-breaking will not be tolerated. The money should be used to deport failed asylum seekers, not to reward them. Only a small fraction of those whose asylum claims have been refused since 1997 have actually left the country. Although the Government deports about 1,000 failed asylum-seekers every month, there is still a backlog of 240,000 people whose claims for asylum have been rejected. Because around 1,000 additional claimants are added to the "rejected" list every month, the Government's deportations have made no impact on the huge backlog.

Asylum – politics
'Cover-up' over £35m asylum centres that were never built
Robert Watts
Sunday Telegraph, 4 November 2007

     Botched plans to detain thousands of asylum seekers in the depths of the countryside have wasted £35 million of taxpayers' money.
     Officials at the Home Office have also been accused of a cover-up after scores of documents about the proposed centre disappeared.
     Labour ministers originally planned to build four holding centres in rural areas five years ago. But the plans were shelved three years later after opposition from the Refugee Council, the Red Cross and thousands of local residents.
     A report this week by the National Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, will for the first time lay bare the full cost to taxpayers of the ditched policy. It will announce on Thursday that ministers spent around £35 million on a proposed asylum centre in Oxfordshire alone - £10 million more than initially thought.

Asylum
Asylum crisis getting worse say officials
Ben Leapman
Sunday Telegraph, 14 October 2007

     The asylum system is in turmoil, and claimants could now be offered a backdoor amnesty to remain in Britain, a leaked Home Office memo has revealed.
     The document raises fears that a government target to speed up the processing of new claims could lead to existing cases being given "lower priority", potentially allowing thousands of claimants to stay in the country indefinitely.
     The memo, seen by this newspaper, says unrest is spreading in detention centres, a growing number of claimants are going missing before cases are decided and the number of failed asylum seekers being deported is declining.
     The concerns are highlighted in a "performance report" to ministers from the Border and Immigration Agency (BIA), which enforces the asylum system. ...
     Home Office figures show that only 23,610 people claimed asylum last year, the lowest annual total since 1993. However, the Government missed its deportation target with only 6,780 failed asylum seekers removed in the first half of this year, down from 10,345 in the same period last year.
     With fewer than 3,000 places in immigration detention centres, most asylum seekers are given free housing while their claims are processed, making it easy for them to abscond.

Asylum
Daily Telegraph, 9 October 2007

     Britain is the top European destination for asylum seekers, according to figures released by the EU yesterday. In 2006, Britain received 27,850 applications for asylum, more than France (26,300), Sweden (24,300) and Germany (21,000).
     Britain received 3,000 fewer applications than in 2005. The greatest number of asylum applicants came from Eritrea, with 2,725 applying to stay, followed by Iran (2,675) and Afghanistan (2,650).

Asylum – immigration
Asylum backlog won't be cleared until 2011
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 22 August 2007

     In the second quarter of this year, the number of asylum applicants removed because they were not considered legitimate refugees fell by more than a third to 3,280, compared to the same period last year when 5,260 were deported.
     This means that the Government's "priority" target to remove more failed asylum seekers than there are new applicants has been missed.
     ... Ministers said they will clear the backlog of 450,000 cases by 2011. But at current rates, it would take 30 years.
     Separate figures published yesterday showed that the number of eastern Europeans who have registered to work in Britain since May 2004 is close to 700,000. More than 50,000 arrived in the three months to June this year, mainly from Poland. The figures do not include the self-employed or the families of workers, so the true total could be much higher.
     In addition, 9,335 people arrived in the second quarter of the year from Romania and Bulgaria, which joined the European Union on January 1. Another 3,980 came under the agricultural workers scheme.

Asylum
£10m of Diana fund to help asylum seekers
Caroline Davies
Daily Telegraph, 20 August 2007

     The Diana Memorial Fund is marking the 10th anniversary of the Princess's death by earmarking up to £10 million of its remaining £25 million funds on promoting the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.
     The money, to be spent over the next five years, will help fund organisations that support the plight of young asylum seekers in particular, and will lobby for the rights of those under 25.
     ... "We have been supporting the cause of refugees and asylum seekers right from the very start," said Paul Hensby, the fund's campaign manager. ...
     The fund, which received up to £20 million in donations in the immediate aftermath of the princess's death, has sponsored Refugee Week for the past three years and intends to do so next year. ...
     Fifty unaccompanied children seeking asylum arrive every week. ...
     Critics of the scheme include Lord Tebbit, the former Conservative cabinet minister, who said: "We spend vast sums already on asylum seekers and Government figures show that 90 per cent are not genuine cases. ..."

Asylum – amnesty
Amnesty plan for asylum seekers
Ben Leapman
Sunday Telegraph, 5 August 2007

     Hundreds of thousands of failed asylum seekers may be allowed to settle permanently in Britain under a "back-door amnesty" scheme.
     The Government wants to clear a backlog of 450,000 "legacy" cases of immigrants turned down for refugee status but never expelled.
     A 1,000-strong Home Office team has been set up to examine cases, giving priority to those who may now qualify for UK residency because such a long time has passed since their initial rejection.
     The first 6,000 families on the list were sent questionnaires last month asking about their current circumstances. Insiders close to the scheme said those who gave the "right" answers would be granted "leave to remain".
     Asylum seekers who cannot be traced are expected to be simply struck off the "legacy" list, giving the impression that officials have made progress in tackling the backlog. They would no longer be sought actively for removal, even though they would remain illegal migrants - liable for deportation if caught. ...
     The Borders and Immigration Agency (BIA), a branch of the Home Office, aims to consider all "legacy" cases by 2011. It will not say how many it expects to be allowed to remain. Those granted leave-to-remain status will be able to live and work freely in the UK, and claim benefits. After five years they can apply for a British passport. ...
     Liam Clifford, a former immigration officer and head of the consultancy globalvisas.com, said: "While the Home Office talks tough, it is preparing for one of the biggest mass grants of residency rights to asylum seekers in history. The word is out at street level that completing the questionnaire will result in the right to stay in the UK. The BIA simply does not have the resources to investigate each case properly, so it will grant all the applications it can in order to clear the backlog."
     Ministers insist the scheme does not amount to an amnesty because decisions are being taken on a case-by-case basis.

Asylum
450,000 Asylum Seekers to be Allowed to Remain in UK
Press Dispensary, 30 July 2007
[Press release]

     It has come to the attention of leading immigration consultancy www.globalvisas.com that the Home Office is preparing to grant over 450,000 asylum seekers 'Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK (ILR)'.
     All cases that were pending in the system before the Immigration and Nationality Directorate obtained agency status in April 2007 are to be considered for ILR to clear the backlog. The Home Office will begin with families, many of whom have had children since arriving in the UK, increasing the exact numbers to an unknown figure.
     Director Liam Clifford, says: "The Borders and Immigration Agency or BIA simply does not have the resources to tackle the problem and cannot investigate each case properly so it is going to grant all the applications it can in order to clear the backlog.
     "In another admission of its inability to cope, the Home Office has given current instructions to prosecute anyone claiming NAS (National Asylum Support) benefits and working illegally earning over £4,000. However, this cannot be achieved because of a lack of resources. In our experience, and from what we are being told, officers now only deal with cases where people are illegally earning in excess of £20,000 p.a. Even in these cases, the Home Office and Department of Work and Pensions can only afford to slap the person on the wrist as no other options are available to them.
     "While the UK Home Office talks tough and claims that biometrics and joint agency co-operation will reduce immigration of low skilled migrants and terrorists, they are preparing for one of the UK's biggest mass grants of Leave to Remain for asylum seekers in history. The Home Office has said that this will not be called an amnesty as it may create the wrong impression. However, the word is out at street level that completing the questionnaire which the Home Office is about to send out to 450,000 people and families will result in the right to stay in the UK.
     "With a record number of people emigrating overseas and UK PLC unable to attract the right skills it desperately requires, why does the government continue to present barriers for highly skilled people to come here, while being lenient on those immigrants who are of no benefit to our economy, and may actually burden the public purse and local council resources?
     "In recent years, many of our corporate clients have been finding it more difficult to deal with the immigration process for highly skilled workers and work permits, which is about to get worse with commercial partnerships, biometrics, compliance audits and off-shore visa processing. In spite of this asylum seekers can arrive with no checks or controls and receive benefits and Leave to Remain."
[Site link]

Asylum – deportation
Big fall in number of deportations
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 23 May 2007

     The number of failed asylum seekers removed from the country has fallen by a third in a year - despite a promise from Tony Blair to speed up deportations, official figures showed yesterday.
     In September 2004 he pledged to accelerate the removal of an estimated 250,000 asylum seekers who had exhausted all legal processes.
     There was a surge in deportations after John Reid took over as home secretary and demanded better enforcement of the law.
     But in the first quarter of this year, 3,370 asylum applicants were removed - 34 per cent fewer than in the same period last year.

Asylum – Australia, USA
US to swap asylum seekers with Australia
Nick Squires
Daily Telegraph, 19 April 2007

     Australia and the United States will swap asylum seekers under a contentious scheme to deter migrants from seeking asylum in either country.
     Under the exchange scheme, asylum seekers will lose the chance of choosing their destination. The boat people held by Australia on the remote Pacific island of Nauru will be sent to the US, while Cuban and Haitian refugees held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba will be sent to Australia. ...
     Under the agreement, the two countries would swap 400 asylum seekers - 200 from each country - this year and in 2008. The policy will be reviewed in 2009.

Asylum – immigration
200,000 'lost' asylum seekers may be allowed indefinite stay
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 2 April 2007

     More than 200,000 failed asylum seekers may stay in Britain indefinitely because they cannot be traced.
     Officials have conceded that nearly half of the 450,000 "legacy cases" in which the applicants are left in limbo may never be cleared.
     Ministers have flatly ruled out an amnesty and have pledged to remove everyone not entitled to be here within five years.
     Some "legacy" cases date back 15 years and experts believe the Government will not be able to fulfil its pledge to clear the backlog by July 2011. Officials attending a recent meeting to discuss the legacy policy were told that half of the 450,000 are "untraceable".
     They were also told that 18,000 foreign nationals who have committed crimes in Britain were earmarked for deportation, the first time an official figure has been given.

Asylum
Failed asylum seekers allowed to reapply
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 19 January 2007

     Hundreds of failed asylum seekers who have exhausted all avenues of appeal have been allowed to reapply, new figures show.
     They include 80 repeat applications from Afghanistan and 30 from Turkey.
     A Commons written answer disclosed that in the past two years, 520 applications had been received from people who had previously been rejected both in the initial stage and at appeal.
     Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, conceded that the figures were not normally published and were based on "internal management information".
     Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, signatory countries are obliged to consider the asylum application of anyone to assess whether they have a "well-founded fear of being persecuted", even if the individual had previously been turned down. ...
     According to the National Audit office, in 2003 the average cost of processing an initial asylum application was just over £3,000. An appeal costs another £4,500.
     This includes support and accommodation costs of around £147 for each week an application is in process, or more if the applicant has dependants. The annual cost of running the asylum system is more than £1.5 billion.

Asylum – Irish Republic
Ireland bars Romanians, other EU nationals from claiming asylum
Associated Press, 18 January 2007

     Ireland will no longer process asylum applications from citizens of Romania or other European Union members, the government announced Thursday in a further tightening of the country's immigration laws.
     Justice Minister Michael McDowell said he had decided to end Ireland's practice of permitting citizens of other EU states to access Ireland's support system for asylum-seekers because his department received 220 applications from Romanians over the past week.
     He said the Romanian asylum-seekers were all deemed to have been trying to settle in Ireland in hopes of finding jobs, medical care and housing, not to escape persecution.
     "I am taking this firm action now in order to prevent the institution of asylum and our asylum determination process being resorted to for purposes other than those for which they are intended," he said.
     The decision means that asylum-seekers who are citizens of the other 26 EU nations will be refused permission to stay in state accommodation for asylum seekers. They also will not receive welfare payments specified for asylum-seekers.
     Until now, asylum-seekers from other EU states often were permitted to receive benefits until their claim could be considered – and in almost all cases rejected – by the government-appointed Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner. ...
     Ireland used to grant citizenship to any child born in Ireland – a policy similar to United States citizenship law but at odds with the European norm. Irish voters tightened the right to citizenship in a 2004 referendum, permitting Irish-born children the right to an Irish passport only if at least one of their parents has been resident here for a minimum of two years.

Asylum – cost
£40m annual bill for keeping failed asylum seekers here
Toby Helm
Daily Telegraph, 30 December 2006

     Taxpayers are footing a £40 million-a-year bill to house and feed almost 6,000 asylum seekers the courts have ruled should not be allowed to stay in this country, Government figures show.
     The admission by ministers that so many are receiving state help has led to claims that John Reid has failed to bring the asylum system under control - having promised to get tough on immigration when he became Home Secretary in the spring.
     In a written parliamentary answer to Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, the Home Office admitted it cost £129 a week to keep each of 5,980 asylum seekers whose applications were rejected by the courts but who had subsequently asked for help.
     Of these, 2,375 are from Iraq, which Tony Blair and ministers insist is now largely safe.
     Last night the Home Office said those allowed to stay with state support were either "destitute" or had some other legitimate reason preventing them returning home. ...
     The 5,980 receiving state help form only a small part of an estimated 280,000 failed asylum seekers in this country. The vast majority are not in touch with the authorities.

Asylum – Switzerland
Swiss vote to bring in tougher asylum law
Kate Connolly
Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2006

     Swiss voters overwhelmingly backed a law yesterday that will introduce some of the toughest restrictions of any European country on asylum seekers.
     Under new regulations the home of the Red Cross and many international welfare agencies will severely curtail access for non-European refugees and migrants. ...
     Two thirds of Swiss voters supported the law change which, among other things, requires all those seeking refugee status to present a passport to authorities within two days, ...
     Workers from outside the European Union and the European Free Trade association will only be accepted if they have special skills.
     Asylum applications in Switzerland have fallen sharply over the past few years, dropping by more than 50 per cent over the past two years to 10,000.

Asylum
A fifth more children in care pushes annual cost to £1.65bn
Ben Leapman
Sunday Telegraph, 10 September 2006

     The number of children being taken into care has risen by 20 per cent in the past decade while the cost of dealing with youngsters removed from their natural parents has soared to £1.65 billion a year. ...
     The findings were disclosed in a report commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills, and released on its website this month with no other publicity. ...
     Among those in care are 2,900 asylum-seeker children who have been abandoned.

Asylum – amnesty
Up to 80,000 bogus asylum seekers granted 'amnesty'
James Slack
Daily Mail, 8 September 2006
[In the first sentence, 'it has emerged night' was probably intended to be 'it has emerged' or 'it emerged last night']

     Up to 80,000 bogus asylum seekers have been granted an 'amnesty' to live in Britain, it has emerged night.
     They have been in the UK for so long the Government has decided not to even bother considering their claims.
     It is the last shocking indictment of Home Office incompetence.
     Officials had lost track of up to 30,000 of the claimants, or did not even know they were here in the first place.
     Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch UK, said: "This amounts to an amnesty by default.
     "It is Home Office inefficiency that has led to these claims being granted."
     The shambles dates back to 2003, when then Home Secretary David Blunkett announced a desperate plan to clear the spiralling asylum backlog.
     He said families which had applied for refugee status before October 2000 and had been in the UK for four years could stay and be given full rights to work.
     Mr Blunkett asked his officials to trawl for who might be eligible and made a prediction that 15,000 families, or 50,000 people, would benefit.
     But the Daily Mail can reveal that the exercise, which is now on the verge of being completed, has already led to 24,030 families being given indefinite leave to remain.
     It is the equivalent of almost 80,000 people, with another 500 family cases still to be considered.
     Most of the clams are likely to have been bogus - Government statistics show fewer than one in ten applicants whose claims are actually processed is granted asylum.
     But, simply by staying in the country for long enough without having their claims considered, they will now be allowed to stay.
     Equally alarming is the Government's woeful underestimate of who may be eligible. It follows revelations of up to 450,000 asylum claims sitting in boxes, waiting to be dealt with.
     Almost 10,000 of the families granted an amnesty, or 30,000 people, were either not known to officials or had had their paperwork lost. ...
     The amnesty, known as the Family Indefinite Leave to Remain exercise, will be an acute embarrassment to the Home Office.

Asylum – fraud
Inquiry into 'cash for asylum' claims
Nicole Martin
Daily Telegraph, 28 July 2006

     The Home Office is to investigate allegations that an immigration officer helped bogus asylum seekers to enter Britain in return for cash.
     Joseph Dzumbira, 35, who works for the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, allegedly told an undercover newspaper reporter that he received up to £2,000 for providing fake documents to foreigners wanting to be granted refugee status. ...
     Mr Dzumbira, 31, allegedly told The Sun: "I know Nigerians are claiming to be Zimbabweans. No one checks." ...
     Lin Homer, director-general of the IND, said: "The Home Office will not tolerate fraud and corruption from its staff. We take these allegations very seriously and will investigate immediately."
     Keith Best, the director of the Immigration Advisory Service, a charity helping refugees, said: "The system is set up in a way which allows corruption to take place."

Asylum – deportation
Removal papers
Nicky Charles
Daily Telegraph, 26 July 2006
[Letter to the Editor]

     John Reid tells us that the asylum backlog will be cleared in five short years. Among his proposals are uniforms for border guards and additional staff recruitment (report, July 24).
     That's all well and good, but until he tackles the issue of removability, all his bluster will come to naught. To a greater or lesser extent, Immigration and Nationality Directorate staff shy away from dealing with removals to China, Iran, Pakistan, India, Kenya, Jamaica, Ghana, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Jordan, Turkey and Nigeria.
     This is not because they feel insecure without a nice shiny uniform, but because the authorities of those countries refuse to accept their nationals back without a travel document - which their British representatives won't issue within an acceptable time scale. Until he resolves this issue, then his promised revolution will go unnoticed by the public at large.
     I write as a serving chief immigration officer.

Asylum
Who is Mr Reid trying to hoodwink over asylum?
Daily Telegraph, 21 July 2006
[Leading article]

     For John Reid, the Home Secretary, to predict that the backlog of asylum-seekers in this country will be cleared "within five years and hopefully sooner" suggests he has either lost his grip on reality or that he is being profoundly cynical. We tend towards the latter. Only a politician prepared to take the British public for fools could make such a preposterous promise. Ever since Labour came to office, its handling of asylum has been negligent in the extreme. At current rates, it would take more than 40 years to clear the backlog. Nothing that has come out of Mr Reid's welter of announcements this week instils any confidence that this rate will improve.
     Admittedly New Labour inherited a fast-growing problem in 1997. The previous Tory government had been forced to declare an amnesty for 30,000 asylum-seekers because of its inability to process their claims. But instead of tackling the crisis with rigour, the incoming Labour Government reacted with torpor. By the end of its first term in power, the battle was lost. Public disquiet led Labour to promise, in its 2001 manifesto, to deport 30,000 failed asylum-seekers a year - a promise it was forced to abandon the following year, by which time 100,000 applications were being received annually. An analysis by the National Audit Office found that in the decade to May 2004, 363,000 applications for asylum were turned down, but just 79,500 failed applicants were deported - that is, barely one in five. ...
     Labour seeks to mitigate its shameful record of failure to control the nation's borders by claiming that it is now removing more failed asylum-seekers than ever before. Not true. Last year, the figure was 15,055 removals - two years earlier, it was 17,895.

Asylum
Reid faces dangers in Home Office shake-up
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 20 July 2006

     After less than three months on the bridge of the Home Office, John Reid yesterday tried to steer his rusting ship of state off the rocks on which it spectacularly foundered a few months ago. ...
     The Immigration and Nationality Directorate is to be hived off to become a quasi-independent agency where long queues, backlogs and piles of uncompleted case documents will no longer be tolerated.
     As an example of where the IND has lost its way, the Home Office let it be known that it had "seriously underestimated" the number of failed asylum applicants still in the country.
     It now concedes that there are 450,000 outstanding files whereas in the past it had acknowledged half that. Mr Reid said this backlog would be dealt with in five years, although that did not mean that those who were turned down would be removed.
     Indeed, no amount of technical restructuring will enable the Home Office to deport such a large number of people.
     Yet after floating the idea of an amnesty for all illegal overstayers a few weeks ago, that option was firmly shut off yesterday.

Asylum – fraud
Huge rise in student visas raises fear of asylum fraud
Brendan Carlin
Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2006

     Labour's immigration policy was under fresh attack last night after the Government admitted that it had no firm data on how many foreign students left the UK after the completion of their courses.
     The admission came after Douglas Carswell, the Conservative MP for Harwich, discovered a huge increase in the number of student visas issued to people from just five countries.
     Separately, the Foreign Office disclosed yesterday that as many as 180,000 people living in Pakistan and Bangladesh could be holding British passports and be able to live here - 135,000 more than official estimates.

Asylum – repatriation
Asylum cheats get £3,000 to go home
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2006

     Thousands of failed asylum seekers are being paid millions of pounds to return to their home countries because it is cheaper than trying to deport them.
     An offer under which rejected applicants, or those who agree to withdraw their asylum request, are paid £2,000 in cash and £1,000 "benefits in kind" was taken up by almost 2,000 people in the first four months of the year.
     Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said yesterday that the scheme had been so successful that it would be extended for another six months. The £2,000 cash payment was introduced in January as an addition to a £1,000 resettlement grant in an effort to encourage more would-be refugees to abandon their attempts to stay in the country. As a result, the uptake more than doubled.
     The £3,000 bill compares with the £11,000 average cost of a forced deportation.
     Only those who applied for asylum before Jan 1 this year are eligible for the enhanced package and they must leave the country between July 1 and the end of the year.

Asylum
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2006

     The reality is that things are worse than they were under the Tories, not because they were any better at managing matters but because the numbers involved are so much higher than 10 years ago.
     The surge in what became known as "bogus" asylum seeking and illegal immigration began in the early 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall made it easier to travel to Western Europe through the former Eastern Bloc countries.
     What had been a manageable trickle of arrivals became a cascade that the system struggled to deal with. In 1988, there were 4,200 applications; in 1995, there were 44,000. Rapidly, the backlog of asylum applications awaiting to be processed shot up to more than 60,000.
     The Tories got into such a pickle that they even introduced an amnesty allowing 30,000 people who had been in the country a long time to stay even if they were not bona fide political refugees because it had taken so long to process their claims.
     By 2002, the annual number of applications had risen to more than 100,000. Tough measures have reduced this figure to below where it was in 1997. ... ...
     The Tories also abolished embarkation controls - the paper check on people leaving the country to go to other European Union states from sea ports and small airports.
     When Labour took office, the remaining controls to the rest of the world, about 60 per cent of the total, were also scrapped. Since them it has no longer been an absolute requirement to show a passport or other travel document to immigration authorities on leaving. ...
     The Government says it is removing more people than ever before. That is just not true. In 2005, the figure was 15,055 whereas in 2003 it was 17,895. The main reason for this was the expansion of the EU. However, the current figure is a lower proportion of the number who are here who should not be than in 1997.

Asylum
Revealed: How asylum seekers use your taxes to smuggle in relatives
Nick Fagge
Daily Express, 17 May 2006

     Taxpayers are unwittingly funding an illegal people-trafficking scam, allowing waves of immigrants into Britain, a Daily Express investigation can reveal.
     Benefits paid to immigrants in the UK are being sent to France, where friends and relatives use the cash to pay to be smuggled on board ships and lorries bound for Britain. ...
     Sir Andrew Green, of Migration Watch, said: "Asylum seekers in Calais are already in a safe country and should stay there.
     "The only reason they press to come to Britain is because we are a soft touch. It's time that changed." ...
     The problem has also been highlighted by a five-year inquiry by the French Security Services (DST) into financial transfer fraud.
     DST agents have found that migrants are increasingly appealing to their British "sponsors" for help after they become stranded on the streets of Calais.
     British-based immigrants then send money to them to allow the next new wave of migrants to complete their journey to the UK. ...
     Immigrants in the UK are entitled to £40 a week from the publicly funded National Asylum Support Service while their applications to stay are being processed.
     Migrants are also provided with a flat, a room in a shared house or bedsit - at an average cost of £95 a week. If they are granted refugee status the payout increases to £60 a week as income support. This is apart from other Government hand-outs, such as child benefits, housing benefit, council tax rebate and free school meals as they become entitled to all the trappings of the welfare state. ...
     Charity workers in Calais told of a logjam of migrants currently trying to smuggle themselves into Britain.

Asylum
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 16 May 2006

     Since Labour took office in 1997 Britain has received applications for asylum from more than 500,000 people. The numbers have fallen in the last three years from a record of more than 100,000 in 2002. ...
     The number of illegal immigrants cannot be quantified but the Government recently estimated that as many as 280,000 failed asylum seekers may be in the country who should not be. ...
     The removal of unsuccessful applicants is in decline, from 17,800, including dependants, in 2003-4, to 14,250 last year.

Asylum
How one-tenth of all asylum seekers find a home in Britain
Steve Doughty
Daily Mail, 19 April 2006

     Britain took in almost one in ten of the world's asylum seekers last year, a United Nations report said yesterday.
     Over the past five years it has admitted nearly a third of a million - the highest total in Europe. ...
     'Despite a sharp fall, the UK remained the third largest asylum-seeker receiving country in 2005, accounting for 9 per cent of all requests lodged in the industrialised world,' the analysis found.
     Researchers from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said over the past five years only America has taken more asylum seekers. ...
     Although Britain tops the European toll over the last five years, Britain slipped into second place behind France last year. ...
     But, the report by UN High Commissioner Antonio Guterres says refugee numbers have been dropping worldwide and that numbers applying for asylum in EU countries have fallen by almost 50 per cent over the past five years. ...
     The UN figures show that Britain has accepted more than 325,000 asylum seekers since 2001.
     Mr Guterres acknowledged the claims for help of genuine refugees around the world had been harmed by abuse of liberal asylum rules by those trying to migrate for economic reasons.

Asylum
Bungled asylum policy could take 18 years to sort out
Daily Telegraph, 14 March 2006

     More than 400 freed criminals are among thousands of failed asylum seekers whose whereabouts are unknown to the Government.
     A report from a parliamentary watchdog published today says the Home Office has so bungled the removal of would-be political refugees who have had their applications turned down that it could take 18 years to clear the backlog.
     The department keeps no figures on how many failed applicants are still in the country. Its best estimate is between 155,000 and 283,500. They include 403 foreign nationals released from prison in the past five years without deportation proceedings being completed. ...
     "As time elapsed, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) found it harder to locate and remove failed asylum seekers," says the report.
     "Many applicants evaded removal action or moved on without informing the directorate of their new address and hence it knew the addresses of only some 25 per cent of failed asylum applicants." ...
     The committee suggests taking a leaf out of Holland's book by encouraging voluntary resettlement and adopting a tougher line on deportations. But the policy has caused huge controversy in the Netherlands which the Government would be reluctant to provoke here.

Asylum
Drive to clear asylum backlog 'in chaos'
Daily Telegraph, 1 March 2006

     Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, admitted last night that he had abandoned a drive to recruit 100 much-needed asylum judges after a series of errors by Government officials. The judges were being taken on to deal with a backlog of appeals by asylum-seekers. ...
     He told the Commons constitutional affairs select committee that he ordered officials to abandon the programme begun at the end of last year after inconsistencies emerged in the way applicants had been treated. ...
     Figures published yesterday confirmed a continuing fall in applications for political asylum, which are now at their lowest level for 10 years. There were 25,720 applications in 2005, not including dependants, a fall of 24 per cent on the previous year.

Asylum
Judges scathing of efforts to streamline immigration
Daily Telegraph, 25 January 2006

     The Government's efforts to get to grips with the immigration system were criticised by two leading judges yesterday.
     His Honour Henry Hodge, the chairman of the immigration and asylum tribunal, told MPs that it was often pointless to order the return of people whose appeals were rejected because nothing then happened. ...
     Addressing the Commons home affairs select committee, Judge Hodge acknowledged the difficulties that officials faced in trying to arrange repatriation, especially as many of the migrants' home countries refused to take them back. ...

Asylum
Asylum seekers offered £2,000 to return home
Daily Telegraph, 13 January 2006

     Thousands of asylum seekers are to be offered millions of pounds in cash to return to their home countries under a scheme announced yesterday by the Home Office.
     The Government expects to spend about £6 million over six months encouraging around 3,000 refugees, who have been refused permission to stay or are awaiting decisions, to return home.
     As an incentive, they will be offered up to £2,000 cash and a further £1,000 worth of help "in kind" for reintegration, to fund education or training. A pilot scheme will make the cash available to those who agree to leave in the six months between this month and June.
     The Home Office is advertising the scheme to 54,000 people receiving benefits and accommodation from the National Asylum Support Service and will publicise it in asylum detention and reporting centres.
     Tony McNulty, the immigration minister, said in a written statement to the Commons ...
     "It is anticipated that such an offer could increase the number of predicted returns from about 1,950 to over 3,000 for the six-month period."
     Mr McNulty added that the £3,000 cost per person was "good value for money" compared with the £11,000 average cost of a forced deportation.

Asylum
Fast-track deportees 'free to abscond'
Sunday Telegraph, 8 January 2006

     Thousands of asylum seekers on the brink of deportation are to be sent to Liverpool under a secret Home Office scheme.
     They include illegal workers caught in swoops, people who claimed asylum after overstaying visitor visas, and applicants from "safe" countries with good human rights records.
     Their cases will be fast-tracked for a decision within two weeks, after which many will be sent straight back to their homelands.
     Yet despite the incentive to abscond, they will not be kept in detention centres but will live rent-free in flats or hotels, coming and going as they please.
     The only curb on their movement will be a request to report regularly to a local immigration office. ...
     The Home Office claimed that the initiative appeared to be working but officials could not say how many people had been deported, granted asylum, or had simply disappeared.

Asylum
Asylum case backlog costs taxpayer £500m
Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2005

     The taxpayer could have saved £500 million if the Home Office had put proper procedures in place to speed up asylum applications, a Commons committee says today.
     A surge in applications in 1999 and 2000 overwhelmed the staff and infrastructure at the immigration and nationality department, allowing huge backlogs to build up. ...
     In recent years the number of asylum applications has fluctuated from a peak of 84,130 applications in 2002 - not including dependants - to just under 50,000 in 2003.
     In 2002/3 the cost of running the system was £1.86 billion, half of which was spent on supporting applicants.

Asylum
Sandy Bruce-Lockhart
Daily Telegraph, 25 January 2005

     The rising number of asylum seekers in Kent ... In 1996 ... we had just 50 asylum seekers a year arriving. By 2000, this had escalated to 15,000 a year coming into Kent alone.
     Our council's budget on asylum - covering everything from housing to education - was less than £250,000 in 1996, and rose last year to £53 million. ...
     Over the past five years, we have also seen an unprecedented increase in children arriving into Kent without their parents, entirely on their own, either as asylum seekers or as potentially illegal immigrants. The first thing that these bemused children do, when arriving in Kent County Council's children's reception centres, is to phone home so that the second half of the fee owed to traffickers for their passage can be released ... A few years ago, we were receiving just three or four a year of these unaccompanied children, typically aged between 12 and 17, but last year the figure rose to about 100 a month.

Asylum
Brussels: We'll halt Howard's curb on migrants
Daily Telegraph, 25 January 2005

     The European Commission threatened last night to block Michael Howard's programme of tough immigration controls if the Tories win the election.
     These would include setting an annual limit on the number of asylum seekers. ...
     Europe's intervention on what has become a major issue in the election campaign took Westminster aback. MPs and officials were unaware of how much national sovereignty on immigration and asylum had been transferred to Brussels. ...
     A rolling wave of protocols and directives - one in force, one coming next month, a third next year and a fourth in 2007 - have overridden national laws on where governments keep asylum seekers, how they treat them, and how many appeals they are allowed.
     If a future British government were to enact laws that contravened EU regulations, the commission would begin "infringement proceedings". These would be followed, if resistance continued, by legal action in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

Asylum
Sunday Telegraph, 15 August 2004

     The Department for Constitutional Affairs is spending £10,000 offering advice on how to claim asylum. The leaflets are in Welsh. - Daily Express

Asylum – fraud
Alleged asylum fraud linked to Mugabe regime
Daily Telegraph, 21 June 2004

     Police and immigration officers are investigating an organisation, set up with National Lottery money to help immigrants, after claims that it forged documents and provided false life histories for 1,000 Zimbabwean asylum seekers. ...
     Among those who have abandoned Zimbabwe is Stalin Mau Mau, once a Zanu-PF parliamentary candidate, and the leader of a gang accused of forcing white farmers off their land.
     He says he entered Britain legally, but his status is now being investigated by the Home Office, as are his businesses, which include a supermarket in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.
     ... Like most Zanu-PF candidates, he roused his supporters at campaign rallies with one consistent chant: "Down with the whites!"
     ... About 1.1 million Zimbabweans live in Britain, according to an official estimate from the Harare regime.

Asylum – legal aid
Solicitors hand out gifts to grab lucrative asylum jobs
Sunday Telegraph, 6 July 2003

     Solicitors and immigration advisers are offering newly arrived asylum seekers free gifts, including video recorders and mobile telephones, as an inducement to sign up with them.
     The gifts - which are against the law - are being handed out because of the intense competition between lawyers to secure the extremely lucrative work. Last year, more than £175 million of taxpayers' money was spent on legal aid for asylum seekers, with most of it going to solicitors.
     The practice has been uncovered by John Scampion, the official Immigration Service Commissioner, ... ...
     Each asylum seeker is entitled to full free legal aid throughout the asylum process, which can drag on for years through countless hearings and appeals.

Asylum
Lawyers accused of 'milking asylum law'
Daily Telegraph, 22 February 2003

     Human rights lawyers are "cynically milking" the legal aid system to fight hopeless cases on behalf of asylum seekers, a judge said yesterday.
     They have been running up thousands of pounds in court costs, paid by the taxpayer, said Mr Justice Maurice Kay, despite having no chance of success.

Asylum
We're a job centre, not a safe haven
Alasdair Palmer
Sunday Telegraph, 1 December 2002

     Only about one in eight of those whose claims for asylum are rejected by the courts are actually deported. The message has gone out that if you can get to Britain, you can stay here. The Lords Committee that reported on the issue last week concluded that there was "no prospect" of reducing, or even controlling, illegal immigration without a radical re-think of asylum policy. ...
     Even though illegal immigrants are not officially allowed to work, they do so.

Asylum
Asylum seekers reach record 100,000 a year
Daily Telegraph, 30 November 2002

     Record numbers of asylum seekers are arriving in Britain despite intensified ministerial efforts to stop them. ...
     When dependants are added, there were nearly 30,000 applications between July and September. The total for the year, including children, seems certain to pass 100,000 for the first time - easily the highest in the EU. ...
     Beverley Hughes, the immigration minister, said the system known as exceptional leave to remain, which allows people to stay even when they are not judged to be genuine refugees, was being scrapped. It will be replaced by "humanitarian protection" to be granted only in cases of genuine hardship.

Asylum – finance
Asylum seekers' group will get lottery cash
Sunday Telegraph, 20 October 2002

     A controversial grant of £340,000 from the National Lottery for a group campaigning against the deportation of asylum seekers will be given the go- ahead this week despite fierce public protests.
     The Community Fund has been told that there are no legal grounds for rescinding the grant to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns.

Asylum
42,000 asylum seekers win right to stay
The Times, 1 August 2002

     Record numbers of asylum-seekers are being allowed to stay in the UK ...
     The number of refugees remaining legally in the country increased to a record 42,000 last year. The new figures reveal that thousands are successfully appealing against the initial rejection of their claims for asylum. ...
     Mr Blunkett ... His department is facing an overspend on the asylum system of almost £600 million, bringing the total annual bill for dealing with asylum to more than £1 billion. ...
     Mr Blunkett has already abandoned a pledge to remove 30,000 failed asylum- seekers and their dependents from the country after being told by officials that the figure was unrealistic.
     He dropped the target, set by his predecessor Jack Straw before the last general election, after the Home Office admitted it had been able to remove only 1,000 failed applicants a month. ...
     The figures show that 92,000 asylum-seekers and their dependents arrived in the UK compared with 88,300 in Germany, the second most popular destination. The UK figure was a drop of 7,000 on the previous year. ...
     The overall proportion of applications resulting in an asylum-seeker being allowed to stay in the country legally reached 42 per cent compared with 33 per cent a year earlier.

BENEFITS AND COSTS

Benefits and costs – health services
Relying on foreign locums puts patients in danger, doctor says
Daily Telegraph, 30 June 2010

     Patients are put at risk because of the NHS's "scandalous" reliance on foreign locums who often exaggerate their qualifications to get work, a senior doctor has warned.
     Prof Chris Isles, of Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary, said inexperienced overseas doctors were paid "eye-watering" sums of up to £70 an hour for stand-in shifts. Writing in the British Medical Journal, ...
     "We pay lip service to patient safety by allowing this scandalous state of affairs to continue," he wrote.

Benefits and costs – welfare state
Welfare states can't have open borders
Mark Landsbaum
The Orange County Register, 4 June 2010
[Updated on 7 June, 2010]

     Someone's got to say it. What's missing amid the impassioned fervor surrounding illegal immigration is common sense. ...
     Ideally, employers should be free to hire whomever they choose. Employees should be free to seek work anywhere. National borders impede this mutually beneficial arrangement by regulating immigration, consequently distorting job markets by perverting supply and demand. Even so, that's not the central problem of illegal immigration.
     Rather, the problem is rooted in well-intentioned institutional evils. As Milton Friedman said: "You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state."
     It follows that you can't build a fence high enough, or deport enough illegal immigrants, or punish businesses enough to completely discourage people from seeking to substantially better their lives, especially if what they stand to gain is free to them, and particularly if they don't have much to begin with.
     If jobs were the only issue, the market would largely self-correct whatever problems are posed by illegal immigration. But it's not just jobs. Most of the world lives in conditions that make "poverty" in the contemporary United States look extravagant.
     About 43 percent of America's "poor" own their homes, which, on average, is a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath with garage, says the Census Bureau. About 80 percent of U.S. poor have air conditioning. It was only 1970 when merely 36 percent of the entire population enjoyed air conditioning. In the 1940s, my parents slept on the porch to cope with Illinois' stifling summer nights. ...
     About three-fourths of poor Americans own a car, and almost a third have two. A whopping 97 percent of U.S. poor households have color TV, and more than half own two or more. Three-fourths have a VCR or DVD player, and 62 percent get cable or satellite TV. That's poor in America today. ...
     Then there's the fact that no one is turned away from health care in America for lack of ability to pay. Hungry? Food stamps. Can't pay the rent? Subsidized housing and free shelters.
     Before you send hate mail, understand that this is not to say there isn't poverty, suffering, hunger and need in America. It's to say that, relatively speaking, the U.S. looks like paradise to substantially poorer people around the world. ...
     Add up everything the U.S. provides at no cost to recipients – health, education, welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, etc. We're fortunate to be insulated by two oceans, or else many, many more desperate poor would flood across our borders to take advantage.
     And none of that even takes into consideration the lure of jobs, vastly more plentiful and better paying here than in impoverished nations.
     The point is not whether we should turn these people away. The point is they have every reason to want to come. And you would, too.
     As long as we provide such stuff for free, people who don't have it will come to get it. The more vital the free stuff, the greater the attraction. The more generous we are in doling it out, the more entitled they will feel. ...
     ... Whether immigration would increase a little or a lot, the fact remains we can't afford open borders while we operate a welfare state. Neither can we afford to dangle free benefits before a desperate world that regards being poor in America as having arrived in paradise.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs
Think tank: Immigration beats aid in reducing world poverty
Danny Sriskandarajah and Laura Chappell
The Sunday Times, 23 May 2010
[Danny Sriskandarajah and Laura Chappell work with the Institute for Public Policy Research]

     A new report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) shows that migration may be a far better way of helping the world's poor than aid. The report, based on 10,000 household surveys in seven countries, suggests that migrants working overseas deliver tangible benefits in ways that aid and foreign investment just can't.
     Globally, migrants sent home about £220 billion to developing countries last year; four times the total volume of aid. Without these "remittances", some Third World countries would struggle to survive. In Tajikistan, remittances account for more than two-fifths of the total economy; in Senegal, remittances are 12 times foreign investment inflows. The African continent receives $36 per capita in aid but $44 in remittances. Moreover, remittances have emerged as one of the most resilient sources of income for poorer countries during the downturn.
     This money – which usually goes straight to families with no strings attached – can be critical in boosting the quality of life of poorer households worldwide. ...
     When migrants return – and significant proportions do, even to the poorest countries – they usually bring with them new resources, skills and networks. This can be critical in promoting entrepreneurship and trade in local economies. The migration experience can also change attitudes for the better. ...
     Of course, migration can mean "brain drain": countries such as Fiji and Jamaica are estimated to have lost about three-quarters of their highly skilled professionals. But the picture's not all bad: the money, skills and ideas that migrants send home, or bring back with them, often outweigh the negative impacts. And the knowledge that a good education and skills can open up the chance to migrate provides a powerful incentive to young people to work hard at school and university. Some, but not all, will end up leaving, so the pool of skilled people in a country may grow.
     These findings have important implications for the new government's strategy on international development. Migration should become an integral part of the development agenda because migration can do things that aid cannot. Aid has some well known weaknesses – it can get tied up in bureaucracies and its effectiveness can be blunted by corruption. In contrast, remittances go directly to households and are spent by families, not officials. Both migration and aid have a place in development strategies, but a change in approach – more support for migration and less focus on aid – is overdue.
     Of course the second part of this suggestion may be easier for electorates in Europe and America to stomach than the first. But be realistic. The demand for migrant labour in rich countries is set to rise as our populations age. It seems likely, too, that two-tier labour markets that have become almost addicted to cheap immigrant labour – some 90% of all London's cleaners come from abroad – will become only more entrenched. Simply put, economies like ours need migrants to keep them growing.
     This does not mean that we should open the floodgates. Rather, we need practical policies to facilitate and manage mobility. Increasing legal migration programmes may be the best way to meet labour shortages in some sectors, deliver real economic benefits to developing countries and ensure that migrants are not pushed into the hands of traffickers.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – health services
Immigrants help drive sharp rise in A&E patients
Rebecca Smith
Daily Telegraph, 15 May 2010

     A record number of people are attending A&E departments, with immigrants and confusion over out of hours GPs driving the increase.
     Centres in England dealt with 20.5 million patients in the past year – the equivalent of 40 per cent of the population making a visit. ...
     A combination of the confusion over GPs' hours and increases in immigrants who tended to visit A&E routinely and not register with family doctors, was thought to be the cause. Shorter waiting times in A&E, with 98 per cent seen within four hours, also meant people were more likely to attend.

Benefits and costs
Equalities boss 'victimised Sikh'
Daily Telegraph, 3 May 2010

     An equalities boss is being taken to an employment tribunal amid claims he victimised a Sikh employee.
     Dr Mashuq Ally, 59, is paid more than £100,000 to eradicate prejudice at Birmingham city council as its assistant director for equalities and human resources. He is accused of race, ethnic, age and disability discrimination by a former worker, Rajpal Virdee.
     Mr Virdee, 50, a practising Sikh, claims he was victimised and sidelined in his job as the council's equalities manager for social services, partly because of his religion.

Benefits and costs – London, business opinion
London firms say immigrants are 'good for business'
24dash.com, 16 March 2010

     A 'significant' majority of business in London think that the capital would not be as competitive without the contribution of migrants, according to a new report.
     The survey of 182 firms, published today by the London Chamber of Commerce in partnership with polling firm ComRes, quizzed companies on a wide range of immigration issues, two years on from the introduction of the UK's points-based system.
     Migrants are viewed in a positive light by London employers across a number of indicators with 68 per cent saying they often work harder than their UK counterparts.
     Similarly, 72 per cent of companies say that migrants are prepared to do the jobs that British citizens won't.
     Employers not only view migrants positively in a general sense, but value their contribution to their own firms as well, with 57 per cent of companies saying that immigrants are important to their own company.
     However, most businesses (56 per cent) think that migrant workers are not as well qualified as UK employees.
     On the controversial subject of the pressure migrants place on public services, the majority of London businesses (56 per cent) think the economic benefits they bring to the capital outweigh the potential cost of providing such services.
     When asked if an amnesty for illegal immigrants resident in London would be beneficial for businesses, just 38 per cent said yes.
     Opinion was more evenly divided though on Boris Johnson's policy of an amnesty for illegal immigrants living in London for four years or more with 43 per cent saying they agreed with the policy and 52 per cent saying they opposed it.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – health services
Tourists must take out health insurance
Kate Devlin and Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 27 February 2010

     Every tourist visiting Britain could be forced to prove they have health insurance under proposals designed to curb the misuse of the NHS.
     Ministers said they were determined to prevent so-called health tourists from entering the country.
     Mike O'Brien, the Health Minister, said: "Whilst the NHS has a duty to any person whose life or long-term health is at immediate risk, we cannot afford to be an international health service, providing free treatment for all."
     ... The health service writes off around £5 million owed by foreign nationals every year. Most outstanding bills are, on average, more than £1,000. ...
     Under the proposals, proof of health insurance will be compulsory for all visitors who have to pass through immigration control.

Benefits and costs – European Union
Somali mother of four has no right to live here... but we have to give her a council house
Arthur Martin and Steve Doughty
Daily Mail, 24 February 2010

     Standing proudly with her arm draped over her 36in television, this is the Somali woman who must be given a council house even though she has no right to live in Britain.
     Nimco Hassan Ibrahim - who lives with her four children on benefit handouts - was granted the right to the home by EU judges yesterday because she was once married to a Danish citizen who briefly worked in this country. ...
     And although she lives in a temporary accommodation in Harrow, Middlesex - funded by the local council - she has managed to install a high-speed internet connection.
     Speaking to the Daily Mail last night, Mrs Ibrahim said: 'I deserve to be given a proper house. This one is too small for all of us. ...' ...
     Mrs Ibrahim does not work and spends her day looking after her children Abdirahman, 12, Abdifatah, 10, Deka, eight, and Mustapha, four. She refused to reveal how she could afford her electrical goods and furniture.
     The landmark EU judgment opens the door for hundreds of thousands of unemployed foreigners to claim both state benefits and council or housing association homes. ...
     The judges at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said Mrs Ibrahim must be given a home because 'a parent caring for the child of a migrant worker who is in education in the host member state has a right of residence in that state'.
     'That right is not conditional on the parent having sufficient resources not to become a burden on the social assistance system.'
     Mrs Ibrahim fled war-torn Somalia to Ethiopia with her family when she was 15. She married Mohamed Yusuf in Ethiopia before the pair moved to Denmark where he holds citizenship.
     The pair came to Britain seven years ago. After eight months working as a bus driver, Mr Yusuf began living on benefits. When they were stopped in March 2004, he left the country.
     Mr Yusuf's departure ended Mrs Ibrahim's right to stay in the UK and her right to receive benefits, but six years later, she lives on £1,000 a month through child tax credits, child benefits and child disability allowance.
     Her accommodation is paid for and she also uses the NHS, even though she is not entitled to free medical care and has no insurance cover.
     Her three-year legal battle was funded by the charity Shelter.
     The UK Border Agency said it was 'disappointed', while Harrow council - which lost the case and has to give a home to Mrs Ibrahim - said European judges were determining British immigration policy.
     Housing chief Barry Macleod-Cullinane said: 'We are very concerned-with this outcome, as it appears to establish a major new legal precedent over benefit claims.
     'It could well prove to be a floodgates judgment in that people who have not yet contributed to this country or who do not have the means to sustain themselves can now seek immediate help from state welfare services.
     'This judgment would seem to make the EU policy of free movement impossible unless one greets new migrants at Heathrow with sizeable welfare handouts.'
[Site link]

Benefits and costs
£2m payout for illegal migrants
Daily Telegraph, 12 February 2010

     Illegal immigrants who should have been removed from the country are receiving compensation for wrongful detention, it has emerged.
     The Home Office paid out at least £2 million over the last three years in cases where it was proved that migrants, foreign prisoners or asylum seekers were wrongly held.
     The figure, relating to 121 individuals, was based on data from several law firms. The true cost could be higher.

Benefits and costs
Time to 'lance boil' of resentment over 'unfairness' of immigration, says Labour's Margaret Hodge
James Chapman
Daily Mail, 4 February 2010

     Migrants would be forced to 'earn' the right to benefits and council housing over several years under explosive plans outlined today by a senior Labour minister.
     Margaret Hodge warns British values of openness and tolerance are under threat because of an increasing sense of 'unfairness' over immigration.
     The Culture Minister is calling for a new points system - based on length of residence or national insurance contributions - to determine that only migrants who have made a fair contribution to society get the same rights as local families.
     Mrs Hodge, who is facing a General Election challenge from BNP leader Nick Griffin, told the Daily Mail it was time to 'lance the boil' of growing discontent over the wave of economic migrants entering Britain.
     Labour strategists fear there are signs that the far-Right BNP will mount a 'serious challenge' in her Barking, East London seat.
     One recent poll found that 65 per cent of voters believe foreign arrivals get favourable treatment over housing and benefits.
     It also showed a third of voters support a core policy of the far-Right BNP, proposing that people from ethnic minorities should lose all state benefits, including NHS treatment, to pay for a 'resettlement policy' for those wishing to leave the country.
     Migrants currently have the right to claim in-work benefits, such as tax credits, if they have a job. Those who have come from the EU must spend a year working in Britain, but can then claim the same level of state support as any citizen.
     They are treated the same as UK citizens in respect of claims for income support, jobseeker's allowance, housing benefit and council tax benefit. ...
     Mrs Hodge was attacked as 'offensive' by senior Labour colleagues after calling for a shake-up of housing rules two and half years ago.
     But last year, the Government announced it was adopting the policy proposal she made to give councils new powers to give local people priority on waiting lists.
     Now the minister is risking angering colleagues again by going further, with an admission that the Government has failed to address voters' concerns over immigration.
     Her proposal to strip benefits from immigrants who have not been contributing to society for a fixed period will infuriate Left-wing Labour MPs, who argue people cannot be left destitute.
     But Mrs Hodge insisted: 'At the moment, people don't feel the system is fair and we can't ignore that. If we are serious about reconnecting with people, then we have to listen to what they are saying.
     'We have to lance this boil. This isn't just a message to my own party, it's a message to all mainstream parties. ...
     'This isn't about race, it's about having a transparent system which people understand and which is fair.'
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – translators, interpreters
£20m translation cost is revealed
Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2010

     Ministers had to issue an embarrassing correction over how much the Government spends on translators in the courts, after giving inaccurate figures to MPs on four separate occasions.
     The Ministry of Justice admitted it has spent more than £20 million on interpreters and translators in the past two years, increasing concerns over the impact immigration is having on the public purse.
     The figure included £11.8 million spent in 2007-08, which was higher than MPs had previously been told. The figures refer to services for victims of crime and other court users but not suspects.

Benefits and costs – translation
Translation charges cost councils £20m
Nick Collins
Daily Telegraph, 16 January 2010

     Councils spent nearly £20 million of taxpayers' money last year translating documents, figures suggest.
     Translations were carried out in more than 75 languages, including Kpelle, a Liberian dialect, and Pahari, which is spoken in northern India and Nepal. The biggest spender was City of Edinburgh council, which last year paid £110,000 for translations into languages including Mongolian. ...
     The figures came to light after 84 per cent of councils responded to a Freedom of Information request by Lingo24, a translation agency. ...
     The Local Government Association said translation spending fell from £25 million in 2006. A spokesman said: "Translation has its place to ensure people can access vital services, find jobs and get their children into school."

Benefits and costs – visitors' visas applications
Anger at migrant visa costs
Macer Hall
Daily Express, 2 January 2010

     Taxpayers are footing a £50 million-a-year bill to fund appeals by relatives of immigrants barred from Britain.
     More than 1,000 are lodged every week, it was revealed last night. The caseload has soared eightfold since the Government scrapped fees for family visitor visas in 2002.
     Critics last night warned that the explosion in the number of appeals was more evidence that Labour has lost control of Britain's borders. The visa shambles was uncovered in a report from the population think tank Migrationwatch.
     Chairman Sir Andrew Green said: "In the current recession it is no longer acceptable that taxpayers should pay the appeal costs for foreign nationals wishing to visit Britain. The definition of a family visitor is so wide that it could include as many as 120 relatives of a middle-aged person. The definition should be narrowed and charges which the Government abolished in 2002 should be re-introduced."
     More than 400,000 applications for immigrants' relatives to visit Britain for up to six months are made every year. The number of appeals has risen from 7,997 in 2002 to 64,669 in 2007-08.
     Family visitor visas are available for relatives including parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces and cousins of immigrants already living here who want to come to the UK.
     Applicants are expected to prove that they will stay for no longer than six months and are not coming to Britain to work.
     But critics fear the system is full of loopholes and is being exploited as yet another way for illegal immigrants to sneak into the country.
     Sir Andrew said: "Obviously, family members should be able to visit relatives in Britain but such visits need to be properly regulated. There is a clear risk that, once here, some of these visitors will stay on illegally knowing that the chance of them being removed is remote."
     In 2008, a total of 414,000 applications for family visitor visas were made, of which 312,000 were approved.
     Around 197,000 of those applications came from India, Pakistan and Nigeria. Of those, 134,000 were approved. Yet despite the huge number of approvals, failed applicants are allowed to challenge the refusals without charge.
     Previously, they had to pay £150 for an appeal or £500 if they wished to attend an appeal hearing in person. In January 2001, the Government reduced the fees to £50 and £125, then scrapped them altogether in May 2002. As a result, the number of appeals has soared.
     The Migrationwatch report said: "Fees should be re-instated. There is no reason why the British taxpayer should pay the appeal costs of foreign visitors." It also criticised the wide definition of family member. "The definition should be substantially tightened, at least until exit controls are in place.
     "In particular, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, and first cousins should no longer be included. This would reduce the number of eligible relatives by up to 68," the report said.
     "This definition of family visitor is so widely drawn that somebody from a third world country where the number of children per family is often four or five, could sponsor somewhere between 80 and 120 people under this scheme.
     "Furthermore, the provision for unmarried couples is particularly hard to verify and is therefore open to abuse."
     It also called for sponsors of applicants to be asked to provide a cash bond guaranteeing that their relatives leave the country.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – health services
Migrants join a GP practice every minute
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 22 December 2009

     Migrants are registering with family doctors at a rate of one a minute, leaving GP surgeries "straining at the seams" as they try to cope with the impact of rising immigration, figures show.
     More than 600,000 people signed up with a GP practice in England and Wales last year having arrived from overseas – an increase of 50 per cent in seven years. ...
     Of those, 69,000 were Britons back from a spell overseas and it is a rise of half on the 400,000 new migrant registrations in 2000-01.
     The report, by Migrationwatch, also showed the number of GPs in England and Wales rose by 18 per cent over the period from 30,609 in 2001 to 36,041 last year.

Benefits and costs – crime
£292m bill to keep foreign prisoners behind bars
Daily Telegraph, 7 December 2009

     Foreign prisoners cost £292 million to keep under lock and key.
     Jails in England and Wales hold 7,500 immigrants from 160 different nations, almost a tenth of the prison population.
     Ministry of Justice figures show foreigners have been jailed for almost 900 sex offences and 1,500 violent attacks including murders.

Benefits and costs – class
Middle classes benefit from immigration, says John Denham
Richard Ford
The Times, 2 December 2009

     Middle-class people fail to understand the impact of immigration on poorer workers because they are "insulated" from competition for jobs, housing and public services, the Communities Secretary said last night.
     John Denham said that those at the top of society benefited most from migration, enabling them to find plumbers and cleaners to work in their homes. He said that for others, immigration fuelled fears about job prospects and their chances of finding decent housing. He said that these fears were heightened in areas of the country that were already facing difficulties arising from economic decline, deprivation and unemployment.
     In a speech to Policy Network, a left-of-centre think-tank, Mr Denham said that while the affluent felt "culturally enriched" by the benefits of migration, working-class people found it harder to accept the advantages.
     "Those of us who feel culturally enriched by the benefits of migration and who are insulated from the competition for jobs, housing and public services that is potentially posed by migrants, often find these views [the perception that migrants jump the queue] difficult to appreciate," Mr Denham said. His comments follow the publication last week of official figures showing continuing high levels of immigration into Britain. "The affluent often are able to see opportunities within change and uncertainty; whereas those who are less insulated from potential drawbacks may see the same change as a risk or a threat".
     Mr Denham said that class still mattered in Britain and this was particularly clear when people looked at who benefited from immigration. "Crudely expressed, the higher you are in the pecking order, the more likely you may be to benefit from immigration," he said. People who worked in a high-tech, highly skilled multinational organisation were likely to work with the most talented migrants. He added: "If immigration makes it easier for you to find a plumber or cheaper for you to hire a cleaner then you clearly and directly benefit. But for many others you may see them as a direct threat to your own interests."
     Mr Denham said that in some communities migration intensified competition for scarce resources, including housing and jobs. This was taking place against a backdrop of wider change including the decline in unskilled jobs and the development of businesses that people lacked the skills to access.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – asylum, citizenship
Council pays refugee family's £83,000 rent
Chris Irvine
Daily Telegraph, 30 November 2009

     A family of former asylum seekers living in a £1.8 million home in central London is costing taxpayers more than £83,000 a year.
     Nasra Warsame, originally from Somalia, seven of her children and her mother moved into the six-bedroom home last month, while her husband, Bashir Aden, and an eighth child are living in an "overspill" property, also paid for by housing benefits.
     The couple claimed asylum in Britain after leaving Somalia in 1991.
     They have been granted citizenship and all their children, aged between two and 16, have been born here.

Benefits and costs – child benefits, European Union, public opinion
We pay benefits for 37,000 Polish children ... still living in Poland
Rebecca Lefort
Sunday Telegraph, 1 November 2009

     British taxpayers are funding child benefit payments for 37,900 children who live in Poland, Treasury figures show.
     The money is going to support those who have remained behind in their homeland while one or both of their parents lives and works in this country. The cost is estimated at more than £20 million a year.
     The number of claims has risen by 20 per cent in the past year, despite a slowing in the rate of immigration from eastern Europe. ...
     The findings come as an ICM poll for The Sunday Telegraph shows today that two thirds of voters believe the number of immigrants in Britain is too high.
     Poles make up the majority of the 50,600 children, from more than 30,000 families, living outside Britain who are supported with child benefit payments from British taxpayers. ...
     The Treasury has refused to put a figure on the cost of supporting children abroad.

Benefits and costs
Britain fails to make top 10 in 'well-being' survey
Andrew Pierce
Daily Telegraph, 27 October 2009

     Britain has failed to make the world's top 10 in an international survey of wealth and happiness because of poor education and over-regulation.
     The report by the Legatum Institute, a think tank based in London, ranks Finland in first place, with the United States ninth and Britain lagging behind in 12th. ...
     Mediocre scores for education, health, domestic security and levels of personal freedom because of excessive regulation dragged down Britain's overall score, the institute said. ...
     High levels of divorce, pressures caused by immigration and a lack of community spirit have also marked down Britain's score in the survey.

Benefits and costs – bankruptcy
Tunbridge Wells, the EU debt capital
Harry Wallop
Daily Telegraph, 23 September 2009

     Royal Tunbridge Wells is becoming the "debt capital of Europe" as insolvent Germans and Austrians move there to take advantage of Britain's lenient bankruptcy laws, according to accountants. ...
     As long as a person has lived in Britain for six months, they can be declared bankrupt in a British court, writing off their debts a year later. This compares to a wait of seven or even nine years in Germany.
     Because any EU national is allowed to live in Britain, accountants said they were not surprised that Europeans were taking advantage of legislation that allows them to wipe out debts incurred in Italy, Austria or Germany in a British court. ...
     Tunbridge Wells has proved particularly attractive since a specialist company, run by a German, opened in Erith, Kent. ...

Benefits and costs – extremism
Fighting terror, with ping pong
Daily Telegraph, 8 September 2009

     Taxpayers' money intended to tackle extremism has been spent on table tennis tables, rap workshops and has even been given to restaurants.
     A total of £12 million has been distributed under the Government's Prevent programme but there is insufficient monitoring of how it is being spent, according to the TaxPayers' Alliance.
     A breakdown of spending, obtained by the campaign group through Freedom of Information requests, shows that more than £5,000 went to a rap workshop and £25,000 to a theatre project.
     Restaurants and food bars were also among the recipients.

Benefits and costs – population, education
Immigrants baby boom costs £1bn
Mark Reynolds
Daily Express, 7 September 2009

     Taxpayers face a £1 billion bill to provide school places for children born in a looming immigrant baby boom, a shocking new study reveals today.
     The vast sum will be needed to create more than 96,000 extra places at primary level – around 67,000 to educate children of parents born outside the UK.
     It will also cost the British taxpayer at least £200 million a year to run them, warns a cross-party group of MPs.
     The knock-on costs to other public services like housing are predicted to be "even greater".
     Last night MPs Nicholas Soames and Frank Field called on ministers to cut immigration now to stop the population surging past the 70 million mark.
     In a joint statement, the veteran parliamentarians who chair the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration, said: "This research illustrates how uncontrolled immigration is directly affecting ordinary families."
     The pair – former Tory and Labour ministers respectively – said the Government "have clearly failed to plan for the consequences of the mass immigration they have permitted".
     The study found that 703,000 five-year-olds will be entering primary school in 2014, compared with 607,000 now.
     Of the 96,000 increase, more than half will be born in families where neither parent was born in the UK. Around a sixth – 13,000 – have one foreign-born parent. Less than a third, 29,000, have both parents born here.
     The findings come as it is revealed that tens of thousands of British parents already struggle to get children into their first choice of primary school. ...
     Nicholas Soames and Frank Field added: "The research is yet more evidence that the Government must take steps to reduce immigration.
     "It must prevent our population from reaching 70 million within the next 25 years, as official forecasts now predict, if public services and the public purse are to be protected.
     "Today's research highlights primary school places but the same applies to health, housing and other services."
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – translation, police
Police forces spending £70,000 every day on translation for migrants
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 7 September 2009

     Police forces are spending up to £70,000 a day on translation to deal with migrants caught up in crime.
     At least £25 million was spent by forces across England and Wales last year to deal with foreign criminals or help victims and witnesses who could not speak English.
     The total, enough to put 500 extra officers on the street for a year, has risen by almost three quarters since 2004 and is further evidence of the impact immigration has had on public services. ...
     Figures obtained under Freedom of Information by the Tories showed that in 2008-09 £12.6 million was spent on translation by 35 of the 43 forces that responded. However, that did not include the Metropolitan Police, which spent £12.5 million over the same period, according to figures released this summer.
     Martin Tiplady, the Met's director of human resources, predicted that the bill could rise to £20 million by 2012. ...
     In total at least £25 million was spent on translation – a 70 per cent increase on the £14.6 million spent by police in 2004 – although the true figure was likely to be much higher considering a fifth of forces did not reply.

Benefits and costs
Thousands spent on lavatories for foreign prisoners
Daily Telegraph, 27 August 2009

     A prison has admitted spending £17,000 on special lavatories for foreigners and footbaths for Muslims to wash their feet before prayer.
     Figures from the Ministry of Justice show that the money was spent on two footbaths, a "squat" lavatory and a shower area at Canterbury Prison in Kent, which holds foreign nationals awaiting deportation.

Benefits and costs – health services
Transplant rules are tightened
Daily Telegraph, 31 July 2009

     Foreign private patients will be banned from receiving organ transplants from dead NHS donors after fears were raised about immigrants jumping the queue for treatment.
     It was found that 50 foreign patients had received organs donated by Britons over two years.
     The hospitals were not breaking the law. However, an inquiry concluded there was a risk that the public would believe foreign nationals had been able to jump the queue.
     The inquiry ruled that they could establish a right to be treated by the NHS on an equal basis.
     The rules would also apply to British private patients.

Benefits and costs – housing
Labour backs down on promise to stop migrants jumping house queue
Daily Mail, 31 July 2009

     Councils will not, after all, be given new powers to stop migrants 'queue jumping' local people for housing, the government admitted yesterday.
     Last month, Gordon Brown suggested that local families who had been on the waiting list for a long time would be given priority over migrants.
     But housing minister John Healey said the Government was not planning to change the law to give British people greater priority. Instead, town halls will be simply be issued with new guidance about how they allocate homes.
     The Prime Minister's suggestion had prompted uproar from equal rights campaigners who warned that attempts to give councils extra powers would breach human rights laws.
     At present, local authorities have a duty to award council housing on the basis of need.
     Mr Healey insisted yesterday that, although the guidance would not change this, it would give officials more 'leeway'.
     He said councils would be able to consider other factors, such as how long people have been on waiting lists and skill shortages in the area.
     There will also be a crackdown on frauds who get homes at the taxpayer's expense and then sub-let them to earn extra cash. ...
     LibDem MP Sarah Teather said: 'The real problem is the queue, not the queue-jumping.'
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – crime, asylum
Foreign spongers scandal, by judge
Chris Riches
Daily Express, 29 July 2009

     A judge yesterday launched a blistering attack on Britain's "desperate" immigration policy and the Government's failed welfare system.
     He slammed policies that allow hundreds of thousands of foreigners to stream into the country to sponge off benefits.
     Judge Ian Trigger also savaged the delay in kicking immigrants out of the UK once it had been ruled that they were here illegally.
     And he condemned the country's massive welfare system for lavishing billions on immigrants.
     The outburst came as the judge sentenced Jamaican Lucien McClearley, 31, for drugs offences at Liverpool Crown Court. McClearley should have been booted out of Britain in 2004. "Your case illustrates all too clearly the completely lax immigration policy that exists and has existed over recent years in this country," said Judge Trigger.
     "People like you, and there are literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people like you, come to these shores from foreign countries to avail themselves of the generous welfare benefits that exist here. In the past 10 years the national debt of this country has risen to extraordinary heights, largely because central Government has wasted billions and billions of pounds.
     "Much of that has been wasted on welfare payments."
     This was creating an enormous strain on resources which are already badly stretched, he said. ...
     Last night, the judge was roundly applauded for speaking out against the Government and its disastrous immigration system.
     Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green declared: "The judge is right."
     Sir Andrew Green, founder of think-tank Migrationwatch, commented: "He is expressing a sense of frustration which is very widely felt among the public. And it is courageous of him to do so.
     "The long-term failure of this Government's immigration policy has effects in many areas of national life. That is why we need a better controlled system, and a Border Police to make our borders more secure."
     Sir Andrew added: "I have lost count of the number of magistrates who have told me privately of their concerns about the number of immigrants coming before them and the difficulties in finding an appropriate penalty, if convicted, when they have no money and our jails are full." ...
     Judge Trigger made his scathing comments yesterday after his court heard how McClearley, of Liverpool, had entered the UK in 2001 on a visitor's visa. He was arrested in 2002 after overstaying but appealed for asylum and was released while this was pending, allowing him to "disappear from the radar of the authorities."
     His application was finally rejected on March 2004, but he was not arrested until last February in Liverpool when police noticed his hired Vauxhall Vectra stunk of cannabis. They discovered bags of cannabis and a further search of his house revealed more than £7,200 worth of cannabis, a gram of cocaine and a fake passport.
     Judge Trigger added: "The fact that it took nearly two years to process your claim shows how desperate the situation in this country has become."
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – asylum
Failed asylum seekers living in Britain receive 'resettlement grants' worth thousands
Daily Mail, 28 July 2009

     Failed asylum seekers living in Britain can already benefit from generous 'resettlement' grants worth thousands of pounds each.
     The value of the support packages - described as 'bribes' by critics - can be as much as £4,000.
     The deal includes money for housing, childcare, school fees for any children and even help setting up a business.
     Ministers insist it provides good value as the total cost of forcibly removing a bogus refugee can be as much as £11,000.
     But the programme has cost the taxpayer well in excess of £30 million. In part, this is down to the nature of the businesses opened by its beneficiaries.
     A 35-year-old Iranian was given money to open an ostrich farm, an Albanian was given cash to open a vineyard while a Zimbabwean was paid hundreds of pounds to open a beauty salon.
     The hope is that setting up migrants with fledgling businesses will give the failed migrants a chance to settle and prosper when they return to their homelands, rather than leaving them rootless and ready to return to Britain.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – housing
One in ten state-subsidised homes goes to an immigrant family
Steve Doughty
Daily Mail, 7 July 2009

     Nearly 400,000 homes have gone to tenants who were born abroad, the Government's equality watchdog has said.
     One in ten state-subsidised homes is occupied by an immigrant family, according to the first estimate of the impact of immigration on social housing.
     More than half of the immigrants who live in council or housing association houses and flats are in London, the report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission found.
     It added that four out of ten people born abroad who live in the capital are living in subsidised housing - a figure that suggests a million people in immigrant families have found homes in social housing in London.
     The report blamed Home Office decisions to house asylum seekers in empty social housing around the country for 'fuelling misconceptions that asylum seekers are queue jumping and being allocated social housing ahead of white British applicants.'
     It acknowledged that there is tension over who gets social housing in London and other cities including Birmingham.
     But despite evidence of increasing anger over the allocation of housing in poorer and traditionally Labour-voting areas, the report insisted that there is no prejudice against the existing population in the decisions over who gets increasingly scarce homes.
     It said the tension that has led to a growing vote for the far right British National Party in some parts of the country should be dealt with by fostering more positive attitudes to immigration and enforcing equality laws.
     The conclusions will undermine Gordon Brown's latest plans to allow local authorities to give longstanding local residents priority in the queue for homes.
     The report was drawn up for the Equality Commission by the Labour think tank Institute for Public Policy Research, which has a long record of support for large-scale immigration.
     The Commission's chief, Trevor Phillips, is said to be likely to be forced out of his job this autumn.
     Two years ago former minister Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking in East London, began a Labour row when she complained that migrant families were being given priority for homes over those with a 'legitimate sense of entitlement'.
     Shortly afterwards Whitehall published the first estimate of numbers of foreigners in social housing, which suggested that one in 12 people in subsidised homes are foreign citizens.
     However the figures published by the Equality Commission yesterday are based on the large-scale Labour Force Survey run by the Government's Office for National Statistics.
     They count people born abroad, the measure accepted by statisticians as a better estimate of real numbers of immigrants.
     The one in ten national estimate for social homes occupied by immigrants obscures much higher proportions of migrants in council and housing association property in some areas. ...
     Some migrant groups, the report said, were highly dependent on social housing because their families had higher numbers of children and were more likely to be without work.
     They included families from Afghanistan, Somalia and Bangladesh. ...
     Only 11 per cent of migrants over the last five years live in social housing, the report said.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – illegal immigrants
Migrant amnesty 'worth £3 billion'
Daily Telegraph, 16 June 2009

     An amnesty for illegal immigrants would boost the British economy by £3 billion a year and raise tax revenues by £842 million a report for Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has concluded.
     The study estimates there are 618,000 illegal immigrants in Britain of which 442,000 are based in London.
     But the report also accepts there would be annual costs of up to £1 billion a year from the extra demands on public services and benefits.
     Mr Johnson ordered the study, carried out by the London School of Economics, last year after backing calls for an amnesty.

Benefits and costs – multiculturalism, translation
Town halls' unread translations
Ben Leach
Sunday Telegraph, 14 June 2009

     It is a well-intentioned initiative which is meant to offer immigrants a helping hand.
     Town halls and Whitehall spend millions of pounds a year on translation for the benefit of people who cannot speak English. Yet now an investigation has found that many of the expensively-produced foreign-language leaflets have never been read.
     Documents which have failed to attract a single reader include a pamphlet for gipsies translated into Polish, and a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender directory which was translated into French. No one read the Haringey Women's Directory when it was translated into Albanian, Bengali, Kurdish, Somali or Urdu. ...
     Freedom of Information requests were made to all councils, hospital trusts, police forces and government departments in the UK. Some 80 per cent responded and admitted spending £50.2 million on translations and interpreting in 2008-09, an increase of nine per cent on the figure of £46 million in 2006-07.
     Yet the growth in spending on translation comes despite a call in 2007 by Hazel Blears, then the communities secretary, for councils to think twice before translating documents. She argued that the integration of established immigrant communities was better achieved by encouraging them to learn English, rather than providing paperwork in their native tongues.
     Of the 218 local authorities that provided figures, 126 said they had increased spending on translation in the past two years.
     Only a handful of councils were able to say how many times translated documents had been read online. Haringey admitted that of 77 translated documents it published online, 26 were never viewed. Most were only viewed once or twice. ...
     The public bodies which spent the most on translations last year were the Metropolitan Police (£10.6 million) and the Department for Work and Pensions (£4 million).

Benefits and costs
Immigrants send home £4bn a year
Daily Telegraph, 1 June 2009

     Immigrants working in Britain send the equivalent of £11 million a day back home, research by a think tank shows.
     A total of £4 billion a year now flows out of the country after figures almost doubled in a decade, according to Migrationwatch. The figure is likely to be an underestimate because it does not include money sent from Britain by unofficial channels. In contrast, just £2.3 billion a year flows into the country from British expats. Sir Andrew Green, of the think tank, said the pattern meant claims that migrants are of economic benefit to the UK were "illusory".

Benefits and costs – multiculturalism
Taxpayer foots bill for non-English speakers to apply for UK passport
Daily Telegraph, 1 June 2009

     The passport office spent £260,000 of taxpayers' money last year providing interpreters to help non-English speaking immigrants gain a British passport.
     The Identity and Passport Service's growing translation bill makes a mockery of the Government's pledge that migrants who wish to settle in Britain must be able to demonstrate a command of the language.
     Applicants for a passport will have already passed a citizenship test and should be able to answer basic questions in English. But translators still are needed for those attending the new face-to-face interviews, which are designed to question applicants and stop identity fraud or bogus claims.

Benefits and costs
Each illegal immigrant to cost us £1 million
Alison Little
Daily Express, 4 May 2009

     An amnesty allowing illegal immigrants to stay in the UK would cost a staggering £1 million for each newcomer.
     For the first time, the "huge, unnecessary burden" of letting up to 950,000 foreign nationals remain is revealed today by campaign group Migrationwatch.
     They say the move would be a "shocking waste of public money" when the nation is in the depths of recession.
     The pressure group also say a similar cost, based on people having children and earning low wages, could apply to many people who have already been granted asylum.
     And they warn that such an amnesty would only tempt more illegal immigrants into Britain – as has happened in Italy and Spain where migrants have been allowed to stay.
     A coalition of churches, unions and others are holding church services and a mass rally today in support of an "earned amnesty" for an estimated 450,000 long-term illegal immigrants if they meet certain conditions.
     The Institute for Public Policy Research, Labour's favourite think-tank, claimed the move could bring in more than £1 billion of tax a year.
     And Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson has argued for an amnesty for long-term illegal immigrants of good character who can support themselves so that they contribute to tax revenues. A study for Mr Johnson by the London School of Economics has estimated that there were between 524,000 and 947,000 "irregular residents" and their children in Britain at the end of 2007, with a "central estimate" of 725,000.
     But Migrationwatch today publishes what it says is the first estimate of the "lifetime cost" to taxpayers of letting people stay in the UK.
     It is based on a 25-year-old, married with two children, who earned the minimum wage and lived in private rented housing, retired at 65 and lived until 80.
     Setting the tax and National Insurance paid against their demands on the public purse, including housing and council tax benefit and pension credit, brings their lifetime cost to taxpayers to some £900,000, with a bill of £1.1 million in London.
     Migrationwatch chairman Sir Andrew Green said last night: "The numbers are truly enormous, adding an unacceptable, and entirely unnecessary, burden to the nation's balance sheet at a time when Boris Johnson himself is writing about 'the horrific state of the nation's finances'."
     Sir Andrew acknowledged that some immigrants would earn over the minimum wage and thus take lower welfare payments, but some may have more than two children and so get higher benefit.
     "Or they may be unemployed. Immigrants are, on average, more likely to be economically inactive than the UK as a whole," he added.
     The report says the cost of granting settlement to an asylum seeker who did not achieve higher earnings, although many would do so, would be similar.
     The campaign group says this makes Home Office failure to appear at up to a third of asylum appeals "reprehensible". Sir Andrew added: "It is also a shocking waste of public money at a time when we can least afford it."
     In Italy an amnesty in 1988 let 119,000 foreigners settle, but when the exercise was repeated in 2002 the figure soared to 700,000. In Spain the figure rose from 44,000 in 1985 to 700,000 in 2005.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – USA
Schwarzenegger: Immigrants not cause of budget woe
Michael R. Blood
Associated Press, 15 April 2009

     Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Wednesday that health care and other services for illegal immigrants cost California taxpayers as much as $6 billion a year, but that's not the reason for the state's financial mess. ...
     At an appearance at the Los Angeles Times, the Republican governor estimated that education and other services for illegal immigrants could carry a $4 billion to $6 billion price tag each year.
     But to place blame there for the ongoing budget mess – or any other single factor – "would be the wrong thing," he said.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs
Arrival tax of £50 for all non-EU migrants
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 19 March 2009

     A new "tax" for all non-European Union migrants arriving to work or study in Britain will be announced today by Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary.
     The fee, thought to be about £50 per arrival, is to cover the extra burden on public services, and is expected to raise £35 million a year.
     The "migrant tax" will be levied on the hundreds of thousands of migrants who apply for work or study visas each year, from Australian bar staff to Rhodes scholars and Premier League footballers.
     The funds are earmarked for councils struggling to cope with the impact of mass immigration on services such as GPs' surgeries and schools.
     But critics have said that the money generated will be a "drop in the ocean", based on figures that show taxpayers provide £500 million a year for immigration-related costs.
     Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the pressure group MigrationWatch UK, said: "A rough estimate shows that, for every £1 the Government spends on schemes specifically to help migrants, its new tax will only raise about 7p.
     "And that spending does not allow for the fact that one new home will have to be built every six minutes for new immigrants, nor the additional costs to the NHS and education services, nor the countless other costs to local services that large-scale immigration brings."

Benefits and costs – politics
Non-EU immigrants to pay £50 tax
Rosa Prince
Daily Telegraph, 16 March 2009

     Foreign workers and students from outside the European Union will have to pay £50 when they arrive in Britain to help ease their impact on public services.
     The new "migrant tax", to be announced this week, will be levied on the thousands of immigrants from non-EU states applying for work or study visas, from Australian bar staff to Rhodes scholars and Premiership footballers.
     It is expected to raise £70 million over the next few years, with the funds earmarked for councils struggling to cope with the impact of mass immigration on services such as doctors' surgeries and schools. Ministers hope that acknowledging the strain caused by immigration in some areas will stop voters being tempted by the British National Party at the European elections in May.

Benefits and costs – education
EU students fail to repay study loans
Graeme Paton
Daily Telegraph, 27 February 2009

     Almost three quarters of EU students graduating from British universities fail to pay back their loans, leaving taxpayers with a multi-million-pound bill.
     Figures showed that 1,580 of the 2,240 students from outside Britain who should have started repaying had failed to do so.
     The Conservatives said the system used to track them down was "shockingly ineffective". The Student Loans Company relies on students to give correct information about their earnings and make their own arrangements to pay.

Benefits and costs – healthcare
700 organs given to foreigners despite long waiting list
Patrick Sawer
Sunday Telegraph, 25 January 2009

     The organs of nearly 700 British donors have been given to foreign patients in a controversial practice going back more than 10 years.
     It has led to patients from as far afield as China flying in for operations at NHS hospitals.
     The procedures have taken place despite a severe shortage of organs for transplant in Britain. Nearly 8,000 people are currently on NHS waiting lists for a transplant.
     Patient groups and politicians condemned the practice of making organs available to foreigners while so many British patients remained on waiting lists. ...
     The figures, obtained ... through a parliamentary question, show that about 70 British organs were transplanted into foreign nationals every year between 1998 and 2008. At the same time, only 140 foreign organs were brought into Britain to be transplanted into British patients.
     Among the foreigners given British organs in the past two years were 40 from Greece and Cyprus, as well as a number from Libya, the United Arab Emirates, China and Israel.
     Most of the operations took place at Leeds Teaching Hospital, King's College Hospital and the Royal Free Hospital, both in London.
     The Healthcare Commission investigated the matter last year after being alerted to the number of operations being carried out at King's College Hospital but found that no rules were being broken.
     However, the British Transplantation Society criticised the practice.

Benefits and costs
Outrage over organs 'sold to foreigners'
Sarah-Kate Templeton
The Sunday Times, 4 January 2009

     The organs of 50 British National Health Service donors have been given to foreign patients who have paid about £75,000 each for private transplant operations in the past two years, freedom of information documents show.
     The liver transplants took place at NHS hospitals, despite severe shortages that mean many British patients die while waiting for an organ that could save their lives.
     The documents disclose that 40 patients from Greece and Cyprus received liver transplants in the UK paid for by their governments. Donated livers were also given to people from non-European Union countries including Libya, the United Arab Emirates, China and Israel.
     The surgeons who carry out the transplants receive a share of the operation fee – believed to be about £20,000 – as all the work is done privately in NHS hospitals.
     It comes as a record 8,000 Britons are on NHS lists waiting for transplant organs. About 260 British patients are waiting for a liver.
     Last week leading transplant surgeons and patient groups called for an end to the practice. Professor Peter Friend, president of the British Transplantation Society, said it was unethical to give organs to people from abroad while British patients were dying.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – health service
Costly NHS interpreters
Dr Charles Gauci
Daily Telegraph, 29 December 2008
[Letter to the Editor]

     As a consultant in the NHS, my staff and I are faced, virtually on a daily basis, with patients who cannot speak English and for whom an interpreter has to be hired, at considerable expense to the NHS.
     Interpreters are provided for every conceivable language (except, apparently, for my own native tongue, Maltese).
     No other country in the world provides such a service. Surely, if someone has been living here for five years and cannot speak English, they should be expected to pay for an interpreter themselves?

Benefits and costs
Cost in translation
Daily Telegraph, 19 December 2008

     The cost of providing translators for benefits claimants has risen by more than 40 per cent in four years, the Conservatives have disclosed. In 2004, the bill for translation at the Department for Work and Pensions stood at £2.5 million. By this year, it had risen to nearly £4 million.

Benefits and costs – health services
Thousands of Polish women come to Britain for abortions
Daily Telegraph, 16 December 2008

     Ten thousand Polish women had abortions in Britain last year, it was reported. The procedures, illegal in Poland, were thought to have cost the NHS between £5 million and £10 million.
     People coming to Britain as temporary workers are given a National Insurance number and can then register with a doctor and have NHS treatment. Britain is thought to be popular because abortions can be carried out up to 24 weeks into a pregnancy.
     The figures were disclosed by the Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning.

Benefits and costs
Polish pay-outs
Sunday Telegraph, 14 December 2008

     British taxpayers are paying £35 million a year in child benefit to support 42,759 children living in Eastern Europe, the majority in Poland, Government figures show.

Benefits and costs
Benefits of migrant labour 'overstated'
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 15 November 2008

     The benefits of mass immigration have been "wildly overstated" and there should be a cap on the numbers coming into the country, a group of peers has said.
     The warning was given during a debate over a scathing report on the Government's open door policy by the Lords economic affairs committee. The committee, which includes two former chancellors – Lord Lawson and Lord Lamont – and several former cabinet ministers, said that the Government must set an "explicit target range" for immigration and make rules to keep within that limit.
     Lord Wakeham, who chaired the committee, rejected as "fundamentally flawed" the claim that immigration is necessary to prevent labour shortages.

Benefits and costs – housing
Moving up. Family on benefits lives in £800,000 home at taxpayers' expense
Stephen Adams
Daily Telegraph, 11 November 2008

     A mother of five children who lives on benefits is being housed in a home worth up to £800,000 at taxpayers' expense.
     Nigerian-born Omowunmi Odia moved into the mock-Tudor executive home in Edgware, north London, after she was forced out of her previous property by court order. The property reportedly costs £25,000 a year to rent.
     Mrs Odia said that Barnet council had tried to house her in Enfield but she had stuck out for the home in Edgware, because it was closer to her children's school.
     Mrs Odia said that she and her children much preferred their new home, which has two sitting rooms and a double garage, as their old two-bedroom flat was too small.

Benefits and costs – unemployment benefits
Returning Poles claim British dole
Daily Telegraph, 5 November 2008

     Returning Polish workers are continuing to claim hundreds of pounds in benefits from British taxpayers.
     Job centre staff in Poland say increasing numbers of peopleare coming back to their home country after losing work in Britain and Ireland.
     They are advising them that rather than signing on for Polish benefit, which pays just £120 a month, they should use a European Union loophole to continue claiming Jobseeker's Allowance from Britain at a rate of about £260 a month for up to three months.

Benefits and costs – police, NHS
Translators for foreign criminals cost £22m
Andrew Porter
Daily Telegraph, 30 October 2008

     Police forces are having to spend more than £22 million a year on hiring interpreters for foreign criminals, new figures show.
     The overall cost has risen by two thirds in the past five years, but for some individual forces the amount paid to translators has increased by 400 per cent. ...
     In total the costs have risen from £13,580,599 in 2004 to £22,178,040 this year – a rise of 63 per cent. ...
     Of the 51 forces in Britain, 43 responded to the Freedom of Information request ...
     Meanwhile, it emerged that the NHS is spending millions on interpreters for patients who cannot speak English.
     At least 200 trusts spent £25 million on interpreters last year, figures released under Freedom of Information laws show. If this is representative of the 557 trusts in England and Wales, the total translation bill would be well in excess of £50 million.

Benefits and costs
Staff sacked over £170,000 benefits
Daily Telegraph, 10 October 2008

     Three council officials have been sacked after an Afghan woman was given £170,000 a year in benefits to live in a £1.2 million home.
     Ealing council in west London was paying Toorpakai Saiedi, a mother of seven, a monthly housing allowance of £12,458, nearly five times the rent for a similar property nearby. She also received £400 a week in benefits.
     The sacked housing officers claim they have been made scapegoats by the council.

Benefits and costs
The £1.2m council house tenants
Urmee Khan
Daily Telegraph, 9 October 2008
[See also "Staff sacked over £170,000 benefits" (10 October)]

     A mother is receiving £170,000 a year in benefits so that she and her family can live in a seven-bedroom house worth £1.2 million.
     Toorpakai Saindi, who has four sons and three daughters aged eight to 22, has been granted an estimated £400 a week in benefits. Her landlord is paid £12,458 a month because there is no other property suitable for her family.
     Mr Saindi, who came to Britain from Afghanistan seven years ago, approached Ealing council in west London in July after being made homeless. The authority has a legal obligation to find her a seven-bedroom house. ...
     The council says the benefit and rent payouts are set by central government. ...
     The Local Housing Allowance (LHA), introduced in England on April 7, enables landlords to find out the maximum rent available for a property before a price is agreed.
     Foxtons, the estate agents, said similar houses are let for about £6,000 a month.
     The landlord, Ajit Panesar, who is acting within his rights, fixed a value for his Acton property so that the Rent Service – an executive agency of the Department for Work and Pensions – could advise the council what it should pay. It came up with £12,458 a month.

Benefits and costs
Overseas lorry eight times more likely to be in a crash
David Millward
Daily Telegraph, 22 September 2008

     Foreign lorry drivers are eight times more likely to be involved in a serious or fatal accident than their British counterparts, figures show. ...
     With foreign lorries accounting for one per cent of the total in the country, the proportion of accidents in which they are involved is far greater.
     Campaigners say foreign lorries are not maintained to the same safety levels as British ones.
     More than one in five trucks operated by overseas hauliers have been found to be unroadworthy.

Benefits and costs – housing
Government funded website telling immigrants how to get free housing
Martin Beckford
Daily Telegraph, 9 September 2008

     The Housing Rights site offers advice to new arrivals in Britain on what welfare assistance they qualify for and how to claim it.
     It also tells them how to take legal action if they think they have been denied a home on the grounds of their race. ...
     It is part of a three-year project called Opening Doors run by the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Housing Associations' Charitable Trust, which has been given £120,000 by the Department for Communities and Local Government to help migrants settle in Britain. ...
     Mark Wallace, campaign director for the TaxPayers' Alliance pressure group, said: "This sends out a deplorable message to migrants about Britain as a whole, and also about what we would hope they would contribute to the country.
     "We should be welcoming people with assistance on how to get a job swiftly and join the hard-working majority of people, not on the quickest and easiest way to tap into benefits."
     He added: "I'm not aware of a special website for people who have paid taxes here their whole lives."
[Site link]

Benefits and costs
Immigration is 'big boost for economy'
Daily Telegraph, 26 August 2008

     The economic benefits of immigration have been underestimated by the Government, according to an influential think-tank.
     Immigrant workers fill gaps and do jobs British workers do not want, says a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). But it found that employers and local economies were not reaping the full benefits because many migrants were staying for short periods instead of settling in Britain.
     The IPPR said local economies benefited because might have different skills that could lead to the establishment of new types of businesses and they tended to be more entrepreneurial.
     Immigrants could also expand the market for local businesses by establishing links to their countries of origin.
     IPPR analysis of statistics showed that more than a million immigrants came to Britain from the eight countries that joined the EU in May 2004 but about half of those had now returned home. The report recommends that local councils and the Government ensure they are doing enough to attract and retain immigrants.

Benefits and costs – multiculturalism, housing, education
Britons who feel they are losing out to immigrants
Christopher Hope
Daily Telegraph, 21 July 2008

     Immigrants raise fears of limited prospects among the British
     Many Britons fear their prospects are being limited because of the pressure put on housing and schools by immigrants arriving in the UK, a new report warns.
     The claims come as it emerged that £1 billion is being spent on putting up foreigners in council houses – despite two million people waiting for a home.
     The report, titled Immigration and Social Cohesion in the UK, uncovered a stark divide in how parts of the UK adapt to new migrants.
     While many people value their children growing up with cultural diversity, some feel their opportunities are reduced because of immigration.
     There was particular concern around the competition for social housing, soaring house prices and school places.
     Report author Mary Hickman, a Professor at London Metropolitan University, said: "We found that although many British people value the UK for being multi-ethnic and multicultural, poverty and lack of opportunities undermine social cohesion especially in certain parts of our towns and cities.
     "A key factor influencing whether new migrants are accepted is the dominant story in each locality about who belongs there."
     The report also suggested that Gordon Brown should spend focus on tackling poverty rather than a "fixed notion" of Britishness to improve social cohesion.
     Since taking over as Prime Minister last July, Mr Brown has consistently emphasised the importance of Britishness to bind the nation together.
     However the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggested that his time might be better spent dealing with "deprivation and how people connect".
     The competition for a limited supply of council housing has been one of the areas of key concern in the debate about immigration.
     Since Labour came to power in 1997 the number of people on the waiting list for a council house has soared by 650,000 to 1.67 million households.
     Figures obtained by the Conservative MP James Clappison show that nearly £1 billion is being spent on putting up foreigners in council houses –despite nearly two million households waiting for a new home.
     Parliamentary answers show that 7,000 council houses were rented to foreigners from both inside and outside the European Union in 2006/7.
     Given that it costs £134,000 to provide a council house, this means that £938 million – including £430 million of grants – is spent on providing social housing for foreigners.
     Mr Clappison, a member of the Commons home affairs select committee, said: "This is one more example of the pressure placed upon housing and services by the present very high level of immigration permitted by the Government.
     "The Government is completely failing to take into account the consequences of its policies".
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – multiculturalism, housing
Immigration: 'Britishness' will not help integration, say researchers
Sara Gaines
The Guardian, 21 July 2008

     Tackling deprivation and boosting social interaction would do more to reduce hostility to immigrants than trying to create a sense of Britishness, a report said today.
     Concerns over limited housing and school places in some parts of the UK are undermining attempts to ensure new migrants are well received, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
     It found a stark divide between places well equipped to adapt to new migrants and those that are not.
     In areas people perceived as homogeneous and settled, there were more fears about the effects of immigration. Tensions were far lower in areas where there was a long history of immigration.
     "There is no simple relationship between high levels of diversity and poor cohesion," researchers concluded.
     "What many people welcome is the opportunity to meet people in their area at social occasions, or at cultural events and festivals, and to exercise the choice of, selectively, getting to know people better."
     The research, Immigration and Social Cohesion in the UK, found many people welcomed cultural diversity, but tensions arose where people felt their prospects were reduced because of immigration.
     "Although many British people value the UK for being multi-ethnic and multicultural, poverty and lack of opportunities undermine social cohesion especially in certain parts of our towns and cities," said the lead researcher, professor Mary Hickman.
     Residents across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland were interviewed for the study between 2005 and 2007.
     It found diverse feelings on Britishness, with minority ethnic long-term residents and new arrivals the most positive about Britain.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – unpaid fines
Foreign drivers speed off without paying £10m fines
Ben Leach
Sunday Telegraph, 29 June 2008

     Foreign drivers get away with not paying 180,000 speeding and parking fines every year because British authorities cannot trace them.
     The Sunday Telegraph used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain speeding ticket figures from 15 police forces. They showed that foreign drivers in those areas fail to pay 27,000 speeding fines annually – pointing to a nationwide total of about 80,000 unpaid speeding fines a year.
     The motorists can escape justice over the fines, which total more than £10 million, because police, councils and speed camera authorities are not able to obtain their details. Statistics released by 36 local authorities also show that foreign drivers got away without paying 54,000 parking fines a year, pointing to a nationwide total of 105,000 unpaid fines. ...
     There are 140,000 foreign-registered vehicles on Britain's roads at any one time and three million enter the country each year.
     The largest group are Polish-registered vehicles, which account for 36 per cent of those in Britain, followed by French vehicles at 10 per cent and German vehicles at 9 per cent.

Benefits and costs – births, health services
Shortage of nurses and cots a threat to babies, claim MPs
Rebecca Smith
Daily Telegraph, 17 June 2008

     The lives of newborn babies are being put at risk by understaffed and overstretched neo-natal units, a report by a group of MPs has disclosed. ...
     Infant mortality figures are nearly three times as high in the Midlands as in parts of the South. The Department of Health admits that the target to close the gap by 10 per cent by 2010 is unlikely to be met, the report from the Public Accounts Committee says. A third of units are overcrowded and on average each unit has three vacancies for qualified nurses.
     Edward Leigh, MP, chairman of the public accounts committee, said: "Constraints in capacity mean that the Department of Health is still struggling to meet the demand for neo-natal services which has risen year on year. ..." ...
     The PAC report says obesity among mothers, older women having babies, deprivation, increasing use of fertility treatment and rising numbers of babies born to ethnic minority mothers is putting pressure on services.

Benefits and costs
£33m child benefit paid to foreign children who live abroad
Glen Owen
Daily Mail, 1 June 2008

     British child benefit paid to foreign children living abroad has rocketed by an astonishing 72 per cent in just nine months, to £33million a year.
     Most of the money is going on 36,000 children still in Poland whose parents are cashing in on European rules that let them claim benefits in the UK after working and paying taxes here for a year.
     Ministers were plunged into a new immigration row last night by the figures, only shortly after proposed tax rises for low-income British families sparked intense controversy.
     The huge bill for British taxpayers began with the EU's enlargement in 2004, leading to 800,000 workers from the new member countries moving to the UK.
     But it has escalated dramatically as word has spread among Polish communities in Britain, coupled with Polish-language newspapers publishing guides on how to claim the benefit.
     The new figures, released to Conservative Treasury spokesman Philip Hammond, reveal that in the nine months to March this year the number of workers from EU accession states claiming child benefit rose from 14,000 to 24,000.
     For Poland, the rise in six months was 43 per cent.
     Even larger amounts are paid out to East European workers in child tax credits, but the Government has refused to put a figure on that liability.
     The UK benefit is so attractive because it is £977 a year for the first child and £652 for young siblings – as opposed to £160 for each child in Poland.
     But the reciprocal agreement under European law means Britons working in that country get only the £160 from the Warsaw government.
     Mr Hammond said: "At a time when child poverty is rising, child-benefit money is being siphoned off to children who don't even live here.
     "The Government has no way of checking if these claims are genuine. ..." ...
     Sir Andrew Green, chairman of pressure group MigrationWatch, said: "It is ridiculous that we pay child benefit at British rates to be claimed in countries where the cost of living is one quarter of ours.
     "Having failed to foresee this, the Government should now renegotiate the requirement so that this benefit is tied to the cost of living."
[Site link]

Benefits and costs
James Kirkup
Daily Telegraph, 21 May 2008

     More than 100,000 of the eastern Europeans who have come to Britain in recent years are claiming benefits, official figures showed yesterday.
     Some 102,029 are receiving child benefit and an estimated 58,000 are receiving tax credits, Home Office data disclosed.
     The figures also showed that the number of eastern Europeans who have applied to work in Britain since their countries joined the EU in 2004 has reached 845,000.

Benefits and costs – business
UK 'reaping benefit' of immigration
The Press Association, 7 May 2008

     Eastern European immigrants to the UK have a higher employment rate than British citizens, a report reveals.
     An average 84% of workers from eight countries that joined the EU in 2004 have jobs - 9% higher than the UK-born average, according to Business for New Europe (BNE).
     Its report suggests the impact of the EU's biggest-ever expansion four years ago has benefited the UK and Eastern Europe equally.
     Since 2004 just over one million migrant workers have come to Britain from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, Slovakia and Estonia.
     But nearly half have already emigrated again, leaving an estimated 665,000 people from the eight nations currently living in the UK.
     The BNE report contains articles from 22 business leaders in companies including ArcelorMittal, Tesco, Sainsbury, BT Group and Microsoft.
     They collectively hail EU expansion as a good thing. Roland Rudd, BNE chairman, said: "This expansion has transformed the accession countries, galvanised the European Union and also presented fresh opportunities for existing member states.
     "Britain, and businesses here, are reaping the benefits of an enlarged EU which has created a single market of 500 million consumers."
     The report said very few of the Eastern European migrants claimed state benefits - only 2.4% of those registering for NI numbers since 2004 did so to claim benefits.
     And, on average, immigrant workers put in 46 hours a week - four hours longer each week than UK-born workers.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – healthcare
Health tourist checks 'not done'
Phil Kemp
BBC, 3 May 2008

     About a third of hospitals in England and Wales are ignoring government advice to charge foreign visitors for NHS treatment. ...
     But a third of overseas visitor managers polled by their association admitted patients were not routinely asked about their entitlement. ...
     Tunde, not his real name, lives in Lagos in Nigeria and has been suffering with heart trouble for the past three years.
     But, instead of paying for treatment at home, he travels to the UK for free care on the NHS.
     "I have an NHS card. I registered it through the GP. I book an appointment with a GP and I am referred to the hospital," he said.
     Tunde has been making the trip as a health tourist twice a year for the last three years and says that he will continue doing it until he is better. ...
     For most non-EU nationals, treatment on the NHS which is not urgently necessary is chargeable.
     The government was so concerned about reports of foreign nationals receiving free treatment when they should be paying that it introduced tough new guidelines in 2004, designed to ensure that all hospitals checked the status of patients being admitted.
     But, four years on, the Donal MacIntyre programme on Radio 5 Live has learned the rules are widely ignored.
     Some overseas visitor managers in hospitals told the BBC that they found the guidelines confusing and described how some staff are uncomfortable checking patients' immigration status.
     One told the programme: "Staff are anxious of possible abuse not only by overseas visitors but also from people who feel it is unjust to be asked."
     A confidential report for the Department of Health released under the Freedom of Information Act last year estimated that £30m was lost in un-recovered debts from foreign visitors in 2004. ...
     The Department of Health is currently reviewing access to primary and secondary care for all foreign nationals and several hospitals are running pilot schemes where patients who are not eligible for free treatment have to pay at their bedside.
     Andy Finlay is the income generation manager at West Middlesex University Hospital, which is one of the hospitals involved in the scheme.
     He explained that one particularly blatant example of a health tourist prompted their involvement.
     "He said 'you have to treat me until I'm well and I'm not paying and there's nothing you can do about it'.
     "He came with a pre-existing heart condition and he knew it's free at the point of delivery in the UK. He abused us - he was a 100% bona fide health tourist."
     Since introducing their new policy, 20% of all patients admitted to A&E self-discharge before they are asked to pay for treatment, whereas before no patients left of their own accord.
     The hospital says they now recover 75% of debt from foreign visitors paying all fees, a much higher proportion that most other hospitals.
     Andy Finlay is hoping that the Department of Health will extend his idea across all hospitals.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – healthcare
Health tourists must pay, says hospital
Daily Telegraph, 1 May 2008

     A hospital is refusing to provide anything other than basic treatment for "health tourists" unless they pay first.
     West Middlesex University Hospital, which is near Heathrow airport, has started taking action – such as discharging heart attack patients after as little as 48 hours and taking credit card details – and hopes to save up to £500,000 a year. Patients were discharged only after being signed off by three consultants.
     Visitors from non-EU countries are not eligible for free treatment and are estimated to cost the NHS more than £50 million a year.

Benefits and costs
Migrant benefits
Daily Telegraph, 24 April 2008

     The British economy has been boosted by high levels of immigration over the past 10 years, a report has claimed.
     The Work Foundation think-tank said inflation and interest rates have been kept lower as a result of mass migration. It also suggested that skills and labour shortages had been avoided and the economy had been kept on a "stable growth path".

Benefits and costs
The Media's Delusional take on Multiculturalism [1]
Tim Murray
Canada Free Press, 11 April 2008

     According to the Edmonton Journal's editorial of April 4/08, "Prosperity in Diversity", Canadians are just loving the transformation of their cities.
      ...
     You know the old song. There is a labour shortage. Repeat that undocumented myth often enough and it becomes conventional wisdom and no inventory is taken of our national needs. So instead of training our own people we must reach out to the far corners of the world to solve it. The people we reach out to, naturally, must be people of colour, who will enrich us both culturally and economically because, you guessed it, they will solve the labour shortage that is alleged to exist. Much of it is the famous "they do work our own people won't do" kind. That is, our own people won't do it unless they are paid decent wages for it.
     Now, according to the Edmonton Journal, anyone who doesn't want their city bulging with people of colour is a bigot who belongs in the past. The rest of us are "celebrating" the new Canada. Celebrating higher density living, traffic jams, more pollution, more sprawl, loss of farmland, loss of wetlands, and species loss. About 70% of species at risk exist at the boundaries of the very cities that the Edmonton Journal is excited to report are bursting with ethnic minority growth. Canadians are exchanging treasured biological diversity for this vaunted "cultural diversity".
     One conspicuous feature of cultural diversity is ethnic gang warfare which, to borrow a phrase from the Edmonton Journal, has made "the cities of this country vastly more interesting." Multiculturalism has not only enriched our palates with its fine range of ethnic restaurants, it has enriched our crime scene, forcing our phlegmatic and unimaginative home- grown thugs to either shape up or find a new line of work. I know I was enriched, until I fled, along with tens of thousands of other WASPS to the hinterlands in search of respite from the lawlessness that diversity had wrought. But now diversity is following us. Last summer Asian gangs were reported to be hounding the formerly sleepy retirement city of Kelowna, B.C.
     The Edmonton Journal speaks of "changing realities and changing attitudes." Interesting. A poll conducted by CTV and the Globe and Mail between August 3-7 of 2005 found that 69% of Canadians opposed multiculturalism and favoured assimilation, and 55% thought immigration levels were too high. They were not asked if they wanted the country's ethnic composition changed, but of course, they were the ordinary people of Canada and journalists and parliamentarians know better anyway. A democrat would turn the question around: Name a federal government that had a mandate to change the ethnic profile of the nation? I think it is clear the Edmonton Journal does not have its finger on the pulse of public opinion anymore than the social engineers at the CBC. There has been no sea change in attitudes toward "diversity" since August 2005.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs
The Media's Delusional take on Multiculturalism [2]
Tim Murray
Canada Free Press, 11 April 2008

     Why is there such subterranean discontent with multiculturalism in Canada, and elsewhere? Of course there is resentment with the concept of our own government requiring us to accommodate to the customs and sensibilities of newcomers rather than the reverse. But the perception of there being rampant, disproportionate ethnic crime is a common denominator of much antagonism to the multicultural nature of immigrant populations in Europe, Australia and North America. In the United States 27% of all inmates of federal prisons are illegal aliens and their violent crime statistics are appalling. In the United Kingdom 60% of London's muggings are committed by blacks and 31% of all street robberies are committed by West Indians. Ethnic crimes don't happen in Canada because the federal government won't collect ethnic crime statistics. ... ...
     There is something about diversity which is less tangible but more corrosive to society than violence. That is its apparent role as an agency of fragmentation and the loss of a sense of civic duty. Dr. Ernest Healy's study, in concert with others by Harvard's Robert Putnam, Irenaus-Eibesfeldt and Pierre van den Berghe would contest the notion of "unity in diversity". A senior research fellow at the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, Healy challenges the idea that ethnic diversity leads to a stronger, more cohesive society. In fact, it can hasten a withdrawal from collective life as manifested in Australia by lower rates of volunteerism by even second-generation immigrant residents. "When you create societies from mixed backgrounds it may lead to withdrawal from the civic sphere," Dr. Healy said, "a feeling of less connectedness." As one commentator remarked, "Few cultures actually put the nation ahead of their own families. The Civic Culture of Northern Europe and North/East Asia is the exception, not the rule. If the people of the Civic Culture are replaced by people without those values, the Civic Culture ceases to exist." ...
     And what of the economic benefits of multicultural immigration? How much prosperity is there in "diversity"? The problem with boastful pro-immigration claims is that they never take account of the enormous costs that migrants incur in social services, costs borne by resident taxpayers. In early April 2008, for example the British Peers economics affairs committee made a mockery of long-standing government claims that foreign workers added 6 billion pounds each year to the wealth of the nation. On the contrary, they concluded that the benefits of immigration to the resident population were close to zero in the long run. And the Lords report never even touched the horrendous environmental impacts of Tony Blair's demographic onslaught upon water, food production, greenspace, farmland, GHG emissions, pollution and quiet. Britons might ask, what price diversity?
     In America the price is $152 billion lost each year to American workers in job displacement and wages to immigration, according to Harvard's Dr. George Borjas. Each immigrant legal or illegal costs American taxpayers $9,000 annually, according to the Manhattan Institute while each unskilled immigrant and his family costs the treasury $22,000 annually according to a 2007 study done by the Heritage Foundation. The Grubel study done for the Fraser Institute reached similar conclusions for Canada. $18 billion more was paid out in services to unskilled presumably third world immigrants than was recovered in taxes from them - annually. So I hope you enjoyed your goat curry, you paid through the nose for it.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs – housing, education, health care
Mass immigration raises house prices, say peers
Robert Winnett
Daily Telegraph, 1 April 2008

     The unprecedented influx of immigrants will make houses unaffordable for millions of British people, an authoritative parliamentary report concludes today.
     Immigration is already having a dramatic impact on house prices but, according to the House of Lords economic affairs committee, the cost of the average property will rise to more than 10 times the average wage as a result of the influx. ...
     Research from the financial firm Goldman Sachs calculates that a one per cent increase in the number of households increases house prices by eight per cent in the short term. The increase falls to six per cent as more houses are built. ...
     The committee recommended: "Immigration is one of many factors contributing to more demand for housing and higher house prices. Housing matters alone should not dictate immigration policy but they should be an important consideration when assessing the economic impacts of immigration on the resident population in the UK."
     

800,000 pupils who are not English

Benefits and costs – transport
Foreign lorries 'pose higher risk'
Daily Telegraph, 31 March 2008

     Foreign lorry drivers are breaking British safety laws and risking lives, with accident figures rocketing in the past five years, a television programme warns.
     Killer Lorries: Tonight – to be shown on ITV1 this evening – says that foreign trucks are three times more likely to be involved in accidents. In 2006 44 people were killed and 1,322 injured in collisions with foreign heavy goods vehicles.

Benefits and costs
Migration has brought 'zero' economic benefit
Philip Johnston and Robert Winnett
Daily Telegraph, 29 March 2008

     Ten years of record immigration to Britain has produced virtually no economic benefits for the country, a parliamentary inquiry has found.
     A House of Lords committee, which is due to report next Tuesday, will call into question Government claims that foreign workers add £6 billion each year to the wealth of the nation.
     It is expected to say this must be balanced against the increase in population and their use of local services such as health and education, resulting in little benefit per head of the population.
     "Our overall conclusion is that the economic benefits of net immigration to the resident population are small and close to zero in the long run," the report will say.
     Thy findings of the Lords economics committee threaten to demolish the key argument made by ministers to justify the highest levels of immigration in the country's history.
     The inquiry by the committee, which includes two former chancellors and several former Cabinet ministers, is the first to try to balance the costs and benefits of large-scale immigration.

Benefits and costs – employment
Skilled migrants 'will give £77bn boost to UK'
Peter Taylor
Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2008

     The number of skilled migrant workers in the UK will climb 14pc within four years to top 800,000, new research has indicated.
     A report by recruitment consultants Harvey Nash said skilled migrants will account for 2.8pc of the British workforce by 2012, up from 2.5pc now, with the value of their output climbing more than a third to almost £50bn.
     Harvey Nash chief executive Albert Ellis said that, in addition, the group supported 650,000 more jobs through spending on goods and services.
     The total contribution of skilled migrants to the UK economy will hit £77bn annually within four years, the report said, with IT, telecommunications and transport sectors benefiting most. The majority come from the European Union, with London the principal destination.

Benefits and costs
£28m in child benefit is paid to families living in Poland
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 8 March 2008

     British taxpayers are paying £28 million in child benefit for youngsters living in eastern Europe, it was disclosed last night.
     The figures, given in a Commons written answer, show that by the end of last year about 34,000 children of migrant workers were getting British state handouts, even though they do not live here.
     The vast majority live in Poland and have parents who have come to Britain since their country was allowed to join the European Union in April 2004.
     More than half a million Poles have since registered for jobs in the UK together with another 300,000 people from seven other eastern European nations.
     This does not include the self-employed – who have probably pushed the numbers of those who have come seeking work above the one million mark.
     Once EU nationals have been working and paying tax in Britain for 12 months, they are entitled to the same level of state support as any British citizen.
     This includes benefit for their children, even if they are in another EU country.
     They can claim benefit worth £941 per year for a first child or £629 per year for younger siblings.
     In Poland, the benefits system pays a maximum of around £160 per year in child benefit.
     Philip Hammond, the Conservative treasury spokesman, said: "There are 3.8 million British children living in poverty. Yet we are sending £28 million of taxpayers' money abroad every year because our benefits system is such a shambles."
     He added: "When will Gordon Brown get a grip on this situation?
     "We know that billions of pounds are being lost to benefit fraud every year in Britain, so how on earth is the Government going to check these payments to children who aren't even here?"
     Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, recently announced a Whitehall review to see if the EU rules could be tightened up or reformed.
     However, Whitehall officials believe it would require a new deal among the 27 European Union countries to close the loophole.
     HM Revenue and Customs says claimants have to provide evidence to support claims for children abroad, such as a birth certificate.
     It is thought that even larger sums are being paid out to Eastern European workers in child tax credits – financial support that is provided through the tax system for those with children or on lower incomes.
     This could push the total payouts to more than £50 million but ministers say these figures are "not available". ...
     Polish newspapers regularly run features explaining exactly how to claim benefits in the UK.

Benefits and costs – employment, politics
An immigration policy bought and paid for? [part 1]
Tim Murray, director of Immigration Watch Canada
(We) Can Do Better [website], 24 February 2008
[Note: all dollar figures given are in US dollars]

     The numbers are unequivocal. For a decade polls have consistently recorded a wide discrepancy between the attitude of ordinary Americans toward immigration and the attitude of those who govern them. And the gap has been growing. In 2002 a poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that 60% of the public thought current immigration levels to be a "critical threat to the vital interests of the United States," as compared to only 14% of the country's leadership. This 46% gap compared to a 37% gap revealed by a 1998 poll. 70% felt that reducing illegal immigration should be a "very important" foreign policy goal compared to only 22% of the political elite.
     Polling done by TM, inc. in October 2006 confirmed these results. While the U.S. Senate passed a bill (S2611) supporting a large increase in legal immigration, 68% of voters thought the number of immigrants, legal or illegal, was too high, 34 times the number who said it was too "low". 71% said that low paying jobs could easily be filled if employers paid American workers decent wages rather than import low-skill labour. And 62% agreed with a statement that Canadian viewers of CBC immigration sob stories have frequently observed, "The media coverage of illegal immigrants is mostly devoted to human interest stories like how illegals risk their lives (to get here), rather than the costs they create and the Americans, particularly low-wage American workers, who may be harmed by their being here."
     The polling company Inc./Woman Trend in October of 2006 found 66% in agreement that the population increase caused by the present level of immigration would negatively impact the environment. A Zogbylcis poll of April 2006 revealed that 67% of Americans wanted less immigration to promote the assimilation of those who were already here. A poll conducted a month earlier by the same company found that 60% wanted their congressional representative to support more restrictive immigration policies. ...
     The question that these poll results beg is why? Why the cleavage between leaders and led? The anti-immigration sentiment of America's middle and working class is easily accounted for. According to Centre for Immigration Studies data, in the decade preceding 2003, immigration increased the supply of people without a high school education by 21% and the supply of other workers by 4%. Rudimentary economic theory suggests that the more poorly skilled workers there are, the less money they'll make – a fact confirmed by the National Research Council in their findings that about half the drop in real wages for high school drop-outs from 1980 to 1994 was due to immigration. A report by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Centre found that Americans and established immigrants suffer an 11% wage drop when they work alongside new Hispanic immigrants. Harvard Professor Dr. George Borgias has accumulated similar data and has made the shocking assertion that American workers lose an incredible $152 billion per year in wages from immigration.
     Immigration provides a ready-made source of cheap labour, ... it weakens the bargaining power of American-born workers and reduces the clout of their unions, if they still have them. ... Writer Rich Lowry made the best assessment: "No wonder corporate America loves our open borders: they serve as a kind of rolling reverse minimum wage law." And no wonder the late African-American liberal Congressman Barbara Jordan called for cutting back immigration in the 1990s. She was defending her constituency of low-income black workers, the first casualty of the corporate welfare program of high- level immigration, marketed by the left as "multicultural enrichment". Cultural diversity is the fig leaf of naked corporate exploitation.
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Benefits and costs – employment, politics
An immigration policy bought and paid for? [part 2]
Tim Murray
(We) Can Do Better [website], 24 February 2008

     So blue-collar attitudes to immigration are easily explained, ordinary people are simply following their class interests. And class interests can explain the open borders position taken up by America's opinion leaders and decision makers too. They are much more affluent and educated than the people they lead and attempt to influence, and feel no threat from the illegal immigrants they hire as nannies and gardeners or tip at fine restaurants. One thing is central to the understanding of the immigration divide in the United States, and that is to divest oneself of the almost universal and persistent belief that somehow the Democrats are white knights who represent the working class, the poor and the environment, while the Republicans are the incarnation of power, privilege and plutocracy. To assist you in this task you should be apprised of the following.
     A TM Inc poll of 2006 disclosed that those most apt to be satisfied with the current level of immigration which is killing American working class living standards were 25-34 year old liberal college graduates and professionals who identified with the Democratic Party. The same poll found though that it was 35-44 year old conservative Republicans who favoured large-scale round-ups of illegal immigrants. That profiles the supporters of the pro and anti-immigration positions, but the current party leadership positions could best be ascertained by the fact that as of the end of January 2008, all Republican contenders rejected the legalization of "undocumented" immigrants now in the U. S., while the Democrats continue to support it.
     The true alignment of the Democratic Party with corporate interests can be vividly illustrated by a look at campaign financing. McCain, Clinton and Obama are, to put it bluntly, Wall Street candidates. The big banks, the financial firms, corporate law firms and private equity firms pay the pipers. But, according the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP) (www.opensecrets.org), the Democrats are the clear favourite. Hillary Clinton took in $106.1 million and Barack Obama $102.1 million for all of 2007. McCain received substantially less at $41,102,178. Hillary Clinton received $1.3 million from private equity firms, while Obama received $1 million. McCain finished a distant fourth at $395,000. Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory.
     Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal tax rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Clinton and Obama have also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests. Corporate law firms gave Clinton over $11 million and Obama over $9 million. McCain only got just over two and a half million dollars, the most for Republican candidates. As of February 22, 2008, bagmen have raised over $138 million for Obama, over $134 million for Clinton, and over $53 million for McCain.
     Most interesting is the disposition of "Silicon" money. Between 1998 and 2006 almost $83 million in political contributions in the form of individuals donations, PAC contributions, and soft money were made by 40 technology companies. Amounting on average to just $295,708 per company per year of lobbying, it was money well spent. The concession Bill Gates wanted, the H-1B Visa program that allows cheap technology workers into the country, reaped profits a hundred times that investment. But Microsoft wanted to be more certain the fix was in. Over that that seven year period they gave $5,7888,286, with half of Congress on its payroll it would seem. AT+T donated $3,504,773, Apple $3,620,823, and Vericon $4,237,884. ...

Benefits and costs – employment, politics
An immigration policy bought and paid for? [part 3]
Tim Murray
(We) Can Do Better [website], 24 February 2008

     The most revealing fact to be gleaned from presidential campaign donation statistics is one found when donation records are subjected to sector analysis. If one studies 12 business or professional sectors of American society from Agribusiness to Construction to Health to Labour etc., there is one sector that is clearly salient – the "financial-real estate" sector. It has contributed over $73 million to various campaigns, $25 million more than any other sector.
     Real estate interests (including mortgage brokers, homebuilders and property developers) gave $4.8 million to Clinton, $2.7 million to Obama and $1.9 million to McCain. The conventional interpretation of their motive is that they want access to the winner when an expected crackdown over predatory lending and a troubled housing finance system reaches the top of the legislative agenda. But there is an alternative, or at least supplementary explanation. One that has been advanced by Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman. The land tenure system that characterizes Anglo-American societies encourages speculation, and much money is to be made simply by population growth. Newman has written extensively to demonstrate that real estate developers are key players in lobbying for mass immigration. US campaign donation records seem to vindicate her hypothesis, as does the fact that a nation like France is close to achieving population stability because the real estate development industry cannot exist as an agent for growth, given that land cannot consistently be reduced to a speculative commodity largely because of the way tenure is arranged.
     What then became of the candidates who challenged the corporate open borders agenda? Their campaigns died from lack of funds. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado is a case in point. Wall Street likes pro-immigration candidates for obvious reasons and so they will reward those who sing their tune. Tancredo insisted on singing an objectionable note, like a three year moratorium on immigration. So he paid the price and collected just $6 million dollars or less than 6% of what Clinton received by year's end and was forced to end his campaign. Clinton at that time was Wall Street's anointed one, someone who, in the words of Numbers USA, "consistently pressed for U. S. population growth, immigration and foreign labour importation." But of course such an agenda of unabashed greed needs always to be camouflaged with a politician's candy floss, the spin is what they are purchased for. So Clinton obliged her corporate donors by saying that "we should always be open to legal immigration-it reforms, it makes us better." Well, it certainly makes a few of us richer Hillary, doesn't it, like your donors and supporters, the most well-heeled of either party!
     An examination of Clinton's voting record should confirm that big business is getting what it paid for. Clinton was co-sponsor of Bill S-2109 to help employees import cheap high tech workers while the big law firms who give to her campaign are counseling them how to use the legal system to avoid hiring qualified U.S. workers. Her support of Senate bill 2109 helped expedite the processing of the infamous H-1B visas that depress wages and displace workers. She supported an amnesty of illegal agricultural workers (S bill 1340) and another one of a similar nature (S. bill 2137) that would have brought an amnesty to another 860,000 workers not counting family. Clinton's support of Kennedy's bill S 2381 would have meant amnesty to almost all illegal aliens. Her numerous attempts to sponsor "shamnesty" bills is reflective of a comment she made to a man who said that his wife was an illegal immigrant. "No woman is illegal", Clinton replied.

Benefits and costs – employment, politics
An immigration policy bought and paid for? [part 4]
Tim Murray
(We) Can Do Better [website], 24 February 2008

     If Hillary's record is atrocious, it is doubtful if Obama's is any better. His positions seem almost indistinguishable from Clinton's, the difference being more one of emphasis than policy. He supports employer verification of employee identity to deter the hiring of illegals, she doesn't. She favours lower legal immigration intakes, he doesn't. Obama's main focus is the human rights and economic needs – of those knocking at America's door wanting to come in and those already in, legally or illegally. On the Senate floor he stated on May 23, 2007 that "Where we can re-unite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with skills our economy needs, we should." This was an ominous declaration. Since the law was changed in 1965 to create the so-called family re-unification system, "chain migration" – where an immigrant sponsors several others who in turn sponsors several more – has caused the numbers under this category to spiral out of control. In 36 years the number of immediate relatives admitted was over 13 times higher than it was when the law was first enacted to almost one-half million per year.
     An Obama policy statement maintains support for "improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world's most talented people to America." But H-1B visa holders are not paid as much as Americans, and even Microsoft admits that salaries have not kept pace with inflation. That would do much to explain a so-called labour shortage in the field. As for Obama's goal of attracting the best and the brightest, the vast majority of H-1B holders make in the $60,000 range (Intel's median salary is $65,000), but top talents in the industry capture more than $100,000. And ironically the great majority of awards for innovation have fallen to Americans, indicating that the industry is not shackled by a domestic cognitive deficit that needs relief by a massive injection of foreign Einsteins. The quest for the best and brightest of overseas talent is a smokescreen for the tech corporations' prime motive, the hunt not for the brightest minds but those that come at the cheapest price. And the H-1B program doesn't even require employers to give hiring priority to qualified American citizens, and they have an arsenal of legal measures to reject those who apply. If one is given to wonder why a U.S. Congress would expand the H-1B program in 2000 when their employers, the American taxpayers, most of whom are workers, were not its obvious beneficiaries, Utah Senator Bob Bennett's comment would be informational: "There were, in fact, a whole lot (of Congressmen) against it, but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public."
     John McCain, the only Republican contender left standing, were it not for his title as waterboy for Iraq, could run for the Democrats. He got the ball rolling in 1986 when he signed the 1986 amnesty for illegals and thereby gave the green light for aspiring border-crossers who knew that American law could be violated with impunity and trespass retroactively forgiven. He ran his nomination race on a full-throttle amnesty platform until he found religion earlier this year and back-pedaled. He has voted for S-1639 to double legal immigration, to continue chain migration and the ridiculous annual jackpot lottery of 50,000 applicants from third world nations called "Diversity Immigration". McCain's problem is that he is a dark horse and Wall Street, while hedging its bets, likes to back winners. So his take of their money is but one-third of Obama's and Clinton's.
     ...

Benefits and costs – employment, politics
An immigration policy bought and paid for? [part 5]
Tim Murray, director of Immigration Watch Canada
(We) Can Do Better [website], 24 February 2008

     The most disappointing feature of the American immigration dialogue is its one-dimensional nature. Two critical elements are virtually absent from the arguments presented by both open and closed borders advocates. One is that both sides talk about what attracts Mexican labour to America, and therefore the measures for turning them away. But no one talks about the conditions in Mexico that drove people to take desperate risks to get to the United States and who is responsible for those conditions. When is America going to look in the mirror and admit that the larcenous NAFTA agreement and rapacious rampage of multinational corporations undercut a viable Mexican economy and the basis for a decent life for so many Mexicans? When are American politicians and opinion-makers going to acknowledge that much of American prosperity is built on the backs of those people and others like them in the hemisphere and the world? All the measures proposed by the anti-immigrationist forces are necessary, but by no means sufficient to defend the borders. America cannot play King Canute and hold back a tide of billions. It must reduce the tide by ensuring that the billions do not want to leave home. Scrap the trade agreements, the IMF, SAPs (Structural Adjustment Policies) and offer restitution to rebuild economies that have been pillaged.
     Aside from NAFTA, there is another crucial phrase missing from US immigration discussions. Carrying capacity. Each year the United States adds the equivalent of another Chicago. During the Bush administration it has grown by 21 million people. Immigrants, their children and grandchildren will account for 82% of all population growth in the years leading up to 2050, when the country will reach a staggering 438 million if this growth rate is not slowed. Some worry about assimilation, since the share of non-Hispanic whites will fall from 67 to 47%. Obviously the labour market is the focus of most, who would share Samuel Gompers's conviction that "immigration is fundamentally a labour issue." But full employment and economic prosperity in a culturally or linguistically cohesive America would be a pyrrhic accomplishment if such a nation were to rest on a collapsing ecosystem. Can America sustain half its current population when critical resource shortages appear or biodiversity services are compromised ? The works of analysts like David Pimental, Dale Pfeiffer and Richard Heinberg do not inform any Congressional debate about how many people the country should admit. Clearly a Population Plan is overdue.
     The American people have spoken on immigration but the political elite will not listen because they are paid by their corporate benefactors not to listen. It is sad to see the world's greatest democratic experiment come to such grief. The Founding Fathers devised a system that they embedded in a constitution with mechanisms to counter-act the natural instinct of the political class to usurp power and exercise it as a permanent elite dominating pauperized subjects on the old European model. They counted on a "vigilant and manly spirit" that animates the American people to breath life and vigour into the constitution. But alas, the Founding Fathers couldn't possibly foresee the power and the scale of Wall Street money.
     In America today, anything's for sale, even democracy. I hear a Senator earmarked for the White House can be had, for, oh around 134-138 million. Sound right?
[Site link]

Benefits and costs
Benefit cuts for migrants under citizenship plan
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 21 February 2008

     Britain could link citizenship to benefits for the first time as part of a plan to cut the millions of pounds paid to immigrants from eastern Europe.
     Immigrants would not receive a passport until they had lived in the country for several years under the new plan, and during this "probationary period" they would not be allowed to claim the full range of welfare handouts such as child benefit and income support.
     Polish families are currently claiming more than £20 million a year for thousands of children who remain in their homeland.
     They get a better deal in Britain than in their own country, where payments are means tested. Under European regulations, migrant workers living in Britain are entitled to full family benefits – even if their dependants stay behind.
     Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, announced a Whitehall review only to see if these rules could be tightened up. However, it would require a new deal among the 27 European Union countries.
     The review forms part of a wider range of reforms to immigration rules and citizenship rights. A Green Paper published by the Home Office yesterday said that new arrivals from outside the EU would be required to pay more for their visas to meet some of the costs to public services.

Benefits and costs
Money transfer charter helps your cash arrive safely
Liz King
Daily Telegraph, 16 February 2008

     A staggering £2.3bn is transferred from the UK each year as people increasingly send money abroad to relatives and friends, but the biggest worry is getting it there safely.
     Much of this money goes to developing countries – more than 50 around the world – with £300m going to India and £200m to Pakistan, with Nigeria, Jamaica and Ghana next on the list. ...
     A new Remittance Customer Charter has been introduced to help those sending money abroad, ...
     The charter, created by the Department for International Development (DFID) through the UK Remittance Task Force, will ensure that firms that sign up will give clear, transparent information in a standard format to the consumer.

Benefits and costs
Pakistanis ignoring dangers of cousins marrying, says MP
Sarah Womack
Daily Telegraph, 12 February 2008

     British Pakistanis are "in denial" about the increased risk of birth defects among the children of married cousins, a Labour MP claimed yesterday.
     Ann Cryer said that many marriages of Muslims in Bradford were between cousins and could have "tragic" impacts. She called for community leaders to encourage debate which, she believed, would move more families away from marriages between cousins.
     Mrs Cryer raised the issue two years ago after research showed that British Pakistanis were 13 times more likely to have children with disorders than the general population. ...
     Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, agreed that there was a higher risk of defects but drinking or smoking in pregnancy was "as bad if not worse". ...
     Prof Jones said: "Let's bear in mind that families like the Rothschilds married their cousins frequently."
     Cousin marriages were quite common in Spain and in Muslim communities worldwide, he said.

Benefits and costs – marriage
Minister warns over in-breeding in Asians
James Kirkup
Daily Telegraph, 11 February 2008

     Arranged marriages between British Asians raise the risk of in-breeding and birth defects, a Government minister has said.
     Phil Woolas, a junior environment minister, came under fire from Muslim groups already concerned about the public reaction to the Archbishop of Canterbury's remarks about sharia law.
     Mr Woolas, the Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, said that marriages between first cousins are a factor in birth defects and inherited conditions. ...
     The Muslim Public Affairs Committee, a campaign group, suggested the minister was demonising British Muslims. ...
     Arranged marriages are common among several British Asian groups, but intermarriage of relatives is a particular characteristic of people of Pakistani origin.
     It is estimated that more than 55 per cent of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins, resulting in an increasing rate of genetic defects and high rates of infant mortality. Figures show that British Pakistani children account for as many as one third of birth defects despite making up only three per cent of all UK births.

Benefits and costs – hospitals
£350m maternity bill for foreign mothers
Daily Telegraph, 30 January 2008

     Britain pays £350 million a year to provide maternity services to mothers born outside the country, according to a BBC analysis.
     While the birth rate among British-born women has dropped, the number of immigrants giving birth has risen by three quarters.
     The sudden rise has put such pressure on maternity services that many cannot cope and are having to turn women away. Immigrant women are more likely to suffer complications, requiring emergency caesarean sections and often are not known to health services until they are in labour.
     When Tony Blair came to power in 1997, the NHS spent around a billion pounds a year on maternity services, with one baby in eight delivered to a foreign-born mother. Ten years on, spending has risen to £1.6 billion with almost one baby in four delivered to a mother born overseas, according to an analysis by the BBC's Ten o'Clock News.
     While the number of babies born to British mothers has fallen by 44,000 a year since the mid-1990s, the figure for babies born to foreign mothers has risen by 64,000. The overall birth rate is at its highest level for 26 years.

Benefits and costs
Poles claim £20m benefits in UK for children back home
Daily Telegraph, 29 January 2008

     Polish families are claiming more than £20 million a year in benefits for thousands of children living outside Britain, it emerged yesterday.
     Under European regulations, migrant workers living in Britain are entitled to full family benefits, even if their children remain behind in their home country.
     Following the influx of workers from eastern Europe in the wake of the expansion of the EU nearly four years ago, more than 16,000 Poles alone have submitted child benefit claims. They cover 26,000 children living in Poland, at a cost to the taxpayer of £21.4 million a year. The figures were disclosed by Jane Kennedy, the financial secretary to the Treasury, in answer to a written question ...
     She refused to say how much of another benefit, child tax credit, was being claimed by Polish workers for families living overseas, ...
     In Poland, parents are not universally entitled to child benefit, and any payments are means-tested.

Benefits and costs
Cost of migrants
Cllr David Ashton, Deputy leader, Harrow Council
Daily Telegraph, 25 January 2008
[Letter to the Editor]

     As evidence presented to the Treasury select committee this week shows, the Government is indeed detached from reality when it comes to the costs of immigration and a changing diversity.
     My own local authority is a clear illustration of the point. We are the fifth most ethnically diverse borough in England and Wales, and currently incur substantial extra costs looking after that diverse population, plus the growing number of migrants who come to the area.
     Migrant skills are always welcome, and we consider diversity to be a strength. But we need to underline that there is a cash cost for the local authorities which are on the front line of caring for those populations. Until the government grant settlement recognises these seismic changes, we will all strain to cope.

Benefits and costs
Call for tougher action on foreign car drivers
Daily Telegraph, 9 January 2008

     A police officer yesterday called for tough action on foreign drivers who break the law in Britain after a 25-year-old was killed by a Polish woman driving the wrong way around a roundabout.
     Superintendent Mick Doyle, the head of roads policing for Thames Valley Police, said the number of migrants coming in to the country but not forced by law to take a British driving test had caused a huge problem on the roads.

Benefits and costs
The price of cutting migration
Daily Telegraph, 9 January 2008

     Cutting immigration levels could put 9p on income tax, a think tank told peers yesterday. The Institute of Public Policy Research also questioned whether newcomers were taking hundreds of thousands of jobs from British-born workers.
     The institute claimed that if the Government adopted a zero net migration policy then working-age people would have to pay more tax to support far more dependants in decades to come.

Benefits and costs – NHS
Immigrants 'stretching the NHS'
Daily Telegraph, 31 December 2007

     The Health Service is being pushed to breaking point by Eastern European immigrants, an NHS source claimed in a Sunday newspaper yesterday.
     The Department of Health is said to have expected to treat an extra 150,000 patients since eight countries joined the EU in 2004. But hospitals and GPs have reportedly dealt with that number every year since Britain opened its doors.
     ... The Government insisted services were not being stretched. A Health Department spokesman added: We are talking about people who are legally entitled to live in this country and access the NHS."

Benefits and costs
Politicians aren't making economic sense
Irwin Stelzer
Daily Telegraph, 14 November 2007

     Immigration is another area of muddle. There are 600,000 known job vacancies, while millions of sensible potential British workers, the very ones for whom the Prime Minister wants to create British jobs, have become layabouts. Or, to use the technical jargon, economically inactive. Some are physically unable to work. But for millions who have joined the lists of the disabled during this era of increasing health and longevity, and many of those of the dole, it would be irrational to work when the pay for staying home is better. ...
     So the first step in forging a sensible immigration policy is to reduce the demand for immigrant labour by increasing the supply of British workers.
      ...
     The second step would be to meet the legitimate complaints of the native population that is bearing the high social costs of immigration - crowded schools, overloaded health facilities and the like. Employers are getting a free ride: they have the benefit of often-cheaper foreign labour and pass on the social costs. Solution: employers to pay a fee equal to those costs for every immigrant hired, the proceeds to go to the affected community. Supplement that by raising the cost of employing illegal immigrants further - by jailing employers who knowingly hire them - and economic reason will have replaced some of the populist posturing that dominates debate about immigration policy.

Benefits and costs
Immigration officials got £7m bonus despite errors
James Kirkup
Daily Telegraph, 13 November 2007

     Immigration officials involved in a string of fiascos have been paid £7 million in bonuses, it emerged yesterday.
     Staff at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office got nearly £2 million in bonuses last year alone.
     In that year, the division was described as "not fit for purpose" by John Reid, then Home Secretary, after a series of blunders including the failure to deport hundreds of foreign prisoners held in UK jails.
     Flawed data from the IND, now the Border and Immigration Agency, were blamed for the Government omitting 300,000 foreign-born workers from immigration figures given to Parliament last month. ...
     In 2005-06, IND staff were paid £1,951,276 on top of their salaries. The previous year, the total was £1,967,989. In 2003-04, it was £1,650,451. And in 2002-03, officials got £1,334,164. ...
     The figures were released in response to Parliamentary questions from Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on work and pensions, who said the situation "defies common sense".

Benefits and costs – public opinion
Restrictions call
Daily Telegraph, 12 November 2007

     Eighty-one per cent of the public believe immigration in Britain should be cut substantially, according to a poll today, while 54 per cent dispute the Government's assertion that those coming into the country have helped the economy.
     The research, carried out by YouGov for pressure group Migrationwatch, found 85 per cent of people thought that immigration was putting too much pressure on public services.

Benefits and costs – housing
Inquiry launched into migrant council housing
Robert Winnett
Daily Telegraph, 2 November 2007

     A major independent inquiry to determine whether immigrants are given unfair access to council housing was announced yesterday by Britain's race watchdog and local authority leaders.
     Trevor Phillips, the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said there was a "widespread public perception" that new migrants had "unfair advantages to which they are not entitled".
     He announced that his commission and the Local Government Association (LGA) would launch a study to determine whether the perception was correct, and would stop any abuse it uncovered. ...
     A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: "Trevor Phillips said ... he has never seen 'any reliable evidence' to back up claims that councils are unfairly allocating housing. While local government has always maintained they have operated allocations fairly, we agree it is important to deal with perception."

Benefits and costs
Migrants may push up council tax
Toby Helm
Daily Telegraph, 1 November 2007

     Millions of homeowners face higher council tax bills next year because of the Government's failure to keep track of the number of immigrants in Britain, local authorities warned yesterday.
     Schools, hospitals and other services are struggling to cope with rapid and uncontrolled influxes of migrants, the Local Government Association (LGA) claimed. It says that because money allocated to local authorities is calculated by population figures, the government's inability to accurately assess migrant numbers means councils are receiving inadequate funding.
     A spokesman for the LGA said that in areas where numbers had risen but statistics had not reflected the increase, councils would have two options: to put up council tax next year, or cut services.

Benefits and costs
No jobs for 4,000 UK junior doctors
Rebecca Smith
Daily Telegraph, 1 November 2007

     Almost 4,000 UK medics have not got training posts in the disastrous junior doctors recruitment system, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
     A second round of recruitment ended yesterday and of the 13,624 UK graduates, who cost the taxpayer £250,000 each to put through medical school, 3,687 have not been awarded posts to allow them to train towards becoming a consultant or GP.
     Some may yet be allocated a post in one of the less popular specialties such as trauma, orthopaedics or psychiatry, and an extra 1,050 short-term posts that have not yet been allocated. But most face a choice between taking a non-training job, leaving medicine or practising abroad. ...
     Officials have said that without the thousands of applicants from outside Europe, most of which were from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, there would not have been such oversubscription for training places.

Benefits and costs
We need an honest immigration debate
Bob Rowthorn, professor of economics at Cambridge University
Daily Telegraph website, 21 October 2007

     Immigration is a contentious topic. But there is widespread agreement in official circles to one proposition: immigrants contribute enormously to increasing the prosperity of the British people. The consensus that immigration has economically beneficial effects was on display last week, when the Government released a report by its own experts. "Migrants contribute £6 billion to the GDP" was the headline in many newspapers. And the report indeed confirmed the orthodoxy that "the Exchequer is better off with immigration than without it" - as Liam Byrne, the Home Office Minister, has insisted.
     Such claims are profoundly misleading. What matters to the existing population is not how migration affects the "economy" as a whole, but how it affects them individually. Migration may increase the size of the national cake, but it also increases the number of people who are entitled to a slice of this cake.
     There is a whole section of the report devoted to the contribution of migrants to GDP per capita. It claims that, since 1998, immigrants have added 3.1 per cent to Britain's GDP. That is true. But there is another, critical fact: during the same period, immigrants have added 3.8 per cent to the total British population. Put those two together and you get the result that the additional amount produced by immigrants has been smaller than the number of people they have added to the population.
     The conclusion is inescapable: the result of immigration since 1998 has been to lower per capita GDP, or output per individual worker, not to increase it. The effect is very small, and within the margin of statistical error. But if you are willing to rely on the figures, the one thing you cannot conclude is that immigration has increased per capita GDP.
     Yet this is precisely what is often meant by those who insist that "immigration has been enormously beneficial to the economy". Putting the GDP and population figures together is not complicated economics. But somehow the report never manages to do it, and so never manages to reach the obvious conclusion. I don't know whether that failure is deliberate or not - but it is certainly misleading. ...
     Immigration, if it continues at the present rate of a net inflow of around 200,000 people a year, is going to add around 20 million to Britain's population over the next 50 years. Official press releases from the Office of National Statistics do not accurately report that fact, because they do not take account of the children that immigrants will have. It is not easy to see how the South East - which is where most immigrants settle, because that is where the jobs are - will be able to cope with so large an additional population. ...
     But let's have an honest debate about the effects and consequences of immigration, not one based on misleading statistics or evasion of the truth. At the moment, the Government seems to want to conduct the discussion on the basis that it is better that people should not know what the truth is. I cannot believe that ignorance is a rational or ethical basis for making a decision on so important a topic. If we do not debate the effects of immigration honestly and truthfully, we will all come to regret it.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs
Migrant workers earn more than British
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2007

     Immigrant workers are both higher paid and more reliable than their British counterparts and contributed £6 billion to economic growth last year, a Government study said yesterday.
     Migrants earn £424 a week on average, compared with £395 for UK workers, and paid more in tax than they consumed in services.
     However, a separate paper issued together with the study by the Home Office admitted there were complaints about the impact of immigration on housing and other public services. Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said the research showed that "in the long run, our country and Exchequer are better off with immigration rather than without it".
     The report found that in 2006, record immigration pushed the number of foreign workers up to 12.5 per cent - or one eighth - of the labour force, compared to 7.4 per cent a decade ago.
     Since average output growth over this period was 2.7 per cent a year and migration contributed an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of this, the study estimated a contribution of £6 billion from foreign workers - or £700,000 a day.
     However, the figure does not take account of the costs of a growing population, for instance the impact on public services such as health, education and transport. But the overwhelmingly positive findings were last night challenged by academics.
     Robert Rowthorn, an emeritus professor at Cambridge University, warned that as well as putting pressure on services, large-scale migration would "undermine the labour market position of the most vulnerable sections of the local workforce". The study, the first official attempt to establish the economic and fiscal impact of the record levels of immigration seen in recent years, states that "in the long run, it is likely that the net fiscal contribution of an immigrant will be greater than that of a non-immigrant".
     It also claims there is no evidence of foreign workers pushing British people out of jobs, although it presents no firm evidence for this.

Benefits and costs – housing
Public 'link immigrants to soaring house prices'
Andrew Porter
Daily Telegraph, 8 October 2007

     Immigrants are being blamed for driving up house prices, according to a new survey.
     The Conservatives immediately seized on the evidence to push their policy of putting annual limits on immigration. One in five people said controls on the number of foreigners coming to Britain was the best way to slowing demand and halting soaring property prices, the survey for propertyfinder.com found.
     ... New arrivals from abroad came second only to property investors as being responsible for fuelling the market.

Benefits and costs
Migrants 'reliant' on benefits
Duncan Gardham
Daily Telegraph, 1 October 2007

     The degree to which new immigrants rely on benefits and council housing has been revealed by a survey that looks at how much foreigners contribute to the economy.
     The league tables have been compiled by the Left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research on behalf of Dispatches, to be shown on Channel 4 tonight. The figures come from the census and the quarterly Labour Force Survey.
     Somalians rely heavily on benefits, according to the statistics - 80 per cent live in social housing and 39 per cent claim income support.
     Nearly half of newly-arrived Turks - 49 per cent - rely on social housing and 39 per cent claim income support. However, 35 per cent are self-employed.
     Other nationalities rely on sickness benefit - 10 per cent of those newly arrived from Pakistan claim it, along with nine per cent from Cyprus, and eight per cent from Kenya, Ireland and Jamaica.
     Poles work longer hours for less pay and are paid less sickness benefit than almost any other group.
     Nigerians are among the best educated, most likely to be working in the public sector and least likely to claim sickness benefit.
     British-born workers score below average in most of the tables - they claim more sickness benefit and council housing and work shorter hours.

Benefits and costs
Migrants are a drain on Britain, says Left think-tank
Ben Leapman
Sunday Telegraph, 30 September 2007

     Hundreds of thousands of immigrants are a drain on Britain and its economy, says a Left-leaning think-tank.
     Migrants from many developing nations fail to pay their way, while those from wealthy countries, such as the United States and Australia, provide a boost for the economy.
     The report, published today by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), sets out to reveal which nationalities are "a debit on Britain's balance sheet".
     It found that fewer than half of Britain's 650,000 Somalis, Bangladeshis, Turks and Pakistanis, have jobs and the four communities have the highest levels of benefit dependency.
     Britain's fastest-growing migrant group, the Poles, score above-average for employment, but have the lowest hourly pay and make a below-average tax contribution.
     Channel 4 commissioned the report for a Dispatches documentary, Immigrants: the Inconvenient Truth, to be shown tomorrow night.

Benefits and costs
Immigrants 'fuel rise in crashes'
Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2007

     Immigrants motorists' attitudes to drink-driving and speeding is fuelling a surge in road crashes, a police chief warned yesterday.
     Eastern European drivers struggling to understand signs is also thought to be a factor in the number of accidents.
     Chief Insp Rick Dowell, the head of Dorset Police's traffic unit, said there had been an increase in the number of foreign nationals arrested for drink-driving and speeding.
     "The number of fatal or serious injury collisions involving foreign nationals is also increasing," he said.

Benefits and costs – public services
Migrants 'should pay for our services'
Bonnie Malkin
Daily Telegraph, 24 September 2007

     Economic migrants could be forced to make a bigger contribution to the cost of public services, under plans outlined by the head of Britain's new equality watchdog.
     Trevor Phillips, who launches the Commission for Equality and Human Rights this week, said that some migrants who stay in the UK only for a short time should pay more for the use of schools and hospitals.
     He said the current immigration system was not built to deal with "shuttle migrants", described as people who "virtually commute from Warsaw or Slovenia", and recommended a "two-track immigration system" instead.
     He said: "It's not that we don't want them to come here. But they put a stress on infrastructure.
     "You might say they are people who are basically here for work ... they and their employers might have to make a contribution, for social insurance for example." ...
     Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, said yesterday that the suggestions would be taken seriously.

Benefits and costs – multiculturalism
Police face growing bill for interpreters
Aislinn Simpson and Alison Stacey
Daily Telegraph, 21 September 2007

     Police forces are spending millions of pounds on interpreters to meet the demands posed by immigrant workers. ...
     ... Thames Valley Police - which covers Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire - said it was spending £1 million a year on interpreters. Ten years ago the bill was about £80,000. ...
     In London, the Metropolitan Police spent £9.9 million on interpreters last year - up almost £3 million in the past three years.

Benefits and costs – employment
One in four Britons is out of work
Graeme Wilson
Daily Telegraph, 16 August 2007

     Nearly 10 million adults in Britain are currently out of work, one in four of the working population, the Government admitted yesterday.
     Official figures showed there are 1.65 million people who are unemployed, with a further 7.9 million defined as "economically inactive".
     The latter group includes more than two million people who are on long-term sickness benefits as well as students, people who have taken time off work to look after their family and those who have taken early retirement. ...
     The scale of the figures overshadowed the fact that the official unemployment figure had dropped by 45,000 over the past three months to 1.65 million, the lowest figure for more than a year.
     At the same time, the number of people in work rose by 93,000 to 29.07 million, the second highest figure on record.

Benefits and costs – housing
Immigrants given 4 in 10 new homes
Tom Savage
Daily Star, 16 August 2007

     Immigrants have taken 40% of all homes built in the UK in the past 10 years.
     The number of properties available for Brits has been squeezed because of the record number of foreigners coming to live here, according to official figures released yesterday.
     Nearly 600,000 properties have been needed to house immigrants since 1997 - three times the amount required under the last Tory Government. On average, 19,000 new homes were needed for migrants each year from 1992 to 1997.
     But after Labour came to power, that figure rocketed to an average of 66,000 each year from 1997 to 2005 - the latest year figures are available for - making a total of 592,000 homes.
     And experts say the figure is likely to have continued rising due to East European immigration since 2005.
     Tory MP James Clappison, who requested the figures, said the extra homes also damage the countryside. ...
     The Brown Government plans to build 3 million new houses in the UK by 2020, many tailored for firsttime buyers.
     But projected levels of immigration suggest that 1.2m - or 40% - will be needed for migrants, though the Government claims the figure is 33%.
[Site link]

Benefits and costs
Counting the cost of immigration
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 30 July 2007

     Immigration is, then, a numbers issue after all. Even the BBC now agrees. Last week, after studiously ignoring the subject for years, or finding it somewhat distasteful, the Beeb screened a Panorama programme entitled "How We Lost Count", which it advertised as though this were some sort of scoop.
     These are facts that many of us have known for years, but it has been an uphill battle to get them seriously debated. The fact that they are now being discussed is largely due to the efforts of a small, independent research outfit called Migrationwatch, which came on to the scene exactly five years ago this week. It issued a report that was denounced as alarmist, scaremongering, even racist.
     It was a prediction that Britain could expect to receive more than two million immigrants every 10 years for the foreseeable future unless curbs were introduced. It was absolutely spot on, but few thanked Sir Andrew Green, the retired diplomat who founded Migrationwatch, for pointing it out. More than that, efforts were made - including official ones - to traduce his motives and to trash his group's research.
     You may or may not agree with Sir Andrew's view, which he articulated five years ago, that "the scale of inward migration is now so great as to be contrary to the best interests of every section of our community". But you can no longer ignore that scale nor its consequences. The big question now is what do we do about it?
     In a recent parliamentary debate, important speeches on this subject were made by Nicholas Soames, the Tory MP for mid-Sussex, and Frank Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead. Mr Soames proposed moving to zero net immigration from outside the EU; Mr Field, if anything, was more radical in his prescription. He also said: "The debate is of course about numbers, but it is also about what it means to create and maintain a community. If the Government do not change track very smartly on this issue, the sense of national identity might be lost, and then we are in totally new territory."

Benefits and costs – employment
Rural migrant workers 'drive out young'
Graham Tibbetts
Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2007

     Migrant workers from Eastern Europe are flooding the rural labour market and forcing young people to leave the countryside in search of work, a Government advisory body warns today.
     The number of migrants working in the countryside has increased by 200 per cent in three years, with many seeking employment in agriculture, manufacturing, hotels and retail, according to a major report by the Commission for Rural Communities. This comes amid a long-term decline in the number of young people living in rural areas. ...
     The report, entitled State of the Countryside 2007, found much to commend country life over urban life including full employment, less pollution, better diet and fewer cases of stress and mental illness.
     But the researchers raised concerns that the influx of foreign workers, following the accession of eight former Soviet-bloc countries to the European Union, was placing a great strain on local schools and transport and posing problems for young country people.
     About 120,000 migrant workers registered to work in rural areas between May 2004 and Sept 2006. ...
     The commission said the money the Government gave town halls for supporting immigrants was based on statistics that were several years out of date.

Benefits and costs – education
Britain's universities 'could lose world position within 10 years'
Caroline Davies
Daily Telegraph, 5 July 2007

     Britain's reputation as a world leader for university education could be lost within 10 years, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge warned yesterday.
     Standards will plummet unless universities resist the temptation to take on poor-quality students in an attempt to plug funding gaps, Professor Alison Richard told MPs. ...
     Prof Richard told the education select committee that standards could be seriously compromised by the Government's drive to increase student numbers.
     In particular, the trend to recruit foreign students for their higher fees could lead to "a downward spiral", she said.

Benefits and costs – housing
200,000 'social homes' were given to immigrants last year
Gary Cleland
Daily Telegraph, 2 July 2007

     Five times more immigrants are given social housing than previously claimed, the Government has admitted.
     Just weeks ago ministers insisted that only one per cent of social housing is given to immigrants, in an attempt to quell widespread fears that they are treated better by local authorities than people born in Britain.
     But after an investigation by ITV's Tonight with Trevor McDonald programme, the Government has admitted that 200,000 of Britain's social homes - five per cent of the total - were given to immigrants last year.
     There is a waiting list of 1.5 million for the four million social houses in Britain.

Benefits and costs
Shortage of £50 notes blamed on immigrants
Daily Telegraph, 29 June 2007

     The Bank of England has revealed that a shortage of £50 notes is the result of so many eastern European immigrants sending them back home.
     Poles in Britain sent home almost £1 billion in the first three months of this year. Polish officials say two thirds of the Poles who have left the country are working in Britain and more than three quarters of the money flooding back to boost the Polish economy has been sent from this country.

Benefits and costs – housing
Open borders demand open debate
Sunday Telegraph, 27 May 2007
[Leading article]

     Margaret Hodge, the Minister of Industry and the Regions, and MP for Barking in London, was therefore doing little more than stating the obvious when she noted that the basis on which the state allocates the scarce resource of council housing "needs to be transparent and it needs to be perceived as fair". She also said that it was not perceived as fair, particularly since there was a widespread perception that a recently-arrived family with children would get priority over people who had lived and paid taxes for most of the lives in Britain. Such a perception exists, as the polls show: around 70 per cent believe that long-term tax-paying Britons should have priority over just-arrived immigrants in the queue for social housing.
     Yet the reaction of Margaret Hodge's Labour colleagues to her statement was hysterical. She was accused of "allowing the BNP to dictate Labour Party policies", of advocating changes which would have "catastrophic consequences for community relations", and advocating "discriminatory" housing policies. The tactic is only too familiar, because it is what Labour has done whenever any issue relating to immigration has come up for discussion: it has tried to close down debate by suggesting that even to talk about the topic is to be "racist" and to have views indistinguishable from the BNP. ...
     Myths and outright falsehoods are quickly accepted as true when public discussion is suppressed. For instance: it is not generally true that immigrant families are given automatic preference over native-born Britons when it comes to allocating housing. But the refusal of the Government to allow an open and honest discussion of the subject means that many Britons waiting for council houses believe it. ...
     We badly need and honest and open public debate about the costs and benefits of immigration to Britain, and on the extent and limits of our obligations to poor or destitute people who arrive in Britain in search of a better life. ...
     There was not a word on the topic in any of Labour's election manifestos. Conservative attempts to put the issue on the agenda have been smeared and denigrated in exactly the same way as Margaret Hodge was last week.

Benefits and costs – housing
Lady Hodge's days must be numbered
Simon Heffer
Daily Telegraph, 26 May 2007

     It is hard to believe that one person who will not be sacked - and for whom it would be hard to find as appalling a replacement - will be the industry minister, Margaret Hodge. Mrs Hodge - or Lady Hodge, as she should more correctly be known, her husband being a knight - came out this week with the amazing statement that our indigenous population should be given preferential treatment in housing allocations to recent immigrants. I happen to agree with her, but it is only because the BNP threatens to unseat her in her constituency because of this issue that she has come out so cynically in favour of the policy. I won't ask what took her so long, just why even now she is still allowed to hold office.

Benefits and costs – housing
Johnson accuses Hodge of using 'language of BNP'
Brendan Carlin
Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2007

     Labour's immigration row deepened last night after the Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, accused a fellow minister of language worthy of the British National Party.
     Mr Johnson, one of the frontrunners to be Labour's deputy leader, condemned the industry minister, Margaret Hodge, for claiming that existing British families should have more right than immigrants to social housing.
     Speaking on BBC's Question Time, Mr Johnson said: "The problem with that is that's the kind of language of the BNP.
     "And it's grist to the mill of the BNP, particularly as there is no evidence that there's any problem in social housing - none whatsoever." ...
     Earlier this week, Mrs Hodge was rebuked by two other contenders for the deputy leadership - Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary, and backbencher Jon Cruddas. ...
     However, Mrs Hodge, who was born in Egypt, won some support from Hazel Blears, Labour's party chairman and also a deputy leadership candidate. She said that "you have got to look at allocations policies to show that they are fair".

Benefits and costs – housing
Shame on you, Margaret Hodge
Andrew O'Hagan
Daily Telegraph, 22 May 2007

     Are modern politicians generally more disgusting than they used to be? I feel it is worth pondering the question as you go about trying to understand the latest statement by Margaret Hodge on the question of immigrants and public housing. ...
     It was nauseatingly worded, in an article for the Observer, so as to seem fair to all parties, but nobody is fooled: Mrs Hodge wants to stop foreigners from taking our houses.
     She hasn't the courage to present the matter so frankly, but this is what she means, and her idea is completely divisive. ...
     Why do you think she did it? I'll give you three clues. One: she represents Barking. Two: her constituency used to be very white and now it's very mixed. And three: the BNP gained 11 seats on the local council last year. So there you have it, the simple moral arithmetic of modern British politics. Mrs Hodge is wooing those of her constituents who have lately found their concerns being represented most nakedly by the British National Party, and their sitting MP is keen enough to see that she'd better say something to appease their growing anger.
     Shame on her. And shame on them. The notion that immigrants are hoisted on to the housing lists at the expense of true blue working-class English folk is a complete fallacy. It's more than a fallacy: it's a stupid, jingoistic fallacy, propagated by people who have their own reasons for feeling aggrieved at their lot in life.

Benefits and costs – housing
A message to my fellow immigrants
Margaret Hodge, Industry Minister
The Observer, 20 May 2007

     In our open, tolerant country, there are, thankfully, few issues that remain taboo. But, motivated by the fear of both legitimising racism and encouraging the extreme right, migration is one. Yet for many voters, it continues to be a top issue.
     My constituency of Barking in east London has experienced rapid change, moving from predominantly white neighbourhoods to many multiracial neighbourhoods. ... ...
     Unless we listen, we shall be unable to convince people that we are on their side as they learn to live with new neighbours in the tolerant and strong multiracial society we on the liberal left desire. This stifled debate means we have missed the opportunity to articulate more clearly the huge benefits to our economy, our culture and the evolving nature of our Britishness that migration brings. ...
     We need just immigration policies that are fairly and efficiently administered. But we also need to acknowledge that population change is a feature of the modern world, of our globalisation. Yet the period of transition can be disturbing and painful. We all find change difficult and new neighbours, new shops and new habits in our street or on our estate do demand adjustment. As ever, the people who face the greatest changes tend to be those who live in the poorest communities where migrants can afford to settle.
     So while we need strong leadership to promote the rewards migration offers, it is only fair to hear the resentments and fears it can arouse. Only by listening to those fears can we demonstrate understanding for the difficulties settled communities experience in adjusting and move beyond the fears to secure tolerance and harmony. ...
     We prioritise the needs of an individual migrant family over the entitlement others feel they have. So a recently arrived family with four or five children living in a damp and overcrowded, privately rented flat with the children suffering from asthma will usually get priority over a family with less housing need who have lived in the area for three generations and are stuck at home with the grandparents.
     We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants.
     We should also look at drawing up different rules based on, for instance, length of residence, citizenship or national insurance contributions which carry more weight in a transparent points system used to decide who is entitled to access social housing. There are a small number of confirmed refugees who, of course, would receive the same entitlements as British citizens. However, most new migrant families are economic migrants who choose to come to live and work here. If you choose to come to Britain, should you presume the right to access social housing? ...
     As an immigrant myself, although I am white and middle class, I know how difficult it is to adapt in a new country. ... I know that striking the best balance in our approach to migration is fraught with huge difficulties. But if we don't dare to talk about it, we'll never get it right.

Benefits and costs – statistics
Whitehall immigration figures are too low, say councils
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 15 May 2007

     The Government was accused yesterday of exaggerating the economic benefits of immigration as council leaders complained that official data about migrant numbers were flawed.
     Liam Byrne, the Home Office minister, said immigrants were contributing half a billion pounds every working day to the economy, a figure later repeated by Downing Street.
     This would amount to £125 billion a year - equivalent to 10 per cent of total GDP.
     But critics said it did not take into account the fact that immigrants also added to the population, which meant that on a per head basis the addition was negligible.
     Mr Byrne was responding to criticism from town hall bosses that official statistics underestimated the number of migrants in their areas.
     This affects the grants they receive from Whitehall, which are based on population numbers. ...
     Councils receive around £600 for every person in the borough from central government. ...
     Sir Simon Milton, the leader of Westminster City Council, said 2,000 migrants were coming through Victorian coach station every week.

Benefits and costs – assessment
Forum to assess impact of record immigration
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 29 March 2007

     Ministers are to set up a forum to assess the impact of immigration on communities, the Home Office announced yesterday.
     The new body, which follows 10 years of record immigration under Labour, will consider evidence that schools, hospitals, housing and transport infrastructure are all feeling the strain of a growing population. ...
     The creation of the Migration Impacts Forum (MIF), alongside another body advising on skills shortages that immigrants might be able to fill, marks a significant change of approach by Labour, which has justified the four-fold increase in immigration since 1997 almost entirely on economic grounds. ...
     Yesterday's announcement was part of a package of measures that included the prospect of a £1,000 fine on families whose relatives failed to go home when their visas expired. It is already an offence punishable by a £5,000 fine to retain a nanny who has overstayed.
     It also envisaged further curbs on forced marriage by raising the minimum age for bringing a spouse into the country from 18 to 21. It will be a requirement for spouses to learn English before they can join they wife or husband. ...
     Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migrationwatch, said: "It is high time that the wider picture was considered, including the widespread public concern that we are losing our own culture.
     "But this forum will be useless if it includes only the usual suspects from the immigration industry and employers who stand to gain from immigration."

Benefits and costs – asylum
Taxpayers get bill for asylum seekers
Daily Telegraph, 16 March 2007

     Taxpayers will have to pick up the bill for looking after failed asylum seekers after a council lost a legal test case yesterday.
     Hillingdon borough in west London is adding £10 to its average tax bill to cover the cost because the Government refuses to provide the funds.
     The Tory-run council, which covers Heathrow, spends £1 million a year looking after people who arrive as unaccompanied children and remains legally responsible for them until they are 21.

Benefits and costs – jobs
'Learn English or lose benefits'
George Jones
Daily Telegraph, 13 February 2007

     Unemployed immigrants will have to show they are learning English or risk losing benefits from April, Jim Murphy, the welfare minister, announced yesterday.
     About 40,000 jobless people from ethnic minorities say their poor English is a barrier to finding employment - and £4.5m is spent on translators in job centres.
     The Government believes that this money would be better spent on teaching them English so they could get jobs rather than claim benefit. Mr Murphy told a Work Foundation seminar that it was "unacceptable" that ethnic minorities in Britain earned on average a third less than their white counterparts.
     While 15 per cent of members of ethnic minorities cited language difficulties as a barrier to work, not enough of the language-learning opportunities at job centres were being taken up.

Benefits and costs
Migrants 'add 4p a week' to your pocket
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 3 January 2007

     The alleged economic benefit to Britain of record levels of immigration are a myth, new figures suggest.
     They show a "very slight" gain of around 4p a week for each member of the native population - not enough to buy a Mars bar a month.
     An analysis carried out by Migrationwatch UK used the Government's own claim that immigrants contribute a net £4 billion a year to Britain's gross domestic product.
     The study said this amounted to £2.10 a year for each of Britain's 60 million inhabitants.
     It concluded: "The much vaunted contribution of immigrants to the economy is very slight indeed." ...
     Migrationwatch examined a range of British and international studies on the economic value of mass immigration, all of which indicate that, on a per capita basis, the financial benefits are minimal.
     In addition, high levels of immigration place huge pressure on housing, health and schools and have an increasing impact on employment.

Benefits and costs
Little to show from tide of migrants
Sir Andrew Green
Daily Telegraph, 3 January 2007

     It is amazing what the Government's spin doctors have been getting away with. For years they have trumpeted the economic benefits of immigration but now we find that they are, in fact, very small.
     The Government recently put a figure on it for the first time. Ministers told Parliament that immigrants add "at least £4 billion to production". What they did not say is that they also add almost exactly the equivalent percentage to our population, so the extra wealth per head is barely positive. We calculate it is 4p per week per head. Another claim - that immigrants contribute 10-15 per cent of trend growth - gives a slightly better result of 12p a week. Both are trivial.
     We shouldn't be surprised. Major studies in America, Canada and Australia found similarly small benefit - typically a tenth of one per cent of GDP. ...
     But the key issue is scale. We need to balance any economic benefit against the social cost of immigration ...

Benefits and costs
£100m translation bill for migrants who can't or won't speak English
Amy Iggulden
Daily Telegraph, 14 December 2006

     Public spending on interpreters and translation for immigrants is to be reviewed after figures revealed the yearly bill is more than £100 million.
     Police forces, councils and hospitals are each spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money on translating services that include recycling and anti-smoking advice, it emerged yesterday. ...
     The Government yesterday ordered a review after figures showed that NHS trusts spend at least £55 million a year on translating and interpretation, the courts and police spend £31.3 million and local authorities spend £25 million a year.
     The costs, obtained by the BBC, are likely to be an underestimate because not all public bodies are taken into account.
     The details show how the Metropolitan Police spends £8.4 million a year, Barts and the London NHS Trust spends £1 million a year, and the Department of Work and Pensions spends £3 million on a telephone interpreting service.
     Overall, the interpretation market for business and the public sector is thought to be worth about £400 million and growing to reflect the increasingly diverse population, according to the Institute of Translation and Interpreting.
     The increase in the courts service bill alone - now £10 million a year - has trebled over five years. ...
     Phil Woolas, the local government minister, admitted that the situation needed to be examined. He said that more than £1 billion is already being spent on teaching English.

Benefits and costs – multiculturalism
Winning Muslim hearts and minds
Michael Burleigh, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
Daily Telegraph, 30 November 2006

     We are entitled to have accurate information about immigration, with open discussion of its cultural, as well as economic, merits and demerits. Clear lines need to be established about what the majority of people here are prepared to tolerate, for toleration is not some open-ended, one-way arrangement. It's all very well to say you are against the formation of inner-city ghettos potentially subtracted from common law, but how, precisely, do Conservatives imagine dispersing them or preventing their formation?

Benefits and costs
'Feckless' Poles aim for Britain
Daily Telegraph, 8 November 2006

     "Feckless" Poles have turned Britain into their number one destination, the Polish president declared yesterday during a press conference with Tony Blair in Number 10.
     Lech Kaczynski said Britain had become the "destination of choice" for homeless and jobless Poles and complained that many of his countrymen were still claiming benefits in Poland despite holding down jobs in Britain.

Benefits and costs – drug addicts
Doctor's diary
Dr James Lefanu
Daily Telegraph, 20 October 2006

     Back in the mid-1990s, ...
     At the same time, when sentencing an Italian drug addict convicted of theft, a judge remarked how those coming before the bench were frequently from other countries in the European Union who appeared to have moved to Britain to take advantage of the generous attitude of the welfare system to those in their situation. A decade on, it's hard to imagine anything more in need of reform.

Benefits and costs
Why is the white working class so roundly despised?
Andrew Gimson
Daily Telegraph, 13 October 2006

     The Government has encouraged mass migration, a change of which I happen to be in favour, for I believe these newcomers are an asset to our country and will rapidly become British. But no heed has been paid to those members of the indigenous working class who have found their wages undercut by cheap foreign competition, and have difficulty getting council housing.

Benefits and costs – education
Months after they turned children away, 'full' schools open to migrants
Julie Henry
Sunday Telegraph, 8 October 2006

     Schools that are officially full have been forced to find places for eastern European children who turn up at their gates after term has started.
     Secondary schools across the east of England have suspended admission rules that dictate how many children they can accommodate each year, in order to take dozens more pupils, mostly from the EU accession states of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.

Benefits and costs
Life in Britain 'declining'
Laura Clout
Daily Telegraph, 4 September 2006

     Britain is a worse place to live now than it was 20 years ago, according to almost half of respondents to a nationwide poll.
     Lack of respect and crime were given as the main reasons for the decline by the 47 per cent who felt that British life had deteriorated since 1986. Less than a quarter believed that it had improved.
     Almost half of those who felt the country had gone downhill cited a lack of respect and crime, while 31 per cent mentioned the cost of living. Terrorism and immigration were each blamed by 28 per cent of respondents to the poll, conducted for BBC1's Six O'Clock News.

Benefits and costs
Immigrants 'should be set £27,000 wage target'
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 29 August 2006

     Immigrants unable to earn more than £27,000 a year should not be allowed to settle in Britain because they do not make "a positive contribution", a report says today.
     The Migrationwatch think-tank suggests that the figure could be used to set an optimum level of immigration along the lines recently suggested by John Reid, the Home Secretary. ...
     The report says that immigration is of long-term benefit to the economy only if it raises productivity. Otherwise, it simply adds to the pressure on infrastructure and public services.
     The paper adds that less skilled migrants can make a contribution by filling gaps while British workers are trained but should not be allowed to settle permanently. ...
     Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migrationwatch, said: "The social costs of the present massive levels of immigration far outweigh any possible benefit."

Benefits and costs
The cry has gone up 'Enoch was right'. Tosh. Immigration is good for Britain
Magnus Linklater
The Times, 23 August 2006

     "If Enoch Powell were alive today, what would he have to say about the current security situation?" It was a typical Any Questions debating point - the equivalent of rolling a grenade into a crowded pub, then standing back to see what would happen. Within minutes, the discussion on Radio 4 had become a full-scale argument about Islamic terrorism, multiculturalism, free trade and Polish plumbers. From this week, it is also about Romanians and Bulgarians, rampant Aids and the white slave traffic. The debate about immigration is as inflammatory today as it was when Powell articulated it in 1968. It is also as dangerously confused.
     The answer Powell himself would undoubtedly have given is: "I told you so." He would have claimed prescience about the numbers flooding into Britain from abroad, he would say that multiculturalism (which he referred to it in those days as "communalism") had demonstrably failed, and he would have argued that the growth of immigrant communities had undermined the security of the State. He said as much in his infamous "rivers of blood" speech, when he spoke of "dangerous and divisive elements" within the immigrant community, who would use Britain's well-intentioned race relations laws "to organise and consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow-citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest".
     It was a blatantly racist speech, playing to the most basic fears of the white population at the time about the growth of immigration from the Commonwealth. It was also wrong. Powell presumed that the majority of immigrants would become increasingly alienated from society and that, as their numbers increased, they would seek to assert their domination over the native British. He thought that the sheer weight of numbers would simply overwhelm white communities, who would become, to quote him, "strangers in their own country". He predicted intolerable tensions as a result, with a system of "one-way privilege" operating in favour of immigrants. That has not happened. There have been flashpoints along the way - race riots in Brixton, Bristol and the North of England, racist attacks and murders, and the worrying alienation of Muslim minorities. But the breakdown that he predicted has not happened; Powell's nightmare vision has not materialised.
     It has not, however, gone away. In different forms, it is summoned up to warn us of the threat from Islamic extremists, from asylum-seekers, and now the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe. ... ...
     As so often, there is a grain of truth in some of these arguments - but collectively, they amount to a lie. Immigration has, by and large, been of enormous benefit to Britain. It has helped to transform our economy, enrich our cultural life, support our public services and improve our image abroad. It would be inconceivable to imagine our health or transport systems functioning without it. It fills a skills gap among doctors and teachers. It allows the nation's corner shops to survive. Toynbee's argument about cheap labour could have been deployed at any time over the past 50 years, and would have prevented buses and trains from functioning, hospitals being cleaned, schools being staffed and maintained.
     I have no doubt that mass immigration needs to be controlled, but rather than new restrictions the current rules should be managed more effectively and with greater humanity. This is too important an issue to be hijacked by prejudice disguising itself as rational debate. Unless we distinguish carefully between its differing strands, we might just as well give in to racism and say that Enoch was right all along.

Benefits and costs
Keith Vaz MP (Lab), Chair, Labour Party Ethnic Minority Taskforce
Daily Telegraph, 10 August 2006
[Letter to the Editor]

     It is ... regrettable that some commentators have already jumped to the conclusion that immigration acts as a drain on the national exchequer.
     As a recent report by the Ernst & Young Item Club concluded, immigration from other EU countries has helped to keep inflation under control, boost economic output and in fact raised tax revenue by £300 million in 2006.

Benefits and costs
Legal aid for asylum seekers tops £1bn
Jonathan Wynne-Jones
Sunday Telegraph, 6 August 2006

     More than a billion pounds of taxpayers' money has been spent on legal aid in immigration and asylum cases in the past decade, according to Government figures.
     In that period, the amount provided by the Department for Constitutional Affairs for the cases has nearly quadrupled - from £29 million in 1996-7 to £107.3 million in 2005-6.

Benefits and costs – population
Blair admits he has no policy on population
George Jones
Daily Telegraph, 5 July 2006

     The Government has no policy for controlling the size of Britain's population, Tony Blair admitted yesterday. ...
     Tony Wright, the Labour MP for Cannock Chase, told Mr Blair that Britain's population had topped 60 million for the first time last year and was expected to rise 12 per cent over the next generation. The rises were equivalent to having a new Oxford, a new Middlesbrough and a new Ipswich every year, and migration was the main driver of the rise. ...
     Mr Wright urged Mr Blair to set up a commission to give a cost and benefit analysis about different levels of population. ...
     Asked if the Government had a population policy, Mr Blair replied: "No, but we do have a migration policy obviously."
     He agreed with an MP's suggestion that the issue was "political dynamite". He said it was difficult to give objective facts on the benefits and "disbenefits" of migration.
     Migration on the whole was positive and with benefit to countries but it needed to be controlled. Asked if thousands of people could be deported, even if they had been in Britain for several years, he said there was "no easy way" of dealing with the issue.
     But allowing all illegal migrants to stay would encourage many more to come, he said. ...
     Gwyneth Dunwoody, the Labour MP for Crewe and Nantwich, told Mr Blair that a large influx of migrants from the new EU states was putting schools and housing under strain in some areas.

Benefits and costs
Never have we seen immigration on this scale: we just can't cope
Robert Rowthorn, professor of economics at King's College, Cambridge
Sunday Telegraph, 2 July 2006

     As an academic economist, I have examined many serious studies that have analysed the economic effects of immigration. There is no evidence from any of them that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative.
     Immigration can't solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions. The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny- and house-cleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons, who have to compete with immigrants willing to work hard for very low wages in unpleasant working conditions.
     For low-skilled Britons, the result is that there are only two options: very low pay or unemployment. ...
     It is bizarre that the Labour Party, which still continues to insist that it is the party of the poor and vulnerable, should endorse a policy the purpose of which is the creation of what Marx called "a reserve army of labour": a pool of workers whose presence ensures that rates of pay for cleaners and ancillary staff in the NHS can be kept as low as possible. ...
     Unskilled migrants and their families often are net consumers of taxes: their children are educated in state schools, they are looked after when they have medical problems by the NHS, and they are eligible for state benefits if they are unable to find work. The new arrivals place a significant strain on the housing stock and delivery of public services in the neighbourhoods where new immigrants live: schools, hospitals and GP surgeries become more crowded, and state-subsidised housing gets more difficult to obtain. ...
     At the present rate of 223,000 additional immigrants every year, though, and adding the children that they will produce, the population of Britain will grow by more than 12 million to reach 73.2 million by 2046. There is no parallel for such a huge influx over a mere 40 years in our recorded history.
     Most of the immigrants will settle in London and the South-East, because that is where the jobs are. There is already a chronic housing shortage in that part of England, a large portion of which is due to immigration. ... Exacerbating the housing shortage and increasing the amount and density of built-on land, however, is only one of a series of transformations that will be triggered by the constant arrival of immigrants. They will inevitably completely change the culture and complexion of many cities.
     I am not suggesting that all those changes will be bad, because I am sure that not all of them will be. While the immigration lobby tries to smear anyone who questions the benefits of large-scale immigration as "racist", the real issue is not whether you like or dislike the social changes that the colossal influx of immigrants will bring. It is rather that the Government has embarked on a policy that will totally change the nature of many of the communities in which we live without consulting any of us.
     ... There was nothing about increasing immigration in Labour's manifesto of 1997, or of 2001, or of 2005.
     ... We desperately need an honest debate on the issue. But if the Government's record is anything to go by, it will do everything it can to prevent one.

Benefits and costs
Ten million immigrants 'could help crisis'
Edmund Conway
Daily Telegraph, 24 June 2006

     The pensions crisis could be solved by allowing an extra 10 million migrants into the UK in the next 20 years, leading economists have suggested.
     Experts from the Royal Economic Society said that the population in the UK was ageing so fast that the workforce - as it currently stands - would not be able to afford to pay the pensions bill for their elders.
     Professors David Blake and Les Mayhew have produced a study which also concludes that the government should raise the pension age to 70, and must lift it beyond 65 sooner than it already plans. ...
     Prof Blake said: "From a wider perspective, all these things may need to occur - working longer, increases in migration and increases in contribution levels. ..."

Benefits and costs – multiculturalism
£700,000 bill for rural police interpreters
David Sapsted
Daily Telegraph, 16 June 2006

     A rural police force had to spend more than £700,000 last year employing interpreters to interview suspects, victims and witnesses.
     The money - the equivalent of a year's pay for 35 beat bobbies - was spent by the Cambridgeshire police in the year ending March 31.
     Not only are the Fens a magnet for migrant workers and Cambridge a centre for tourists, but Peterborough is a "cluster" area for immigrants coming into East Anglia.
     However, the police authority said yesterday that some of the people the police had to deal with were second or even third generation Britons who did not speak English.

Benefits and costs
Government 'has hidden £200m cost of migrants'
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 25 April 2006

     Immigrants are a net cost on the economy and not a benefit as the Government has claimed, a report says today.
     The study by Migrationwatch UK challenges official figures suggesting that immigrants annually contribute £2.5 billion more to the economy in taxes than they receive in benefits and state services.
     It accuses Whitehall of using "entirely false" methodology to back up its claims by failing to take full account of the children of immigrants. ...
     The report says the original research, widely and regularly quoted by ministers, chose the only assumption that could deliver the "positive" result they were seeking. ...
     Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migrationwatch, said: "Our research completely demolishes the Government's last remaining excuse for the highest levels of immigration in our history by exposing a serious error in their methodology. The Government has used this statistic on every possible occasion but now it has been shown up as entirely worthless."
     The Home Office research paper, published in 2002, said that although immigrants cost £28.8 billion in welfare benefits and state services that year, they contributed £31.2 billion in taxes.

Benefits and costs
Of course the wealthy want an immigration free-for-all
Polly Toynbee
*The Guardian, 11 October 2005

     Here is a sign of how fast some Tories are on the move. Tory modernising MP John Bercow has written a pamphlet slashing and burning his party's election policy on asylum and immigration. Bercow is one of those who got his U-turn in early, his career a template for how far the modernisers in the party are travelling. Once a Thatcherite Tory boy of the far right, then on the move with Portillo, now he is where his party needs to be - not racist or Daily Mailist but pragmatic. ...
     Praise of immigration is the main thrust of Bercow's pamphlet. His argument for an open immigration policy is liberal in the free-market sense. A call for free movement of (cheaper) labour across the globe is, after all, the CBI's one and only "liberal" policy.
     Bercow, like Labour, says that in a global economy the UK needs migrants to fill jobs the British are "unable or unwilling to do". Migrant workers put in more than they take out, making a net contribution of £2.5bn. The Home Office says a 1% increase in immigration yields up to a 1.5% increase in GDP. Of the entire working population, 10% are now born abroad. The government agrees with Bercow and is setting up a new skills advisory body to let in migrants according to business demand.
     Bercow and Labour hotly assert that migrants don't take jobs from British workers nor depress wages. But there is no evidence for this assertion. It is impossible to know what level wages might be at or how many unemployed might have been tugged into jobs at higher pay rates had Britain kept its doors shut to new EU citizens until their countries had caught up economically.
     Blair and Brown embrace the inevitability of globalisation, but make a deliberately class-blind analysis. Migrants do bring GDP growth, but remember the Gate Gourmet workers fired to make way for cheaper newly arrived workers. Migrants add to the profits of the company and thus to GDP. They keep down the cost of flying for people wealthy enough to fly. They also hold down the pay rate for all other low-paid workers, keeping wage inflation remarkably low and the Bank of England very happy. ...
     Try this thought experiment: 43.5% of nurses recruited by the NHS since 1999 come from outside the UK. What if that were banned? The NHS in London would find clever ways to recruit from the city's mass of underqualified boys and girls, single mothers and other non-workers. Recruiters might set up special classes for 14-year-olds interested in nursing, promising work as nursing assistants while they trained, places to live in attractive nurses' homes, starter homes for key-worker families, status and good pay. The offer would be irresistible, and yes, taxes would be higher. ...
     [Incoming Assets: Why Tories should change policy on immigration and asylum, by John Bercow MP, is published by the Social Market Foundation.]

Benefits and costs
Taboo topic [1]
Thomas Sowell
The Social Contract, Fall 2005

     Immigration has joined the long list of subjects on which it is taboo to talk sense in plain English. At the heart of much confusion about immigration is the notion that we "need" immigrants - legal or illegal - to do work that Americans won't do.
     What we "need" depends on what it costs and what we are willing to pay. If I were a billionaire, I might "need" my own private jet. But I can remember a time when my family didn't even "need" electricity.
     Leaving prices out of the picture is probably the source of more fallacies in economics than any other single misconception. At current wages for low-level jobs and current levels of welfare, there are indeed many jobs that Americans will not take.
     The fact that immigrants - and especially illegal immigrants - will take those jobs is the very reason the wage levels will not rise enough to attract Americans.
     This is not rocket science. It is elementary supply and demand. Yet we continue to hear about the "need" for immigrants to do jobs that Americans will not do - even though these are all jobs that Americans have done for generations before mass illegal immigration became a way of life.

Benefits and costs
Taboo topic [2]
Thomas Sowell
The Social Contract, Fall 2005

     Europeans and Americans have for decades been playing Russian roulette with their loose immigration policies. The intelligentsia have told us that it would be wrong, and even racist, to set limits based on where the immigrants come from. ...
     In that rhetoric, all differences between peoples are magically transformed into mere "stereotypes" and "perceptions."
     This blithely ignores hard data showing, for example, that people who come here from some countries are ten times more likely to go on welfare as people from some other countries.
     The media and the intelligentsia love to say that most immigrants, from whatever group, are good people. But what "most" people from a given country are like is irrelevant.
     If 85 per cent of group A are fine people and 95 per cent of group B are fine people, that means you are going to be importing three times as many undesirables when you let in people from group A. ...
     In the current climate of political correctness it is taboo even to mention facts that go against the rosy picture of immigrants - for example, the fact that Russia and Nigeria are always listed among the most corrupt countries on earth, and that Russian and Nigerian immigrants in the United States have already established patterns of crime well known to law enforcement but kept from the public by the mainstream media.

Benefits and costs – myths
Large-scale immigration has prompted a flood of shoddy economic thinking
Ruth Lea
Daily Telegraph, 19 April 2004

     In November 2003, David Blunkett, defending the Government's immigration policy, asserted that "legal migrants brought economic benefits" and there was "no obvious limit" to the number of immigrants who could settle in the UK. In other words, the quite unprecedented large-scale immigration of a net 200,000 to 250,000 a year into Britain was not just perfectly acceptable, but there was no obvious reason why it should not be higher.
     ... ... ...
     Finally, I would like to dispel a couple of myths about immigration. The first is that large-scale immigration is necessary for buoyant economic growth. But this was most emphatically not the case in post-war Japan. The second is that the native-born British "will not do certain jobs". But they do these jobs in parts of the country where there are very few immigrants.
     Clearly, immigration does bring economic benefits but there are, equally clearly, costs as well. The Government should really be prepared to give us the whole picture.

BIAS

Bias – BBC
Now it's the BBC that blunder over immigration statistics
Migrationwatch UK, 1 May 2010

     On the 10 o'clock TV news on 30 April, the BBC "Reality Check" claimed that, in 2008, there was a net outflow of non EU workers of 8,000 so the real pressure on British jobs was from a net inflow of 46,000 EU workers which none of the parties had any plans to control. To do so Britain would have to leave the EU – a policy advocated only by UKIP and the BNP.
     The real situation is that about 100,000 non EU workers arrived in that year (including an estimate for dependants). The available statistics do not reliably indicate how many left. The proportion of those arriving was almost double the BBC's figure. ...
     Commenting, Sir Andrew Green, Chairman Migrationwatch UK, said:
     "The BBC of all people should get their facts right on a subject as sensitive as immigration, especially when they describe their report as a "reality check". It would have helped if they had paid more attention to immigration policy in the past."
[Site link]

Bias – BBC, housing
Migrant housing figures
Emeritus Professor Mervyn Stone
Daily Telegraph, 25 July 2009
[Letter to the Editor]

     Here is how the BBC covered its embarrassment at having trumpeted the recent Equalities and Human Rights Commission report denying bias in social housing allocation.
     Thursday's radio programme, The Report, was trailed on News at One with the heady information that the BBC had found some people in Birmingham with a perception (not a belief, be it noted) that there is bias in favour of migrants – and, balancing that news, that Civitas had cast doubt on the EHRC claim.
     The programme dealt, largely anecdotally, with those perceptions and only briefly with the deceptively smallest of the statistical percentages out of which the EHRC had constructed its claim.
     Among other irrelevancies, Civitas was given a Right-of-centre sticker, but the Government's favoured think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, was left untarnished.
     MigrationWatch's Sir Andrew Green was allowed to make some prerecorded observations that could have been interpreted as value judgments. Given that Green usually argues from numbers, I for one would like to know what was left behind in the editing room.

Bias – religion
Church leaders believe anti-Christian bias rife
Jonathan Wynne-Jones
Sunday Telegraph, 15 February 2009

     Almost two thirds of the Church of England General Synod believe Christians are the victims of discrimination in the workplace.
     A survey of members of the Church's parliament found that 63 per cent of them felt that Christians faced discrimination at work. ...
     While 59 per cent agreed that they had seen a decline in religious liberty over the past decade, 38 per cent of members disagreed. ...
     Church leaders have made impassioned pleas to Christians to stand up for their beliefs.
     ... However, Synod members were divided on whether Christianity should be exempt from equality legislation.
     While there are limited exemptions for religious employers under equality regulations, a significant number of respondents said that the Church should not be given the opportunity to opt out. ...
     The Sunday Telegraph survey was of 80 of the Synod's 484 members, including bishops, clergy and laity.

Bias – religion
Losing our religion
Olga Craig and Patrick Sawer
Sunday Telegraph, 15 February 2009

     And nowhere, according to councillor Alan Craig, of the Christian People's Alliance, is that wake-up call more vital than in the classrooms. "There is clearly growing discrimination against Christianity in our schools," he says. Teachers are being prevented from implementing policies that may be opposed by some Muslim parents by the fear of an Islamic backlash, believes Craig. ...
     In England and Wales, the law states that children at state schools "shall, on each school day, take part in an act of collective worship" which should be "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character". In the light of the many instances of Nativity plays being banned and Christ's birth being celebrated at "Wintermass" rather than Christmas, Craig points out that it is difficult to remember that the Christian element of religious education is statutory. ...
     Government proposals aimed at giving increased legal rights to Muslims have left many wondering if the result will be a further clampdown on Christianity. The measures will force councils, schools, hospitals and other public bodies to treat members of all faiths equally. The result, says Simon Calvert, of the Christian Institute, could be a fresh onslaught of politically correct rulings. "We are worried that this will further squeeze out Christians," he says. "Christian groups already find it difficult to get funding from local councils." He fears that town hall bureaucrats could "over interpret and gold-plate" measures. "It will simply mean more of the politically correct rulings, such as banning Christmas celebrations and crucifixes from the work place."

Bias – free speech
Whatever happened to free speech?
Philip Johnston
Daily Telegraph, 13 February 2009

     The refusal to admit the oddball Dutch MP Geert Wilders to Britain yesterday marks a further retreat from this country's traditions of free speech. ... ...
     Yet what possible threat to public security is posed by a Dutch MP showing a film, in private, to a smattering of peers on a Thursday afternoon in February? Of itself, the film does not call for violence against Muslims; indeed, it suggests that Islam is a cause of violence, a view with which you are entitled to agree or feel strongly about, but not to prohibit.
     The reason for the ban appears to have been the possibility of protests by some Muslim organisations against Wilders's visit. In other words, his freedom to express a view and the liberty of peers to hear it in an institution supposedly devoted to free speech, were set aside in the face of intimidation – the opposite of what happened in the Rushdie case, even if that author was forced into hiding.
     What is particularly insidious is the application of double standards. One of those most opposed to Wilders's visit is the Muslim peer Lord Ahmed, though he denies allegations that he warned parliamentary authorities that 10,000 demonstrators would take to the streets. Yet two years ago, Lord Ahmed invited Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a Palestinian previously detained on suspicion of fundraising for groups linked to al-Qaeda, to Westminster to meet him. When he was criticised for doing so, he said it was his parliamentary duty to hear Rideh's complaints. He does not appear to see any contradiction with the position he now adopts against his fellow peers. ...
     ... Free speech is about understanding that some people hold a different view from you, whether you like it or not. When we start to alert the "authorities" to thought crimes we really are one step away from the dystopian world that Orwell invented as a warning, not a prophecy.
     The Government that has treated our liberties in such a cavalier way is having none of this, of course. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said the film made by Wilders was "full of hate" and therefore fell foul of British laws, though he admitted that he had not seen it and therefore could not judge. But, in any case, is he right? Is it against the law?
     People have always been free under the criminal law to speak their minds, provided they did not, in doing so, incite others to commit violence or infringe public order. ... However, it is necessary to demonstrate that the words complained of are likely to stir up hatred and public disorder, not merely to complain that they are unpleasant or objectionable to some. Imams have been allowed to continue preaching in mosques when it could be argued that they have overstepped this mark, as when they have called for the death of homosexuals or Jews.
     Wilders is no advertisement for free speech. After all, he wants the Koran to be banned. But that is not the point. It is what this affair says about us, not him, that matters. Is Britain now adopting a position where people who support suicide bombers and jihad are able to make known their opinions without legal challenge, whereas those who oppose them cannot?
     The very people who in 1989 were demanding the murder of Salman Rushdie for writing a book are today leading the charge against a Dutch MP for making a film. The fundamental difference is that 20 years ago, the government supported free speech; today, it has cravenly surrendered. It is simply not good enough to say that Wilders should not be heard because he might provoke a backlash from those who do not like him or his views. That is not upholding the law. That is appeasement.

Bias – BBC, racism
Golly: now we know what's truly offensive
Charles Moore
Daily Telegraph, 5 February 2009

     Commenting on the BBC's decision to sack Carol Thatcher from The One Show because she described a tennis player as looking like a "golliwog", a spokesman for the corporation said: "The BBC considers any language of a racist nature wholly unacceptable." ...
     If Carol used the supposedly shocking word "golliwog", you can be quite sure that she used it without malice – indeed, with good will. The worst that you could possibly say about her was that her choice of words was thoughtless.
     But, before you say that, you come to the second question. Since when has the BBC decided that what is said off screen, in the studio, is a matter of career life or death? I have spent more hours than I care to remember sitting in BBC studios, and the remarks I have heard in them, often delivered by household names, have frequently strayed – I am putting this politely – from the standards supposedly demanded by the BBC on air. I have heard racism (usually against Americans), sexism (usually against Carol's mother), blasphemy, obscenity, rage, bias. If I had decided to profess myself "shocked" (as Adrian Chiles, the presenter of The One Show, did), and if I had then sneaked to the authorities, would the speaker have been thrown out of his job? Should he have been?
     A BBC executive might argue – though I would disagree – that the word "golliwog" is so offensive that it should never be broadcast. As an experienced broadcaster herself, Carol Thatcher might be expected to be aware of that sensitivity and be careful about it. But she was not broadcasting. She committed no offence, professional or moral – not even, since the person she described was not in the room, an offence of manners. ...
     A third question arises for the corporation. We have it from its spokesman's own lips that any racist language is "wholly unacceptable". How does that square with its fervent commitment, constantly repeated in the affair of Jonathan Ross, to "cutting edge" comedy? ...
     You and I might think that the joys of "edgy" comedy are overrated, but if we are to have it, wouldn't it be edgier to have words like "golliwog" scattered about as well? Why not antagonise Disgusted of Brixton, as well as Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells? ...
     So this affair enables us to understand better what the BBC is really up to when it pays Jonathan Ross so much money to swear and talk on screen about bodily functions and sex with octogenarians for hours on end. It is not engaged in a brave, if misguided, attempt to challenge the conventional opinions of viewers in general in order to shake them out of their complacency and strike a blow for artistic innovation. If that were the case, it would also insult homosexuals, the prophet Mohammed, President Obama, racial minorities, and anyone else who qualifies for the strangely assorted club of those who earn special deference from our modern elites.
     No, what the BBC is doing is the cultural target-bombing of people who are very numerous, but whose attitudes do not accord with those of its senior executives – old people, white people, Christian people, monarchist people, people who value politeness, conservative people, provincial people, suburban people, rural people – many people, I suspect, who are reading this article.
[Site link]

Bias – BBC, multiculturalism, diversity
How to save the BBC from itself (and get its hand out of our pockets)
Jeff Randall
Daily Telegraph, 4 July 2008
[Jeff Randall was the BBC's business editor, 2001-05]

     In 2003, I was fighting an internal battle to bring more balance to the BBC's coverage of immigration. I felt that some of its reporters had been programmed to promote the benefits of cultural diversity as an incontrovertible fact.
     Fed up with what he perceived to be my subversion, one of the BBC's most senior figures sent me an email: "The BBC internally is not neutral about multiculturalism. It believes in it and promotes diversity. Let's face up to that."
     I was amazed that he felt unembarrassed to put this in a formal memo. It revealed an arrogant mindset at odds with millions of his customers. Impartiality was fine, but only if it confirmed the prejudices of the BBC's editorial elite, the self-appointed custodians of liberal values.

Bias – BBC
BBC is fuelling attacks on Poles, says MP
Christopher Hope
Daily Telegraph, 5 June 2008

     The BBC was accused yesterday of fuelling racist attacks on Polish immigrants.
     The Conservative MP Danny Kawczynski said that the BBC's coverage of immigration issues tended to concentrate on Poles even though most immigrants to Britain came from outside Europe.
     The result, he said, was a rising number of assaults on Poles living here.
     Mr Kawczynski highlighted his concerns in the Commons when he introduced a Bill calling for a bank holiday to mark the positive contribution that Poles have made to the United Kingdom since 1940.
     "The liberal elite of the BBC constantly refer to immigration from Poland because they are using the Polish community as a cat's paw to try to tackle the thorny issue of mass unchecked immigration into our country," he said.
     Mr Kawczynski, who represents Shrewsbury and Atcham, also said discrimination would not be allowed if targeted at other ethnic groups. ...
     

Bias – border security
Taxpayers fund TV series on migrants
Lucy Cockcroft
Daily Telegraph, 21 May 2008

     The Home Office is spending £400,000 of taxpayers' money to fund a television documentary that will aim to convince the public that it is beating the problem of illegal immigration.
     The eight-part series, which follows immigration officers on their duties, marks the biggest investment the department has made to promote its work enforcing border controls.
     It is part of a drive by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, to show she is tough on illegal immigration.
     The series, which will be shown on Sky One, will acknowledge the co-operation the Government has given to the production company, Steadfast Television.
     However, there will be no mention that it has been partly financed by the Home Office, raising questions about how impartial it will be.

Bias
Mirror pays out over lobby group slur
Stephen Brook
The Guardian, 26 November 2007

     The Daily Mirror has agreed to pay costs and damages to Migrationwatch UK, after star columnist Brian Reade compared the lobby group to the Nazi party and the Ku Klux Klan.
     In today's paper the Mirror apologised to the organisation's head, Sir Andrew Green, and said it had agreed to pay damages after Reade's column on September 13. ...
     "We accept that the allegations were untrue," the paper said in an apology on page 18 today.
[Site link]

Bias – BBC
BBC viewers angered by its 'innate liberal bias'
Nicole Martin
Daily Telegraph, 19 June 2007

     The BBC is operating in a "leftleaning comfort zone" and has an "innate liberal bias" according to a report commissioned by the corporation.
     The report, From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, said that the BBC's drift towards a liberal-minded approach to programmes risked stifling originality and angering viewers.
     Mark Byford, the BBC's deputy director-general, said: "Impartiality is a core value for the BBC, which is non-negotiable and central to its relationship with licence-fee payers.
     "As audience behaviours change and the media landscape develops rapidly, the BBC has to keep asking itself how best to safeguard impartiality in this digital age."
     Andrew Marr, the BBC's former political editor, said at a seminar last year that the BBC is "a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people compared with the population at large." ...
     A survey of viewers found that the corporation was generally seen as impartial.
     However, some respondents felt it had gone "too far" in its representation of racial minorities and was too politically correct. ...
     Most respondents outside south-east England believed that they were under-represented.

Bias – BBC
The BBC can't kick its addiction to bias
Damian Thompson
Daily Telegraph, 19 June 2007

     Yesterday the BBC Trust published From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, an 81-page report with the subtitle "Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century". That's a bit like the late Boris Yeltsin talking about safeguarding his sobriety. It is, however, the first time the corporation has attempted to address the question, so we should read the report carefully.
     The first reaction is to sigh with relief. The report acknowledges that "mainstream opinion" was wrong to attack monetarism, to belittle Euro-sceptics as small-minded and blinkered, and to assume that multi-culturalism would solve the problems of immigration. ...
     This report is a step in the right direction. But, as anyone who has ever dealt with an alcoholic will confirm, it is best not to get your hopes up. Nothing will happen without a desire to change; and I don't think Auntie is ready to come off the sauce.

Bias – adoptions
The improved lot of Romanian orphans
Lady Nicholson of Winterbourne, MEP
Daily Telegraph, 14 November 2006

     There have been protests about Romania's decision to ban international adoptions, coming from individual politicians in France and America, but these are the result of the multi-million-dollar lobby for international adoptions - a lobby that represents a shadowy, unaccountable and deeply unethical industry.

Bias – BBC
The BBC's commitment to bias is no laughing matter
Tom Leonard
Daily Telegraph, 27 October 2006

     But no matter how much BBC bosses swear blind there is no problem, the issue refuses to go away. Why? Because for many licence-payers, the BBC's skewed assumptions about what the world is about and how its inhabitants should think is the most annoying thing about it - more annoying than dumbing down, than the universal licence fee, than Jonathan Ross's £18 million pay packet. More annoying even than Natasha Kaplinsky. And particularly infuriating when the BBC denies it outright, as did Michael Grade, the BBC chairman, in an article published a few days before a governors' impartiality summit a month ago.
     ... Anyway, embarrassingly it emerged ... that even some of his most senior journalists disagreed. Andrew Marr, hardly one of the BBC's token Right- wingers, declared that the BBC "is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people". It has, he added, "a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias."

Bias – BBC, multiculturalism
We are biased, admit the stars of BBC News
Simon Walters
Mail on Sunday, 21 October 2006

     It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.
     A leaked account of an 'impartiality summit' called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.
     It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC's 'diversity tsar', wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.
     At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.
     One veteran BBC executive said: 'There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness.
     'Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC's culture, that it is very hard to change it.' ...
     The full account of the meeting shows how senior BBC figures queued up to lambast their employer.
     Political pundit Andrew Marr said: 'The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.'
     Washington correspondent Justin Webb said that the BBC is so biased against America that deputy director general Mark Byford had secretly agreed to help him to 'correct', it in his reports. Webb added that the BBC treated America with scorn and derision and gave it 'no moral weight'.
     Former BBC business editor Jeff Randall said he complained to a 'very senior news executive', about the BBC's pro-multicultural stance but was given the reply: 'The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it.' ...
     There was another heated debate when the summit discussed whether the BBC was too sensitive about criticising black families for failing to take responsibility for their children.
     Head of news Helen Boaden disclosed that a Radio 4 programme which blamed black youths at a young offenders' institution for bullying white inmates faced the axe until she stepped in.
     But Ms Fitzpatrick, who has said that the BBC should not use white reporters in non-white countries, argued it had a duty to 'contextualise' why black youngsters behaved in such a way.
     Andrew Marr told The Mail on Sunday last night: 'The BBC must always try to reflect Britain, which is mostly a provincial, middle-of-the-road country. Britain is not a mirror image of the BBC or the people who work for it.'

BORDER CONTROLS

Border controls – European Union
5,900 Afghan children get into EU
Daily Express, 14 June 2010

     The UN has revealed that more than 5,900 Afghan children were smuggled into Europe last year.
     Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said in a report that more and more children are escaping from Afghanistan due to worsening living conditions in their homeland.
     The agency said children are being pushed by their parents to leave with smugglers in order to earn money in Europe before sending it back to their families in Afghanistan.
     The report said: "Afghan parents, families and communities have allowed and encouraged the departure of their children on hazardous journeys."
     The agency also found that almost half of under-age asylum claims in Europe last year were made by Afghan youths.
[Site link]

Border controls – politics
Facing up to immigration
David Blunkett, MP (Lab)
Daily Telegraph, 9 June 2010
[Letter to the Editor]

     ... I'm so disappointed that Philip Johnston's obsession with "freeing" us all from an identity register was again paraded in yesterday's Daily Telegraph. He failed to appreciate the contradictions of the arguments he put. We need biometrics and a clean database precisely to determine who is in the country, who is entitled to work legally, who is leaving the country (you can't have embarkation exit requirements without it), and for a clampdown on massive identity fraud, which costs us dear in so many ways.
     I am very proud of the measures that I was able to push through Parliament as home secretary in the teeth of a combination of the libertarian Right and the blinkered Left. I am only saddened that in those battles I was not joined by those so keen to rewrite history in relation to getting a grip on unwarranted and unauthorised entry into our country, illegal (and thus clandestine) working, and asylum claims – now back to 1992 levels.

Border controls – climate change
Plea for a bigger navy to keep out climate immigration
John Ingham
Daily Express, 31 May 2010

     Britain needs a bigger Navy to stave off mass immigration caused by climate change, green guru James Lovelock claimed yesterday.
     Starvation could follow if Britain's shores are not protected, he said.
     Dr Lovelock, 90, said that as the world population rises, climate change would trigger mass immigration north.
     And Britain would be seen as a "liferaft" on to which the dispossessed would scramble.
     The moderating effect of the surrounding seas may help us escape the worst effects of climate change, he said.
     Dr Lovelock, who in the 1960s invented the Gaia theory that the Earth is a self-regulating entity, said mass migration was already under way.
     At the Hay Festival of Literature in Herefordshire he said: "Do you know that Italy now has a larger navy than we do and it is to keep immigrants from Africa out?
     "We are a bit of a liferaft but there is only a limited number of people that this island can support." Dr Lovelock, a patron of the Optimum Population Trust which campaigns for a gradual global population decrease, said that with 60 million people Britain may already be at its optimum size.
     "So what are we going to do?" he said. "The people who are going to come here are going to starve and so are we – a larger Navy may be the answer."
     The Royal Navy is facing cuts in the Strategic Defence Review. One senior officer told the Daily Express that meeting its current commitments was already an "awesome challenge".
[Site link]

Border controls
Axing immigration staff 'could see Dover overrun'
James Slack
MailOnline, 30 April 2010

     Fears were raised last night that the key port of Dover could be overrun by illegal immigrants after it emerged Labour is to axe a whole tier of senior border staff.
     All 24 staff with the title immigration officer - responsible for deciding whether migrants should be let into the country - will lose their jobs.
     They have been credited with 40 per cent of all the removals of illegal immigrants from Kent last year.
     But the UK Border Agency plans to use cheaper junior staff who will not have the same powers to challenge those suspected of being illegal immigrants or potential visa over-stayers.
     In another blow, proposals are also being made to shut down the 60-bed Dover detention centre. The facility is used to detain offenders before deportation and to hold immigrants awaiting interview.
     Sue Kendal, branch secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said: 'Dover is losing its entire immigration officer team and we are in danger of reverting to the bad old days of mass influxes.
     'We risk leaving the door open for a free-for-all, including people who want to harm the UK. The Government talks tough but in reality it is cutting front-line officers.'
     Two chief immigration officers will also be axed, leaving just five, and assistant officers will decrease from 23 to 21. Further cuts in nearby Folkestone take the job losses to 30, according to unions.
[Site link]

Border controls – illegal, amnesty
Lessons learnt in Spain and Italy
Robert Winnett
Daily Telegraph, 26 April 2010

     Several other countries have introduced amnesties to try to curtail problems associated with illegal immigration.
     However, amnesties have led to the number of illegal immigrants increasing. ...
     For example, Spain has had four amnesties. The first, in 1985-86, led to 44,000 immigrants coming forward. This grew to 135,000 in 1991 and 314,000 in 2001. The last amnesty, in 2005, saw 700,000 illegal immigrants granted the right to live in the country.
     Spain has the highest immigration rate of any major European country and recently introduced payments for migrants returning home.
     Italy has had a series of amnesties. One, in 1987-88, uncovered 119,000 illegal immigrants. Another, in 1990, led to 235,000 illegal immigrants coming forward, while a 1998 amnesty uncovered a further 308,000.

Border controls – education
Foreign student visas up 40,000
Robert Mendick
Sunday Telegraph, 18 April 2010

     More than 40,000 extra foreign students were allowed into Britain from just seven countries last year, casting new doubt on the effectiveness of the Government's "tough" new visa system.
     Official Home Office figures show 100,000 student visas were granted in the academic year to September 2009 – an increase of almost 40,000 on the previous 12 months.
     Critics say the 63 per cent jump – equivalent to filling two universities the size of Oxford – exposes the ease with which students have been able to manipulate the points-based visa system introduced by the Government last year.
     The students come from seven countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Malaysia and Nigeria. ...
     The new figures, revealed in a parliamentary answer, show that 99,932 students successfully applied for visas up until September 2009 – with huge rises in the six months after the points system was introduced in March. ...
     Sir Andrew Green, the former diplomat who runs the immigration think tank MigrationWatch UK, said: "This blows out of the water government claims about their points-based system being 'tough'."

Border controls
And another thing
Nigel Farndale
Sunday Telegraph, 11 April 2010

     I have two pet pigs which I was given by a friend last summer, one who lives a mere five country miles away. The paperwork from Defra has been unbelievable – long forms that have to be filled out in triplicate, passports, holding numbers and so on. You then have to contact the local council, the vet, and some other agency in Reading whose name escapes me. And even after all this, I have had three visits from Defra officials, double-checking the information on my forms.
     The problem was that the friend dropped the pigs off in a trailer one day without first filling in a transportation form. I dare say this is petty stuff compared to the bureaucratic hoops my farming cousins have to go through. ...
     Anyway, it strikes me that it must be easier to move about the country as an illegal immigrant these days than it is as a pet pig.

Border controls
Immigration staff claim borders are too open
Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2010

     One in four immigration staff believes they are doing a good job in controlling Britain's borders, an internal survey has found.
     Most staff say the UK Border Agency is not improving while only half think they have the tools and information to do their job.

Border controls – Cambodia, South Korea, marriage
Cambodia suspends marriages to South Koreans
Asia One, 19 March 2010

     Cambodia has suspended marriages between South Koreans and its citizens to curb human trafficking, the foreign ministry said Friday.
     'We sent a note to the South Korean embassy on March 5 informing them about the temporary suspension in marriage applications between Cambodians and South Koreans,' ministry spokesman Koy Kuong told AFP. ...
     South Korean news agency Yonhap reported Friday that the number of Cambodian women marrying Korean men had more than doubled, from 551 in 2008 to 1,372 last year.
     In March 2008 Cambodia imposed a ban on foreign marriages to prevent human trafficking, amid concerns over an explosion in the number of brokered unions involving South Korean men and poor Cambodian women.
     The ban followed an International Organisation for Migration report that said many Cambodian brides suffered abuse after moving to South Korea in marriages hastily arranged by brokers who made large profits.
     The restriction was lifted about eight months later after new laws were introduced to prevent women becoming mail-order brides.
[Site link]

Border controls – crime
£7,000 price of being smuggled over Channel
Peter Allen
Daily Telegraph, 4 March 2010

     Hundreds of illegal migrants were regularly smuggled to Britain from France as part of a discounted "bulk service" provided by the "Baghdad ring" of people smugglers, a Paris court heard yesterday.
     The £7,000-a-head operation saw 1,000 foreigners transported to Channel ports such as Calais and Cherbourg, where they were encouraged to jump aboard lorries heading for England and other parts of northern Europe between early 2007 and mid-2008.
     Once in Britain, migrants, primarily Iraqis, but also Iranians, Afghanis, Pakistanis and Chinese, would claim asylum, or else disappear into jobs in the black economy. ...
     Details of the ease with which the smugglers, mainly Pakistanis and Afghan nationals, regularly evaded British customs and security checks emerged as the 28 suspected smugglers went on trial in the Criminal Correctional Court in Paris.

Border controls – education
Tenth of student visas via suspect colleges
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 27 February 2010

     More than one in 10 foreign students is arriving in Britain through bogus or suspect colleges, figures have shown.
     Up to 30,000 students are registered with colleges that the Home Office has either banned or is investigating on suspicion they are a front for illegal immigration, raising fresh concerns over security.
     That figure is equivalent to at least a tenth of the 236,470 student visas granted in 2008-09. The data have led to concerns that the student visa system is being exploited by criminals, illegal migrants and potential terrorists.

Border controls – visas, education, employment
Immigration officer takes minister to task
Daily Telegraph, 11 February 2010

     An immigration officer rounded on Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, yesterday over lax new entry controls that leave staff powerless to reject suspect students.
     Lisa Lea grilled the Cabinet minister, who is ultimately her boss, in front of an audience and the head of the UK Border Agency. She claimed the new student visa is a "waste of time".
     Ms Lea, who works at Heathrow airport, complained that officials had been stripped of their powers to interview and reject immigrants who they think are coming here to work.
     This was because entirely paper-based applications had led to a huge increase in arrivals in recent months. ...
     Mr Johnson defended the new rules, adding: "If interviewing all potential students was so successful, why have we got so many student overstayers who come here legally without the intention of studying? It wasn't a foolproof system."

Border controls
Immigration service is failing, says watchdog
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 9 February 2010

     The UK Border Agency cannot perform even "basic" functions and is a "very long way" from effectively removing failed asylum seekers, a watchdog warns today.
     It has let a backlog of 110,000 applications for leave to remain and for residence in Britain build up, a report by Ann Abraham, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, found.
     Ms Abraham said the agency risked losing public faith. Her report, Fast and Fair? was drawn up after she became concerned over the number and nature of complaints against the agency. ...
     The agency is already handling up to 450,000 historic asylum cases, but dealing with those and foreign national prisoners who should have been deported, which became a priority, has caused delays in other areas, the report said. Making up the 110,000 backlog are 33,000 applications for leave to remain and 77,000 for residence under European laws, such as relatives of citizens of the European Economic Area. ...
     It also emerged that illegal immigrants who stay undetected in Britain for 14 years can apply for indefinite leave to stay under a 40-year-old rule.

Border controls
New foreign student visa curbs
Patrick Hennessy
Sunday Telegraph, 7 February 2010

     The number of foreign students given visas is to be slashed in an attempt to curb widespread abuse of the system. ...
     Ministers believe the new rules – to be introduced before the general election – will slash the numbers coming to Britain by tens of thousands.
     In 2008, 233,000 student visas were granted, with another 140,000 people granted entry as "student visitors".

Border controls – marriage, visas
Marriage scam drives Indian demand for UK visas
Dean Nelson
Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2010

     A surge in advertisements for sham marriages is behind the huge increase in Indian student visa applications to Britain, officials and immigration experts said yesterday.
     They were speaking after Britain was forced to suspend temporarily applications from India, Bangladesh and Nepal. It followed a rise in requests for visas from 1,800 to 13,500 from the same period last year.
     The suspension is an embarrassment since it comes a year after Britain introduced a new points-based system for assessing applicants.

Border controls – visas, education, employment
Immigration controls being undermined by judges
David Barrett
Sunday Telegraph, 31 January 2010

     Judges are undermining Britain's immigration controls by allowing students who have fragrantly breached the rules to remain in the country, ...
     Home Office efforts to prevent foreign students from extending their visas have been overturned by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal even when the immigrants have broken the rules by setting up businesses or working for more hours than they are permitted. ...
     Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, said he was disappointed by the tribunal's rulings. ...
     In a new case, a 29-year-old Ghanaian student at the University of Sunderland was caught working as a security guard for more than the permitted 20 hours a week, and the Home Office refused his application to stay in Britain. He appealed to the tribunal, and it ruled in September that deporting him would breach his human rights. ...
     Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of MigrationWatch UK, a pressure group, said: "With 250,000 students admitted every year from outside the European Union, we simply cannot afford to have conditions which have been voluntarily accepted by the students undermined in this extraordinary way."

Border controls – France
'Sangatte II' opens by Calais ferry port ... and it's on street called England Square
Peter Allen
Daily Mail, 29 January 2010

     A vast new welcome centre for Britain-bound illegal migrants has opened in Calais.
     Local charities were today accepting the first new residents of the 2,000 sq ft hangar close to the French town's ferry port.
     It is already being dubbed 'Sangatte II' after the former Red Cross centre which attracted thousands of illegal foreigners before it was razed to the ground in 2002.
     And the fact that the new hangar is on Place d'Angleterre, or England Square, has not been lost on the charity workers.
     'It's very appropriate,' said one. 'England is where almost everyone who stays here will want to end up. We'll be able to look after hundreds at a time.'
     News of the latest building comes just eight months after France's Immigration Minister Eric Besson said he would make the town 'watertight' to those trying to get to Britain.
     But since then the humanitarian situation has deteriorated to such an extent that both the government and Calais council fear urgent action is needed.
     While they have not yet given official approval to the new centre, the charities who are renting it believe they will turn a blind eye.
     'We don't envisage any legal problems,' said a spokesman for the SOS refugee and homeless charity.
     'This is a humanitarian gesture – we're putting the shelter at the disposal of the migrants.
     'There are showers, bathrooms and toilets. It will be heated and there will be blankets and beds.'
     Rodolphe Nettier, president of SOS, said : 'We have initially rented the hangar for a few months, but hope to keep it open for much longer. The first migrants are due today.'
     Mr Nettier said the building was very secure – something which will make it difficult for the police to raid and arrest the migrants.
     There will be no restrictions on who can use the welcome centre, said Mr Nettier. ...
     Since the closure of the Jungle in Calais, further migrant camps have also sprung up in nearby Steenvoorde, Bailleul and St Omer, with all providing beds, food, clothing shops, medical care and advice on how to claim asylum.
     But the Calais centre will cause particular outrage, as Mr Besson has insisted time and time again that there would no official welcome centre in the town.
[Site link]

Border controls – education
4,000 'bogus' foreign students are still in country
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 13 January 2010

     Thousands of students who entered Britain through bogus colleges could still be in the country, the Government has admitted.
     More than 4,000 migrants were enrolled in schools, colleges and universities that were refused an official licence to sponsor foreign students last year, or have since had their licences stripped, figures obtained by the Tories have disclosed.
     Students who were in the country before the rule change in March have been permitted to stay for the remainder of their leave, even though the Home Office suspected the colleges they attended were bogus. ...
     In a written answer to a parliamentary question, the Government said there were 3,940 international students enrolled at those establishments. ...
     Another answer showed that 280 students were enrolled at colleges that have had their licence revoked since March.
     Figures in December showed that bogus colleges were being discovered at a rate of almost two a month.

Border controls – education
Bogus students playing 'weak' UK visa system
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2010

     A large number of bogus students are slipping into Britain because the new points-based immigration regime is "significantly weaker" than its predecessor, a leaked Home Office memo has warned.
     An immigration intelligence unit said the student visa system was allowing numerous illegal immigrants to arrive and officers at ports of entry were powerless to stop them, ... Bogus students who were refused or would have been rejected under the old regime were being waved through even though border control staff were convinced that they were not genuine.
     Almost 1.5 million student visas have been issued in the past eight years, including 236,470 in 2008-09, but the memo to the Home Office from the Heathrow Intelligence Unit claimed that it was education institutions that were effectively deciding who was allowed to enter. ...
     The memo warned that unless the officers could prove that documents were false they could not refuse entry and described the new system as a "tick box" process that "removed the ability of the entry clearance officer to assess credibility of either the college or the applicant".
     It said the concerns were "not unique" to Heathrow.

Border controls – education
Foreign students 'treble under Labour'
Christopher Hope
Daily Telegraph, 24 December 2009

     The number of foreigners entering Britain every year under a controversial student visa scheme has trebled since Labour came to power a decade ago, research by the Conservatives has found.
     Figures uncovered by the Tories showed that the Government issued 236,470 student visas in 2008-9, a threefold increase on the number issued in 1998.
     The Government's chief immigration adviser recently said that tens of thousands of foreign students were being allowed to stay in Britain and find jobs after graduating from colleges that are not "proper" universities. Students from outside the EU need a visa to study in the UK and can then apply to stay for a further two years to look for work. If they find a skilled job, they can remain for three more years and may eventually be eligible for permanent settlement.
     A parliamentary answer showed that while 1,925 organisations had been approved by the UK Border Agency to sponsor migrant students, there were only 165 universities and higher education colleges in the UK.

Border controls – people smuggling
Migrant smugglers escaping punishment
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 16 December 2009

     Hundreds of lorry drivers caught smuggling illegal immigrants into Britain are escaping punishment because of backlogs in the immigration system, a report has said.
     Thousands of pounds in fines are outstanding and hundreds of vehicles that should have been seized have not, some dating back seven years.
     John Vine, the chief inspector of the UK Border Agency, said the civil penalties system had been poorly managed for years and was not serving as a deterrent to people trafficking.
     Haulage companies can be fined up to £4,000 per illegal immigrant if their lorries are stopped trying to enter the UK with migrants on board. If they fail to pay up, officials can impound the vehicle.
     But, in his first annual report, Mr Vine said £1.5 million in fines remained unpaid and officials were taking "little if any action" to seize lorries.
     The report criticised senior managers for "ineffective oversight" and said there was "little effective leadership".
     It added: "There was no effective debt recovery strategy in place to chase unpaid debt."
     Junior staff were praised for working hard to "overcome" problems.

Border controls – politics
MPs criticise £300,000 bonus pot for immigration officials
Daily Telegraph, 8 December 2009

     Senior immigration officials have shared a bonus pot of almost £300,000, despite the organisation still not being "fit for purpose", a group of MPs said yesterday.
     The Commons home affairs committee repeated warnings that as many as 300,000 people could be wrongly granted visas to enter Britain each year because of errors in dealing with applications.
     The decision to hand 29 civil servants an average of £10,000 each in financial rewards last year was attacked as "astonishing" after yet more blunders surrounding the UK Border Agency. ...
     Keith Vaz, the committee chairman, said: "No one can forget the previous home secretary describing the agency to my predecessor as 'not fit for purpose'.
     "The agency has had a lot to contend with, but it is apparent that UKBA has a long way to go before it is operating as it should."

Border controls
French to open another Sangatte as Calais prepares new centre for illegal migrants
Peter Allen and James Slack
Daily Mail, 8 December 2009

     A welcome centre for British-bound illegal migrants is to open in Calais before the end of this year, it emerged last night.
     Closely-guarded plans have been approved by French administrative judges for a structure to be built close to the town's ferry port.
     It is already being dubbed Sangatte II after the former Red Cross centre which attracted thousands of illegal foreigners before it demolished in 2002.
     Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green said: 'This is another gesture of contempt from France to Britain. The only result of this will be to encourage more potential illegal immigrants to try to break our laws.
     'The most humane reaction would be for the French authorities to deal with the asylum applications themselves.'
     News of the latest building comes just seven months after France's immigration minister Eric Besson said he would make the town 'watertight' to those trying to get to Britain.
     But officials say the situation has deteriorated to such an extent that both the French government and Calais council feel they have no option to build the centre on waste ground next to an industrial estate. ...
     Officials defended the plan as a humanitarian response.
     One said: 'There are more than 1,000 migrants sleeping rough in the town, and with temperatures dropping their living conditions are getting worse.'
     He said September's destruction of The Jungle, an illegal shanty town full of mainly Afghan young men, had not had the desired effect.
     'It did not persuade them to leave, so we have to offer them a basic level of support,' the official added.
     Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart, a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy's ruling UMP Party, said the council had been forced to accept the new building as part of a compromise deal with refugee charity Secours Catholique (Catholic Help). ...
     Since the closure of The Jungle further migrant camps have sprung up in nearby Steenvoorde, Bailleul and St Omer, with all providing beds, food, clothing shops, medical care and advice on how to claim asylum.
[Site link]

Border controls – education
How migrant crackdown opened the floodgates
David Barrett
Sunday Telegraph, 6 December 2009

     It was meant to end the days when a place at British college was seen as a ticket to bypass immigration controls. But the Government's points-based system for supplying student visas may be making the problem worse ...
     An investigation ... has uncovered a chaotic system which is allowing thousands of foreign nationals to slip into the country under the pretence that they want to study.
     Under the new rules, which came into effect in March, students must gain 40 "points" to come to Britain: 30 for holding a course offer and 10 for proving that they can pay the fees and support themselves.
     But there is growing evidence that the system is open to exploitation by those seeking to work in the black economy, to take advantage of our benefits system and even to plot a terrorist atrocity.
     One senior source said: "At the moment there is massive abuse. The points-based system is utter nonsense and an utter farce. Without a shadow of a doubt you are talking about thousands of visas being issued to people who are not legitimate students and simply want to come to Britain to work."
     Undercover reporters posing as would-be students in three countries uncovered a series of scams used by young foreigners, many of whom have no intention of either studying or ever going home. ...
     According to senior sources, the points-based system has created loopholes which have led to a dramatic rise in the number of applications for student visas and cases of fraud. This, in turn, has led to a giant backlog of applications at the Home Office. ...
     Our investigation exposed widespread abuse by agencies advising customers how to get around Britain's new requirements in India, China and the Philippines.
     One agency, in Fazilka, Punjab, told our reporter: "We guarantee an applicant a student visa within a month." ...
     Agencies in China advised applicants to register with a bona fide language school or university, and then switch to a bogus college once on British soil, to make it easier to extend their visa.

Border controls – visas, education, employment
Migrants exploiting loophole that allows them stay in Britain with a joke degree
James Slack
Daily Mail, 4 December 2009

     Tens of thousands of immigrants are gaining the right to work in the UK by obtaining degrees from 600 colleges which are not 'proper' universities.
     Professor David Metcalf, chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee, said he was 'stunned' to discover how many colleges were accredited to hand out bachelor degrees.
     Some of the colleges offer qualifications in circus skills, acupuncture and ancient medicine.
     Obtaining a degree from one of the 'lower-tier colleges' allows a non-EU student a two-year working visa for the UK.
     But as they are designated as 'highly skilled migrants' they can stay here even if they do not have a job.
     Professor Metcalf, the Government's most senior immigration adviser, said it was possible some of those unable to get skilled jobs were taking lower-paid jobs away from Britons.
     A total of 42,000 students were granted two-year visas in the past year under what is called the Post-Study Work Route (PSWR).
     Foreign students at 154 major universities are automatically granted visas after completing degree courses.
     But a report by Professor Metcalf's committee showed a further 599 other bodies - mostly colleges - can hand out degrees, and the visas that come with them.
     He said: 'They are basically further education colleges which get their degrees validated by one of the universities.
     'What we think is, without being overly elitist, that we should have a good look at these institutions to see if it is legitimate for all the students studying there on all the courses to get post-study work visas.'
     The committee suggested foreign students could be forced to find a job within months of graduating before earning a two-year visa. ...
     A Government survey of students in work after being granted the PSWR visas showed barely half worked in professional jobs. ...
     Shadow immigration minister Damian Green said: 'This is a late recognition of the chaos surrounding student visas which have become one of the most significant loopholes in our immigration system.' ...
     The colleges highlighted by Professor Metcalf are legitimate educational establishments.
     Immigration minister Phil Woolas said: 'The Migration Advisory Committee has delivered a robust and thorough report and the Government will consider it carefully.'
[Site link]

Border controls
French border police discover 12 lorries packed with British-bound migrants
Ian Sparks
Daily Mail, 26 November 2009

     In September, the French bulldozed a squatter camp in Calais called the Jungle. Of the 278 migrants arrested, early all were released on humanitarian grounds.
     Of the estimated 1,000 migrants in Calais, up to 50 a week are thought to be crossing the Channel illegally, with more arriving to replace them every day.
     More are also arriving on a daily basis in other ports on the northern French coast that have ferry links to Britain, including Dunkirk, Ouistreham and Cherbourg.
[Site link]

Border controls – employment, health services
NHS Trust hired illegal immigrant
Channel 4 News, 19 November 2009

     Channel 4 News can reveal that an NHS trust has hired dozens and possibly hundreds of illegal immigrants through one of its biggest private cleaning contractors. ...
     The UK Border Agency has uncovered hundreds of fake documents submitted to Kingston Hospital, including security passes, national insurance numbers and passports.
[Site link]

Border controls – repatriation
40,000 missing illegal immigrants
Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2009

     Ministers have lost track of around 40,000 migrants who have no right to be in Britain.
     The Home Office admitted yesterday that the illegal immigrants should have left the country more than six years ago but could still be here.
     The disclosure, details of which emerged in a letter to the home affairs select committee from the chief executive of the UK Border Agency, is the latest scandal to hit Britain's immigration system.

Border controls – France
France pulls out of deal to return migrants
Daily Telegraph, 7 October 2009

     France yesterday pulled out of a plan to deport hundreds of illegal migrants to Afghanistan in order to prevent them from travelling to Britain.
     Plans for the first joint Anglo-French flight taking migrants back to Afghanistan collapsed after Paris withdrew its co-operation at the last minute in the face of protests from refugee groups. A charter flight leaving Britain last night carrying a group of deported Afghans was due to stop in Lille en route to Kabul. On arrival in Lille, Afghans detained by France would have joined the flight. ...
     France's withdrawal followed protests by refugee groups. Frank Supplisson, France's deputy immigration minister, issued a short statement saying there would be "no return flight".
     Paris agreed to the principle of joint return flights during talks at Evian in February between Phil Woolas, a Home Office minister, and Eric Besson, his French counterpart.
     The change of heart by the French raised doubts about future joint arrangements, particularly after a similar Anglo-French scheme was scrapped last November. At the time, opponents argued that, under United Nations conventions, it was illegal to deport a person to a war-torn country such as Afghanistan.

Border controls – costs, France
Calais migrants flown home to Kabul with £1,900 payoff
Peter Allen
Daily Telegraph, 6 October 2009

     Hundreds of Afghan migrants will be flown home from Calais today with £1,900, paid for by British and French taxpayers.
     As well as a guaranteed place on the plane worth around £500, many of those on board will receive the payment and a guarantee of training back in their homeland.
     However, there will be nothing to prevent any of them travelling all the way back to the French town the moment they get to Kabul. It is intended to be the first of many flights which will cost millions of pounds, split between France and Britain.
     The aim is the reduce the number of migrants who are massing in Calais before trying to get to Britain, where they will claim asylum or disappear into the "black economy". ...
     The first plane will take off from London in the early hours, before stopping to pick up some 250 migrants in Paris. It will then fly on to Kabul.

Border controls
France tells Britain: let in all migrants
Nick Fagge
Daily Express, 30 September 2009

     France last night admitted it was fighting a losing battle against illegal migrants – and demanded Britain should open its doors to them.
     A week after being forced from their shanty town, the asylum seekers were back, still seeking a passage to the UK.
     Last night Calais mayor Natacha Bouchard said the Channel port would remain an immigrant dumping ground until Britain opened its borders and stopped asking France to do its dirty work.
     She insisted that the British should sign up to the Schengen Agreement, a European Union accord that allows free movement of all people between European member states without the need for passports or visas.
     "Calais has become a no-go area, and that's because we have become hostages of the British Government," said Ms Bouchard.
     "Britain is unable to control its borders, so we're doing the job for them because they're not part of the agreement. There are still some 20 squatter camps in Calais alone.
     "Britain has no right to put pressure on us. Every politician should keep repeating this.
     "The more they say it, the more they'll be throwing light on the problem which has been imposed on us."
     The French government is fast running out of patience with the crisis and claims it is powerless to stop the thousands of migrants who make their way to Calais seeking a new life in Britain.
     It complains that until Britain agrees to open its borders, there is no reason for migrants to abandon their nightly cat-and-mouse games with police as they try to board lorries and trains bound for Dover.
     Calais MP Jack Lang said: "The migrants make it to Britain whatever the obstacles. Police operations will do nothing to stop them." ...
     Conservative MP Philip Davies added: "We have lost control of our borders and Britain is seen as a soft touch. These people know that once they are here they will never have to leave.
     "If we had a robust policy to deal with illegal immigrants they would not be trying to get into the UK in the first place." ...
     But while police keep trying to find new camps, they find keeping migrants out of Calais – Britain's main transport link to Europe – a never-ending battle.
     Over two-thirds of the migrants arrested in The Jungle raid have been released and are back in Calais preparing to cross the Channel.
     Hundreds escaped when French immigration minister Eric Besson announced plans for the raid on prime time television.
     Abbot Jean-Pierre Boutoille of the refugee charity C'Sur said: "There are hundreds still living rough in Calais and I hear that a group escaped from a detention centre is already marching back.
     "The operation to destroy the Jungle camp was a ridiculous media exercise and will achieve nothing."
[Site link]

Border controls – employment
New 'face of Tesco' is an illegal immigrant
Justin Penrose
Sunday Mirror, 27 September 2009

     The new face of Tesco, chosen to star in a glossy advertising blitz, has been arrested for being an illegal immigrant.
     Mother-of-three Fatou Cham, a 32-year-old checkout operator, won an in-house Tesco contest to be the face of its new autumn clothing range.
     But she now faces deportation after a tip-off to immigration officials – and has been hurriedly dropped from the ad campaign. ...
     Fatou came to the UK from Gambia, West Africa, in 1998 aged 21 to study banking, economics and finance at London Metropolitan University.
     Two years later, her mother and eldest child were granted a visa to join her here. The family, including two further children born in this country, settled in East Ham, East London, and Fatou began working for Tesco in nearby Beckton in 2002 to fund her studies.
     Her student visa had run out a year earlier. She applied to stay on, but did not have the necessary paperwork and has been here illegally since. ...
     "The last few days have been really stressful," she said. "I came here for a better life and never set out to deceive anyone. I just want to stay here with my family and be happy. ...
     In January Fatou applied for indefinite leave to remain, but the Home Office refused. She has appealed to the High Court. ...
     When Fatou joined Tesco in 2002, all that was required for overseas citizens to work in the UK was a valid national insurance number.
     The law changed in 2004 requiring people from abroad to have a valid work visa.
     A spokesman for Tesco said: "As soon as we were made aware of this issue, we cooperated fully with the investigation. We're satisfied we followed the correct procedures."
[Site link]

Border controls – crime
Official flouted immigration law
Daily Telegraph, 26 September 2009

     A Home Office case worker let 49 migrants into Britain who should not have been here because she "just wanted them to earn some money", a court heard yesterday.
     Only a handful of the immigrants have been traced and it is unlikely the rest will be found, Croydon Crown Court heard. Aliya Ali, a senior member of staff in the Croydon office, was jailed for five years after pleading guilty to 12 charges of misconduct as a public officer.

Border controls – European Union
Steve Haynes
Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2009
[Letter to the Editor]

     Whatever pressure a new EU human rights supremo may put Britain under ("Europe to push for more asylum seekers in Britain", report, September 14), our membership of the EU ensures that we will be subjected to continuing massive immigration for the foreseeable future.
     Two examples illustrate this. The Spanish government recently gave amnesty to half a million asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants, knowing full well that when they become EU citizens, they could settle anywhere within the Union. As most are West Africans, many already have affinities with Britain. Presently living with little more than the Spanish authorities' lip service to human rights, the final destination of most of these amnestees is obvious.
     Poland should have a famine of plumbers and hotel workers: she doesn't. Polish tradesmen have been replaced quite legitimately by a local pre-EU arrangement whereby Ukrainians can freely work in Poland if the jobs are there.
     If the newcomer has lived in Poland for four years, he or she can apply for Polish (therefore EU) citizenship.
     Having made the first, most difficult break with their families, and suffered low wages and discrimination in Polish cities, where will the final choice of residence be for most of these new EU citizens?
     Only by withdrawing from the EU and reclaiming sovereign responsibility for our borders will the coming catastrophe to our quality and way of life be avoided.

Border controls – asylum
New migrants camp appears, a day after the Jungle is cleared
Caroline Gammell
Daily Telegraph, 24 September 2009

     A new "Jungle" has sprung up in Calais just 24 hours after police closed the original makeshift camp for illegal immigrants less than a mile away.
      ...
     More than 30 men gathered there yesterday to receive food from a local charity after being released from detention by the French authorities. Many said they would remain there until they could find a way into Britain.
     At least five other small camps have also sprung up in the area near the port.
     Nearly 300 people, mostly young Afghan men, were rounded up on Tuesday while the so-called Jungle, a ghetto of tarpaulin and wooden houses built up over the past five years, was destroyed.
     They were taken to a detention centre in Lille and offered the option to claim asylum in France or return to their home countries.
     The vast majority refused both options, being determined to reach Britain.

Border controls – asylum
Keep out, Britain is full up
Mark Reynolds
Daily Express, 23 September 2009

     French authorities yesterday finally destroyed the Calais shanty town, known as The Jungle, used by migrants as a launch-pad to Britain. ...
     Critics of yesterday's operation said that while it was essential the five-year-old camp was knocked down, there seemed no proper plan in place to deal with the 1,000 or so Afghans or Iraqis left homeless.
     While some reports said the French would use British taxpayers' cash to offer the migrants financial incentives to go home, most experts believe they will simply disperse to smaller makeshift camps around the Calais docks and continue their attempt to enter Britain illegally. ...
     Conservative MP Philip Davies was among those insisting that France should take proper responsibility for the immigrants on its shores rather than pass on the burden to "full-up'' Britain – but he feared it would not.
     He said: "Asylum-seekers are supposed to be dealt with in the first place they come to. If France was fulfilling its international duties they would be dealing with these people.
     "It is totally irresponsible to be trying to pass them on to us. Obviously both the French government and the asylum-seekers know how soft we are and that once people are here, however bogus their claims, they will never be kicked out again.
     "But we've done more than our fair share. We can't cope with the people we have. There is still a massive backlog of cases, people who have been here years. We need to put the 'full' sign up. France is a big enough country. They've got lots of room." ...
     Sir Andrew Green, of MigrationWatch, said: "Simply closing the camp won't work. We tried that with Sangatte. I think we have to get to the heart of this problem. We entirely support asylum for genuine cases but it seems Britain is now seen as a soft touch. That's certainly what the French believe. Why else should people be queueing up in Calais when France is a safe country?" ...
     Yesterday's raid on The Jungle began at dawn when 500 police officers in dozens of vans and accompanied by bulldozers began circling the wooded waste ground a few hundred yards from the ferry port. In total 278 were arrested and 132 of these claimed they were under 16. All were male. Many more had disappeared overnight, moving to other parts of Calais where they will continue to plan their journeys to Britain in the back of lorries or trains.
     The Refugee Council demanded that Britain accept some of the migrants, particularly children, with family connections in the UK.
     But immigration minister Phil Woolas said: "These people have no rights to claim asylum in the UK. Indeed, we would question whether they were genuine asylum-seekers.
     "If they were fleeing persecution, they have the right to claim asylum in the first country of entry." ...
     Dan Hodges, Communication Director of Refugee Action, said: "You can sweep away the camp but you can't sweep away the issue.
     "Unless the French face up to their responsibilities and bring these people within their migration system it is only a matter of time before the camp and the problems return".
[Site link]

Border controls – asylum
Britain refuses migrants from Calais 'jungle' camp
Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2009

     Britain yesterday rejected a call to accept migrants from the so-called "jungle" camp in Calais when it shuts next week.
     French police are expected to move within days to close the camp, where as many as 2,000 people are living, many of them Afghans.
     Antonio Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, suggested that Britain should take in those with relatives already living in the country.
     However, a spokesman for the UK Border Agency said genuine asylum seekers should make their claim in the country where they enter Europe. He said: "People seeking asylum should do so in the first safe country they come to, those who are not in need of protection will be expected to return home. ..."

Border controls
France to shut illegal migrant 'jungle' in Calais
Henry Samuel
Daily Telegraph, 18 September 2009

     The French government pledged yesterday to shut the so-called "jungle" camp used by migrants in Calais as part of a renewed effort to stop them illegally crossing the Channel to England.
     Eric Besson, the immigration minister, said a "very strong" rise in crime in the northern French port had led him to order officials to clear the area by the end of next week. He said the message to migrants and people traffickers was: "You can no longer cross from England to Calais." ...
     Up to 2,000 migrants, many from south Asia, live in makeshift shelters around Calais. Aid groups said the order would "simply shift the problem a few kilometres".

Border controls – asylum
France's 'jungle' refugee camp may close, but Britain's asylum problem will continue
Ed West
Daily Telegraph blog, 17 September 2009

     I have a feeling we're going to hear a lot more about Eric Besson, France's new immigration minister, ... he has now ordered the closure of "the Jungle", the refugee camp near Calais that sprung up after Sangatte was shut down in 2002.
     Still, forgive me for not being entirely optimistic when Mr Besson promises that cross-channel asylum shopping will end any time soon. They said the same thing in 2002 when Sangatte was closed, but the desperate migrants just moved down the road, and as long as the United Kingdom offers illegal immigrants the chance to scrape a living off the books while receiving (pretty minimal) state support, with a good chance of remaining here even if they lose their asylum case, they will keep on coming.
     None of which is either the fault of the migrants themselves or of France. ... As Besson himself says: "The paradoxical situation for France is that we are trying to bar entry into the UK, which doesn't want these migrants, and we are lumbered with handling their departure."
     And they will still be lumbered with them, so long as Britain makes no efforts to change its laws and to deport people who have no right to be here, and while idiotic churchmen and others campaign for an amnesty – the one action guaranteed to create more squalid camps, more gang-related trafficking, and more suffocated or drowned Chinese labourers.
[Site link]

Border controls – terrorism
Only one in 2,000 visa requests checked
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 10 September 2009

     Fewer than one in every 2,000 visa applicants from Pakistan is being interviewed by British immigration officials.
     The lack of checks on those wanting to come to the UK from the "high risk" country renewed fears that terrorists or illegal immigrants could slip through the net. ...
     It also emerged yesterday that the early release of nearly 150 convicted terrorists had prompted fears that they could plan new attacks and that police and probation services would not be able to cope. ...
     Between Oct 27 and May 31 there were 66,415 applications in Pakistan to come to the UK but officials interviewed just 29. ...
     MI5, the police and probation services will be swamped in coming months as dozens of Islamic terrorists are released after serving just half their sentences.

Border controls – crime
British people smuggling arrests increase
Peter Allen
Daily Telegraph, 4 August 2009

     People smugglers arrested in Calais are increasingly likely to be British, new figures have shown.
     The French immigration ministry said that dozens of Britons had been arrested on suspicion of people trafficking in Calais in the past six months.
     It said that 42 of the 235 suspected people smugglers arrested in Calais in the period were British, along with 32 from France and 20 from Germany.
     However there were only 50 convictions, mainly because of the failure of witnesses to testify against them.

Border controls – France, English Channel
Alarm at 76% rise in stowaway migrants seized from lorries
Mark Blacklock and Peter Allen
Daily Express, 31 July 2009

     The number of illegal migrants arrested in the back of lorries heading to Britain from Calais has increased by 76 per cent this year.
     French police found a colossal 13,715 stowaways in HGVs or vans in the past six months, compared with 7,760 in the same period last year.
     Astonishingly, the vast majority were released without charge – allowing them to resume their bids to reach the UK to claim asylum or disappear into the black economy. ...
     Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch UK, said the figures must mean that illegal immigrants are continuing to get through "or they would try somewhere else".
     He added: "The root of the problem is that Britain is regarded as a soft touch. We must clamp down on illegal workers if we are to deter yet more thousands of would-be immigrants queuing up in Calais."
     A French Frontier Police spokesman described the problem as "a never-ending cycle" because when people were simply deported to the country they came from – usually Belgium – they rapidly returned to France.
     In all, 18,922 illegal migrants were arrested in the Calais region between January and June – the vast majority in the back of lorries.
     But many others were found vaulting barbed wire fences or were picked up as suspected people smugglers.
     The total figure compares with just 11,340 arrests made during the same period last year, an increase of 66 per cent. Yet despite the rise just 5,865 – 31 per cent – were actually put under formal investigation.
     Without money or official papers they were almost impossible to prosecute, and were released without charge.
     Many continued to travel to Britain undetected, thanks to the increasingly sophisticated tactics being used by people-smuggling gangs, according to France's immigration ministry.
[Site link]

Border controls
Tighter border controls agreed to thwart illegal immigrants
Rosa Prince
Daily Telegraph, 7 July 2009

     Border controls will be tightened in an attempt to prevent immigrants who have been gathering at French ports smuggling themselves into Britain.
     At an Anglo-French summit in Evian, Gordon Brown announced a £15 million fund for new technology to search vehicles heading for Britain. ...
     In return for the Prime Minister's pledge, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, announced that France would step up the removal of illegal immigrants to their home countries. ...
     Mr Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, said: "We have one of the strongest borders in the world, and today's agreement has made it even more secure. ...
     "Last year we stopped 28,000 individual attempts to cross the Channel and searched one million lorries – these changes will further strengthen the ring of steel that protects Britain."

Border controls
Fears over migrants as UN returns to Calais
Peter Allen
Daily Telegraph, 2 July 2009

     Concerns about an influx of migrants to Britain has grown after the United Nations began giving advice to asylum seekers gathering in northern France.
     The UN has established a full-time presence in Calais for the first time in seven years, to offer "information and support".
     Its High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said the 2,000 migrants sleeping rough in the area should be allowed to make an "informed decision" about their options.
     More are expected to arrive as facilities improve and the summer weather makes living conditions easier.
     "Most are motivated by economic or family reasons, but a few have fled violence or persecution and their wellbeing is of direct concern," said a UNHCR spokesman. "Many have no idea about the situation back home, or about what they can expect in the UK."

Border controls
New British £750 million electronic border control plan 'breaks EU law'
Richard Ford
Times Online, 30 June 2009

     Britain's multi-million pound electronic borders project breaches European data protection laws and the free movement of EU citizens, MPs were warned today.
     The £750 million scheme will also lead to longer queues for passengers travelling by rail and ferry to the continent.
     Under e-borders, airline, ferry and rail operators must collect eight pieces of travel information including a passenger's full name, date of birth, nationality, passport number, passport-issuing country and passport expiry date. The information will be collected electronically from everyone entering and leaving the UK.
     The results will then be passed to the UK and checked against security watchlists giving immigration officials early alerts.
     But today Eurostar told the Commons Home Affairs select committee that under French law it was unlawful for anyone other than law enforcement agencies to collect the information. As a result it would not able to collect the details required for passengers travelling into the UK.
     Marc Noaro, customer services director of Eurostar, said: "It is not lawful for somebody who is not a law enforcement officer in France and Belgium to demand that information at check in."
     He said that his firm remained extremely concerned that the proposed system will be operationally, legally and commercially difficult for Eurostar to implement.
     Mr Noaro also said that if Eurostar collected the travel information, French law forbade it being sent to another EU state.
     The committee was also told of other concerns that e-border programme breaks EU law.
     Tim Reardon of the Chamber of Shipping, which represents ferry operators, said if someone refused to provide the information and then was stopped from travelling, it could breach EU law allowing the free movement of people.
     He criticised the UK Border Agency for failing to respond to letters demanding clarification of EU law which were sent eight months ago.
     Mr Reardon also warned that having to take the eight pieces of information on everyone boarding a ferry would lead to congestion and delays at ports. He said the scheme had been designed for the aviation industry with little thought given to ferries and rail travel. ...
     Mr Reardon added: "No practicable method of capturing ferry passengers' passport data has yet been identified - and in the absence of a defined process, no work has been done to develop a system to support it.
     "Progress is effectively now suspended pending resolution of the legal questions which will determine what is or is not permitted."
     The Port of Dover warned of even bigger problems with coaches and lorries. "A queue of 100 passengers at an airport is not a big problem and individuals can step forward easily - a queue of 100 passengers at a ferry port (if they are in trucks) is a mile long and takes some moving," the Port said.
[Site link]

Border controls
Police arrest 17 anarchists threatening to lead swarms of illegal migrants through Channel tunnel to Britain
Peter Allen
Daily Mail, 25 June 2009

     French riot police have arrested 17 anarchists after they threatened to lead swarms of illegal migrants through the Channel Tunnel to Britain.
     Weapons including machetes, metal poles and a spiked club were found hidden by the activists during raids in Calais late on Wednesday.
     All those arrested had been massing in a protest camp aimed at helping the migrants to 'tear down the borders' to England.
     More than 800 elite CRS riot-control officers are in the town, with another 1,200 on standby in the immediate vicinity.
     A tense atmosphere has gripped the port all week, with a spotter helicopter circling overhead, roads blocked, and mobile police patrols circulating constantly. ...
     'Many hundreds are massing in the town, ready for a widescale demonstration against immigration control on Saturday. All vulnerable targets are being guarded. We can take no chances.'
     All the protestors are from a group calling itself 'No Borders', which has pledged to 'tear down the borders' stopping migrants getting across the Channel.
     As their tents and marquees were pitched on an official site to the east of Calais, some of the 2,000 odd migrants sleeping rough in the Calais area began to join them.
[Site link]

Border controls
'Relaxed' officials let smuggled migrants go, says judge
Daily Telegraph, 11 June 2009

     A judge overseeing one of the biggest people smuggling cases has criticised "relaxed" immigration officials, after scores of Chinese immigrants were freed.
     Police and border guards caught almost 100 illegal immigrants after intercepting 27 smuggling trips during their surveillance operation.
     However, the UK Border Agency let them all go, telling them to report to the immigration centre at Lunar House in Croydon, south London.
     Only a "handful" ever showed up, Southwark Crown Court was told.
     Judge Christopher Hardy praised the detectives who smashed the "extensive and sophisticated" gang behind the smuggling. "The attitude of the police contrasts with the very relaxed attitude evidence by the UK immigration authorities." he added.
     Five Turkish men were jailed yesterday for their role in the smuggling. ...
     ... The network had links to Chinese gangs and members in France and Belgium. It made millions of pounds, largely sent to China and Turkey.

Border controls – education
Bogus colleges 'going unchecked for six months'
Matthew Moore
Daily Telegraph, 3 June 2009

     A loophole in immigration rules means that fake colleges can still open for six months without having their credentials checked, MPs were told yesterday.
     Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, admitted that he had no idea how many foreigners were living in Britain illegally after enrolling on spurious courses at the colleges.
     The home affairs committee was told that tens of thousands of overseas "students" had entered the country through about 2,000 fake colleges in recent decades.
     Tony Millns, the chief executive of English UK, which represents English language colleges, said the abuse of the immigration system amounted to a "national scandal". ...
     A spokesman for the UK Border Agency, which is currently vetting colleges, said it was "simply not true" that colleges could be on the list for six months without being checked. "All colleges receive thorough checks before they are issued a licence to sponsor foreign students," he said.
     The agency claimed that the number of institutions bringing in foreign students had already fallen from 4,000 to about 1,600. ...
     Nick Lewis, the principal of Castle College in Nottingham and a member of the Association of Colleges, told the committee that the Government was warned about the problem of fake colleges 10 years ago, and failed to act.

Border controls – crime
Gang Jailed For UK's Biggest Visa Scam
Mark White
Sky News, 3 June 2009

     Three illegal immigrants have been jailed for a combined total of 19 years for their part in Britain's single biggest visa scam.
     More than 90,000 counterfeit documents were produced at a property in west London, allowing hundreds of people to cheat UK border controls.
     Jatinder Sharma and Rakhi Shahi, who masterminded the fraud in counterfeit documents, were jailed for seven and eight years respectively.
     Mr Sharma's wife Neelam, convicted of handling some of the proceeds of the scam, was given a four-year sentence at Isleworth Crown Court in west London.
     All three have been automatically recommended for deportation at the end of their sentences.
     The court had heard how the Indian nationals took advantage of a "shambolic" system of immigration checks.
     Prosecutor Francis Sheridan said evidence gathered for the case presented a "damning indictment" of failures by the Home Office to spot the fraudsters, who submitted hundreds of bogus visa applications.
     Sharma, 44, was only caught after he offered to get an undercover reporter a post graduate diploma in business administration and other fraudulent documents for about £4,000.
     The scam mainly targeted the government's Highly Skilled Migrant Programme - a points based system which gives preference to those in desired professions, like doctors and dentists.
     The international Graduate Scheme and other leave to remain applications were also exploited.
     Mr Sheridan said: "The Home Office system was designed to operate with trust.
     "The evidence shows it was naive in its conception and a shambles in reality, but it did not justify someone taking full advantage to cheat the system time and time again..."
     Metropolitan Police officers and officials from the UK Border Agency swooped on the fraudsters' company Univisas, based in Southall, west London, in February 2008.
     They discovered a mountain of documents, including false university certificates, academic records, bank statements and pay slips.
     Investigators also uncovered records of more than 900 people who had been given documentation by Univisas.
     Of a sample 117 analysed in detail, 113 were found to contain fraudulent information.
     Those behind the scam were so confident, they offered a money back guarantee to clients who they charged fees from hundreds to thousands of pounds.
     The gang lived together in Clarence Street, Southall, and hid behind a complex web of false identities and documentation. ...
     Although the fraudsters behind this visa scam have now been brought to justice, officials admit many other organised criminal gangs are still out there, trying to find new ways of flouting Britain's Border Controls.
[Site link]

Border controls – racism, education
Academics boycott visa 'snooping'
BBC, 29 May 2009

     University academics say they will boycott new visa rules for overseas students that would make them into "immigration snoopers".
     Delegates at the University and College Union's annual conference said they did not want to become a branch of the UK Border Agency.
     Under the new rules universities are expected to monitor whether overseas students really attend their courses.
     The Home Office said such things were part of their normal duty of care.
     Institutions must also report concerns that a student could be involved in terrorism.
     In a debate at the conference, in Bournemouth, delegates argued that the rules would place a strain on the relationship between staff and students from outside the European Union.
     General secretary Sally Hunt said: "UCU members are educators not border guards."
     She said later: "Politically, UCU is absolutely opposed to this legislation and we know that many members have strong and principled moral objections as members of society and as professional educators. ...
     One of the resolutions tabled for discussion said the new system "makes educators into immigration snoopers which could damage UK education irreparably".
     It deplored "this pandering to anti-immigration racism" and committed the union to "non-compliance with all such policing and surveillance duties".
     But a Home Office spokesman said: "Educational institutions have a duty of care to all their students and checking that they are attending and making progress in their studies is part of that responsibility.
     "The records we expect education providers to keep are those which most will keep for their own purposes anyway."
[Site link]

Border controls – terrorism, education
Four terror suspects won university places through bogus Manchester college
Andrew Norfolk
The Times, 21 May 2009

     Four terrorism suspects were given places at English universities after leaving the bogus Manchester College of Professional Studies.
     John Moores University, Liverpool, and Liverpool Hope University confirmed yesterday that each had accepted two of the detainees and that all four students submitted diplomas from the fake college as part of their application. Both universities insisted that they had disregarded the Manchester certificates, accepting the men instead on the basis of their university degrees from Pakistan. ...
     The Home Office says that in Pakistan, which it classifies as "high risk", additional checks are made on applicants to seek independent verification of prospective students' qualifications. As a result, the refusal rate for student visa applications from Pakistan has risen from 53 per cent in 2006 to 69 per cent last year. Despite this, the number of Pakistani citizens in the UK on student visas has soared.
     A critical flaw in the new regulations, however, means that there is still no limit on how many international students a sponsor college is allowed to enrol. It may have become more difficult to beat the system, but it is not impossible.
[Site link]

Border controls – terrorism, education
Sham colleges open doors to Pakistani terror suspects
Andrew Norfolk
The Times, 21 May 2009

     Thousands of young Pakistanis exploited a hole in Britain's immigration defences to enrol as students at a network of sham colleges, The Times can reveal.
     The gateway, opened by fraudsters who have earned millions from the scam, has allowed in hundreds of men from a region of Pakistan that is the militant heartland of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taleban.
     Eight of the terror suspects arrested last month in Manchester and Liverpool were on the books of one college. It had three small classrooms and three teachers for the 1,797 students on its books. Another college claimed to have 150 students but secretly enrolled 1,178 and offered places to a further 1,575 overseas applicants, 906 of them in Pakistan. ...
     The Times has uncovered close ties between 11 colleges in London, Manchester and Bradford, all formed in the past five years and controlled by three young Pakistani businessmen.
     Each of the three men entered the country on a student visa. One has fled to Pakistan after earning an estimated £6 million from the scam. Fayaz Ali Khan and another man are in the UK.
     All but two of the ten students arrested last month over an alleged al-Qaeda bomb plot were enrolled over an 11-month period at Manchester College of Professional Studies. Two Liverpool universities admitted last night that they had given places to four of them, ...
     The massive fraud has fuelled a surge in student arrivals from Pakistan, which the Prime Minister has identified as the birthplace of two thirds of terrorist plots in the UK. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of Pakistani nationals with permission to enter or remain in the UK as students jumped from 7,975 to 26,935.
[Site link]

Border controls
Former pub became the centre of a web of bogus colleges
Andrew Norfolk
The Times, 21 May 2009

     Among the fast-food shops, Haj travel agents, halal butchers, curry houses and money-exchange outlets is a former pub, reborn in 2006 as Manchester College of Professional Studies.
     Here, two young men from a town in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan – in Britain on student visas – started a scam that would earn them a small fortune.
     The Times has evidence that in 15 months from October 2006 they enrolled 1,143 foreign students, most Pakistanis, and sold bogus college qualifications to enable another 654 to extend their stay in the UK. ...
     Most students, however, had no intention of entering a classroom. They were in the UK to earn as much as possible for as long as possible. ...
     ... For the vast majority of students, the documents were a charade. The college was a front that provided cover for students to do whatever they wanted in Britain.
     Most came from Pakistan, but hundreds were also admitted from Nigeria and other countries in Africa, South Asia and the Far East. ...
     Manchester College of Professional Studies was also affiliated with Blackpool University, again based in Dublin, established "under the order of the King of Belgium" and licensed by the Accreditation Council of Higher Education (ACHE).
     All of which might sound impressive until one learns that ACHE is based in Wallis and Futuna, an island group in the South Pacific.
     Finally, the college also posed as a study centre for the University of Newcastle, which is really the online University of New Castle, incorporated "in the sate (sic) of Delaware" and, like Blackpool University, accredited by a group of South Pacific islands.
     Mr Fayaz and his friends could run their scams for so long because the UK's system for controlling and monitoring international students was – until last month – lamentable. He was able to open a college and gain a place on the Government's register of educational providers by completing an online application. No one checked his background, no one came – at the outset – to inspect his premises and no one sought to discover whether the teachers he said he was employing had the qualifications claimed.
     Advance notice was given of the periodic Home Office visits made after the college opened, so there was always time to make sure associates and employees were sitting studiously in a classroom when an inspector arrived. Astonishingly, there was not even a system for limiting or monitoring how many students a college enrolled. ...
     One bad apple would have been one too many, but The Times has uncovered a tangled web linking 11 international colleges formed during the past five years, in Manchester, Bradford, London and Essex.
     A few barely existed beyond their registered office address, others had impressive internet sites and some even gave lessons to a minority of the students they enrolled. ...
[Site link]

Border controls – European Union
Exclusive: EU'S £14bn vain bid to halt migrants
Ted Jeory
Sunday Express, 17 May 2009

     Vast amounts of taxpayers' money has been squandered on a "disastrous" scheme to stem the flow of illegal migrants into Europe.
     More than £14 billion – of which Britain's share is an estimated £1.4 billion – has gone on a French-inspired project called the Barcelona Process.
     But much of the cash has ended up in the pockets of north African officials who fail to prevent mass migration.
     Yet despite the enormous sums involved, the European Union has not once published a detailed breakdown of spending on the venture and produced just one high-level audit of the project's total spending in 14 years.
     Incredibly, EU leaders are set to sanction another £550 million on a similar project in eastern Europe.
     The Barcelona Process is an alliance between the 27-member EU and 16 countries from the southern Mediterranean and Middle East.
     Its main aim has been to combat illegal immigration from north Africa to southern EU members such as Spain, Italy and Portugal.
     But more than 100,000 migrants a year are still estimated to enter Europe illegally via the Mediterranean, a fifth of the total.
     Leading Eurosceptic Tory MP Bill Cash said: "The process has been disastrous. It does us no good to raise the volume of expenditure in the vain belief it will curtail illegal immigration. It doesn't work like that. The money just disappears into rivers of slush funds and hopeless corruption."
     Labour MP Michael Connarty, who chairs the European Scrutiny Committee, said: "If we create a stable buffer between north Africa and Europe it will be money well spent, but we've made no progress."
     An EU spokeswoman claimed the Barcelona Process fostered "cohesion and co-operation".
[Site link]

Border controls – crime, education
Fewer colleges for foreign students
Daily Telegraph, 13 May 2009

     The number of colleges accepting foreign students has been cut by more than 13,000 after the introduction of new rules earlier this year.
     Each college applying for a licence was visited by an official from the UK Border Agency as part of a drive to root out fake institutions. There were fears that many colleges were fronts for illegal immigration.
     The list of colleges sponsoring student visas has fallen from 15,000 to 1,500.

Border controls – crime
Foreign lorries responsible for 90% of smuggled migrants
David Pilditch
Daily Express, 25 April 2009

     Nine out of 10 lorry drivers who smuggle illegal immigrants into Britain are from overseas, shocking figures revealed yesterday.
     Even Labour's official statistics show the Government has failed to collect more than £1million in fines owed by hauliers registered abroad who have been caught red-handed.
     Yesterday critics said the damning figures expose the full scale of Britain's shambolic immigration policies and lax border security. It comes after the UK Border Agency revealed 1,571 foreign truckers were issued fines last year after illegal immigrants were found hiding in the back of their vehicles.
     This compares with only 195 British lorries found to have stowaways. In theory drivers and owners face fines of £2,000 for each illegal migrant. But the figures, released under the Freedom of Information Act, show just £2million has been collected from foreign firms, a shortfall of at least £1million. British hauliers have been fined around £300,000.
     Last night, British operators complained the system was being abused by unscrupulous foreign drivers who can earn up to £1,500 from each person they smuggle across the Channel.
     Trucker Mervyn Osgood, 54, from Maidstone in Kent, said: "It's an absolute farce. We always see the foreign drivers talking to the migrants in Calais." Immigrants gather to scramble on to vehicles at the ferry port in a notorious area known as Diesel Alley.
     Mr Osgood said foreign truckers simply ignored the fines, sometimes not even telling their bosses they had been caught.
     "To them it's worth the risk. They get £1,500 from each illegal, so if they get four on, they pocket around £6,000. Then they just unload their cargoes and head back to their countries."
     The Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green insisted the Government was to blame. He said: "Clearly many foreign truckers are abusing our immigration laws and they should be punished effectively. "However, the problem often is that they may be convicted of offences relating to illegal migration but are continuing to operate in the same vehicles."
     Last night the agency admitted: "These figures don't reflect the actual figure because there is often more than one clandestine found per vehicle." He said 28,000 migrants were caught trying to sneak into Britain on board lorries crossing the Channel last year.
     The records show foreign truckers were fined a further £811,507 for working in Britain without the necessary haulage permits. Lorry drivers can unwittingly bring in illegal immigrants who jump inside their vehicles without them realising what is happening.
     But other operators accept cash from people-smuggling gangs led by east Europeans, Afghans and Iraqis.
[Site link]

Border controls
France 'ready to dump migrants in Britain'
Peter Allen and Anil Dawar
Daily Express, 24 April 2009

     France wants Britain to sign a deal allowing thousands of migrants to flood into the UK.
     Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart's controversial plan to scrap passport controls was announced as migrants in the port staged an angry demo yesterday, waving placards written in flawless English.
     The banners expose how Britain's open-door asylum system and benefits culture are a magnet for Afghans, Kurds and Eritreans.
     Exasperated by the sight of migrants sleeping rough as they try to board England-bound trains and lorries illegally, Mrs Bouchart outlined her scheme to rid Calais of the blight to French Immigration Minister Eric Besson.
     "It's necessary to speed up negotiations with the British because at the moment we're ready to charter a boat to dump them over there," she said.
     She said all Britain had to do was sign up to the Schengen Agreement, which allows anybody to travel between EU states without passports or visas.
     Mr Besson challenged Britain to share responsibility for France's problem by asking why migrants from places such as Iran, Somalia and Sudan travel across the world to reach the UK.
     "Britain should step up its controls and take on more of this burden," he said. "Britain should also question why migrants and the traffickers in migrants believe that the British illegal job market is a golden opportunity." ...
     Mrs Bouchart said if Britain signed up to Schengen, then the migrants could make their way direct to the UK to claim asylum, rather than using France as a platform to get there illegally. ...
     Responding to the plan to make Calais a passport-free zone, Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said: "UK policy is to not sign up to the Schengen Agreement. Weakening our controls will only play into the hands of the traffickers.
[Site link]

Border controls – welfare state
Calais mayor blames Britain for immigration problems
Peter Allen
Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2009

     The mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, has blamed Britain's asylum and benefits system for "imposing" thousands of illegal migrants on her town.
     In an angry attack in which she also called for millions in compensation, Natacha Bouchart said the UK was entirely to blame for the hordes of foreigners who use the French port as a staging point to get across the Channel. ...
     Mrs Bouchart pointed out that the Calais Chamber of Trade was having to spend £12 million each year securing the port area – money she suggested the French government should pay back.
     But it was Britain's immigration system which was predominantly to blame for thousands of Africans, eastern Europeans and people from central Asia trying to clamber aboard lorries and trains in Calais to get to the UK every day.
     "Requesting asylum is easier with them (the British) than in France," said Mrs Bouchart.
     "The asylum seeker is given accommodation and receives £31 to £40 a week according to their case, when the annual salary of the average Eritrean is around $200 (£136).
     "That seems enormous and it's attractive, even if in some places it's nothing."
     Calling for a "change in attitude", Mrs Bouchart said the current build up of UK-bound foreigners was untenable. ...
     French immigration minister Eric Besson is due to outline new policies for dealing with the worsening situation in Calais.
     Some 2,000 UK-bound migrants are currently sleeping rough in the area, with around 800 in the town itself.
[Site link]

Border controls
'Risky' students who want a visa will be interviewed by phone
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2009

     Fresh questions were raised yesterday over Britain's security after the Home Secretary admitted some visa applications were decided over the phone.
     Pakistani students wanting to study in Britain who are deemed a risk may only be interviewed over the phone, and from outside the country, it emerged.
     And the Home Office revealed that final decisions on any visa applications from Pakistan were now being dealt with by officials in the United Arab Emirates.
     The disclosure raises fresh security fears around the student visa system after it emerged all but one of the 12 suspects being held over an alleged plot to bomb shopping centres in Manchester came to Britain from Pakistan using student visas. ...
     It later emerged Abu Dhabi is being used as a "hub" for UK immigration officials to take final decisions, although fingerprints and documents of applicants are being checked in Pakistan first.

Border controls
£8m for border agency ads
Matthew Moore
Daily Telegraph, 16 April 2009

     Britain's border agency is spending nearly £8 million a year on advertising and public relations, it was disclosed yesterday.
     The Home Office body has allocated large sums to its promotional budget despite concern about its failings to stem illegal immigration.
     While other government departments and private sector companies are cutting jobs in the recession, the agency is advertising a range of roles in a new communications campaign team, paying up to £56,000 a year.
     The figures were released in a parliamentary answer to the Tories by Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister.
     New research indicates that at least 250,000 migrant workers are employed in the country unregistered.

Border controls – education
Bogus foreign students free to flout new laws
Richard Ford and Andrew Norfolk
The Times, 15 April 2009

     Thousands of bogus students remain free to enter Britain despite new laws aimed at tightening controls on immigration. The Times has learnt that hundreds of colleges recently approved by the Home Office to accept non-EU students have not been inspected by its officers.
     Weaknesses in the student visa system have emerged following the arrest of 12 terror suspects last week. Ten of the men entered this country from Pakistan on student visas.
     It has also emerged that the vast majority of non-EU students will not be interviewed by the Home Office but admitted on the basis of written applications and evidence of sponsorship, educational qualifications and bank statements. ...
     John Tincey, the chairman of the Immigration Service Union, said that the failure to include interviews could be exploited by terrorists.
     Under the system, universities, colleges and schools must register with the Home Office to accept students from outside the EU. They must agree to alert the Home Office if a student fails to register, stops attending classes or if a course is shortened and keep copies of the students' passports as well as up-to-date contact addresses.
     The new regime came in two weeks ago and is intended to end a scam in which thousands of foreigners enrolled at bogus colleges to work here. So far, 2,100 establishments have been registered and 400 rejected. There are 14,000 establishments on an earlier database that need to register.
     Today The Times highlights the abuses under the old regime, described by the Immigration Minister as the Achilles' heel of the system.
     At one college in Manchester that claims to have more than 100 students – most of them from North West Frontier Province in Pakistan – only two turned up for classes yesterday.
     An international college in London with links to Pakistani businessmen was raided by the police and the UK Border Agency in December. It was alleged that individuals attached to the college earned £5 million processing up to 2,500 fraudulent visa applications.
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Border controls – crime, education
£100 fakes helping terrorists into UK
Nick Meo and Emal Khan
Sunday Telegraph, 12 April 2009

     Forged degree certificates, fake income tax returns and bogus payslips were on sale in Pakistan yesterday – all valuable tools for terrorists to obtain student visas for Britain.
     An investigation ... has found that documents could be obtained for less than £100 by anyone seeking to support their application to study in Britain.
     As concerns grew about the screening processes that allowed 11 of the 12 bomb suspects to enter Britain, self-styled "immigration consultants" in Pakistan were hard at work trying to beat the system. ...
     Many British universities have representative offices in Pakistan's main cities through which they recruit students. ... ...
     ... Such documents are widely available under the counter from immigration consultants all over Pakistan.
     The paperwork is designed to convince British immigration officials that applicants want to learn and can pay for their courses, even though some are virtually illiterate and only want jobs.
     Britain has a reputation for being easy to enter. ... Nearly 4,000 immigration consultants are thought to be operating in Pakistan's capital Islamabad and its twin city Rawalpindi. ...
     Many of the forgeries are crude and unlikely to fool immigration officers, but others are sophisticated. The size of the industry shows how much effort is put in to thwart the system at every stage.

Border controls – education
One in four colleges for foreigners 'bogus'
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 1 April 2009

     Bogus colleges that help illegal immigrants slip into Britain are the "Achilles' heel" in the system, a Home Office minister admitted yesterday.
     Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, said fake colleges and language schools were the "biggest loophole" in the system because figures indicated that almost one in four was potentially bogus. New visa rules that came into force yesterday meant overseas students needed to be accepted by genuine institutions before they could enter Britain.
     Colleges and universities who wanted to take foreign students had to register with the Home Office. Of the 5,000 thought to take foreign students, only 2,100 had so far applied to have their credentials checked. Of those, 460 were rejected. ...
     It was estimated that up to 2,000 "bogus" colleges could be forced to close.
     Frank Field, the co-chairman of the Commons cross-party group on balanced migration, said the number of colleges rejected was "worrying" but "