IMMIGRATION CONCERN

News, views and sources for research on why and how

IMMIGRATION MATTERS

A collection of material on immigration and related issues, mainly in the
United Kingdom, as well as lists of books and of web sites.

Details of other pages are at the end of this page

RECENT NEWS AND VIEWS

Extracts of recent news and views in date order - latest first

EXTREMISM – POLITICS, ISLAM
Islamists got voters out for Livingstone
Andrew Gilligan
Sunday Telegraph, 7 March 2010.

     A fundamentalist group that believes in sharia, jihad and creating an "Islamic social and political order" in Britain arranged an "unprecedented mobilisation" of voters for Ken Livingstone, the former Labour London mayor, at the last mayoral election.
     In a poll lost by Mr Livingstone, the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) helped secure massive and unexpected swings towards him in its east London heartland.
     In one ward, Spitalfields, his vote share rose from 29.6 per cent in 2004 – an election he won – to 68.4 per cent in 2008.
     In every other ward in Tower Hamlets and Newham with a sizeable Muslim population, his vote rose by between 23 and 36 percentage points. His vote in other Muslim and ethnic minority areas of London also rose, but by far smaller amounts.
     Mr Livingstone's economic development body, the London Development Agency (LDA), had agreed to pay more than £1.3 million to the East London Mosque, controlled by the IFE.
     Emails ... show that Peter Brimson, a senior LDA official, protested against at least £500,000 of this grant, saying there were "major concerns" about the mosque project and "no case" for giving it the money. He was overruled.
     Part of Mr Livingstone's voting rise will have been due to his opposition to the Iraq war and support for the Palestinian cause, both popular among Muslims.
     However, part can be explained by the activities of a group, "Muslims 4 Ken," which ... was run by Azad Ali, the IFE's community affairs co-ordinator, and Anas al-Tikriti, an IFE ally in the British Muslim Initiative.
     ... On his IFE blog, Mr Ali has praised a key mentor of Osama bin Laden, described al-Qaeda as a "myth," and justified the killing of British soldiers in Iraq. ...
     Electoral officials have also expressed concern ... about dramatic fluctuations in the number of people registered to vote in Tower Hamlets.
      ... ...
     The launch of the Muslims 4 Ken campaign came after the East London Mosque secured at least £1.3 million in funding from Mr Livingstone's City Hall.
     This included £500,000 awarded by the LDA in 2004 for the building of the mosque's extension, the London Muslim Centre, which houses the headquarters of the IFE. Most of the rest of the money was given under the LDA's Ways to Work programme for job-creation projects. ...
     Mr Livingstone said he could not recollect the project, or whether he had been personally involved in approving the payment. He refused to comment on the activities of Muslims 4 Ken and said: "You are a liar who is stirring up racism."
     Mr Ali said that his involvement with Muslims 4 Ken was limited to being asked to "contribute articles to its website."
[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.

RACISM – EDUCATION
Pupils aged five on hate register: Teachers must log playground taunts for Government database
Ryan Kisiel and Steve Doughty
Daily Mail, 4 March 2010.

     Heads will be forced to list children as young as five on school 'hate registers' over everyday playground insults.
     Even minor incidents must be recorded as examples of serious bullying and details kept on a database until the pupil leaves secondary school.
     Teachers are to be told that even if a primary school child uses homophobic or racist words without knowing their meaning, simply teaching them such words are hurtful and inappropriate is not enough.
     Instead the incident has to be recorded and his or her behaviour monitored for future signs of 'hate' bullying.
     The accusations will also be recorded in databases held by councils and made available to Whitehall and ministers to help them devise future anti-bullying campaigns. ...
     In another incident last year a six-year-old girl, Sharona Gower, was reported for 'racist bullying' at her school near Tunbridge Wells in Kent.
     Sharona was chased by two 11-year-old girls, one of whom taunted her that she had chocolate on her face.
     The six-year-old responded to one of the girls, who was black: 'Well, you've got chocolate on yours.'
     Many schools nationwide have already followed advice that they should record incidents of alleged racist, homophobic or anti-disability bullying.
     One report last year by the Manifesto Club civil liberties think-tank said that 40,000 children each year are having racist charges added to their school records.
     But ministers aim to make reporting of supposed 'hate taunting' a legal requirement for every school, primary as well as secondary, and every local authority across the country from the beginning of the new school year in September. ...
     Head teachers were first advised to keep records of racist incidents eight years ago.
     Then, in 2007, heads were told to include disability-related and homophobic bullying in their tallies.
[Site link]

CRIME – BORDER SECURITY
Most dishonest man in Britain: Church leader charged £4,000 a time to smuggle immigrants into country
Colin Fernandez and Ryan Kisiel
Daily Mail, 3 March 2010.

     To all appearances, the Reverend Anthony Quarco was a respectable pillar of the community.
     As well as running a church, he worked as a frontline airport immigration officer and volunteered as a Metropolitan Police special constable.
     But yesterday, the father of two was unmasked as 'the most dishonest man in Britain' and jailed for nine years for smuggling hordes of illegal migrants into the country in exchange for nearly £150,000.
     Croydon Crown Court heard that former asylum seeker Quarco used the cover of the church to write letters supporting immigration bids, charging £4,000 a time to claim applicants were church fundraisers or choir members.
     Meanwhile, he used his job at Luton Airport to issue fake passports, and even smuggled a man into the country under his own name.
     Quarco's extraordinary story can be told for the first time after a jury found him guilty yesterday of 14 immigration offences.
     These included misconduct in public office, money laundering of £143,955, facilitating the breach of immigration law by a non-EU national and possession of false ID documents with intent. ...
     Quarco, then known as Mashudo Brisco Ndou, claimed asylum in Britain in 1995 after arriving from Ethiopia with a Liberian ID card.
     By the time he was made a UK citizen in 2005, he had changed his name to Anthony Davis Quarco, and founded 'The Gift of God Zion Training Church' in Brixton. ...
     In March 2006 Quarco began work at Luton Airport and by 2008 he was part of the Immigration Service's Criminal Investigation Team.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – USA, PUBLIC OPINION
67% Say Illegal Immigrants Are Major Strain on U.S. Budget
Rasmussen Reports, 3 March 2010.

     As the country wrestles with a future of historic-level deficits, 67% of U.S. voters say that illegal immigrants are a significant strain on the U.S. budget.
     A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 23% disagree and do not believe illegal immigration is a strain on the budget.
     Two-out-of-three (66%) voters say the availability of government money and services draw illegal immigrants to the United States. Nineteen percent (19%) think otherwise and do not believe government money and services are a magnet for illegal immigration. Another 15% are not sure.
     These findings help to explain why 68% say gaining control of the border is more important than legalizing the status of undocumented workers already living in the United States. Twenty-six percent (26%) think legalizing illegal immigrants is more important.
     The majority support for controlling the borders has been consistent through several years of surveying. ...
     Fifty-six percent (56%) say the policies and practices of the federal government encourage people to enter the United States illegally. Twenty-seven percent (27%) disagree, and 17% are not sure.
[Site link]

EXTREMISM – ISLAM
Charity is linked to Islamic terrorists
Andrew Gilligan
Daily Telegraph, 2 March 2010.

     A charity praised by Gordon Brown has paid hundreds of thousands of pounds supposedly raised for "disaster relief" to two organisations allegedly linked to terrorist groups.
     Muslim Aid, which has been given at least £830,000 of public money, diverted substantial sums to Islamist organisations, possibly in contravention of its charitable status.
     It has received grants from the Department for International Development, the EU and London councils.
     The charity, based at the hardline East London mosque, has close links to the Islamic Forum of Europe, a fundamentalist group accused by a Labour minister of infiltrating his party.
     Muslim Aid raised more than £24 million last year. It says its charitable objectives, which it is legally required to follow, are "to relieve ... all those who are in need ... as a result of natural disasters" and "to relieve those who are refugees fleeing from war."

RACISM – RIGHTS
Racism on the rise in Britain
News 24, 2 March 2010.

     Racist attacks are on the rise in Britain, where both politicians and the tabloid media routinely disparage Roma gypsies, Muslims and migrants, a European rights watchdog charged on Tuesday.
     Race-linked offences in England and Wales jumped from 31 000 in 2003 to more than 38 000 five years on, according to a report from the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) based on British government figures.
     More than 13 000 race or discrimination cases were successfully prosecuted in 2007-2008, against 8 800 for the previous two years, said the commission, which is part of the pan-European Council of Europe rights body.
     Asylum-seekers were often vulnerable to hasty decisions to reject their claims, unnecessary detention and intense public hostility, the report said. ...
     The watchdog acknowledged British authorities had toughened the legal framework for fighting racism and discrimination, and were working to promote racial equality in jobs and education, with school results already improving.
     But overall, the ECRI report said "the tone of public debate continues to include some elements of racist and xenophobic discourse".
[Site link]

CRIME – USA, DRUGS
Drug gangs taking over U.S. public lands
MSNBC, 1 March 2010.

     Not far from Yosemite's waterfalls and in the middle of California's redwood forests, Mexican drug gangs are quietly commandeering U.S. public land to grow millions of marijuana plants and using smuggled immigrants to cultivate them.
     Pot has been grown on public lands for decades, but Mexican traffickers have taken it to a whole new level: using armed guards and trip wires to safeguard sprawling plots that in some cases contain tens of thousands of plants offering a potential yield of more than 30 tons of pot a year.
     "Just like the Mexicans took over the methamphetamine trade, they've gone to mega, monster gardens," said Brent Wood, a supervisor for the California Department of Justice's Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. He said Mexican traffickers have "supersized" the marijuana trade. ...
     Local, state and federal agents found about a million more pot plants each year between 2004 and 2008, and authorities say an estimated 75 percent to 90 percent of the new marijuana farms can be linked to Mexican gangs. ...
     All of the sites are far from the eyes of law enforcement, where growers can take the time needed to grow far more potent marijuana. ... ...
     The Sequoia National Forest in central California is covered in a patchwork of pot fields, most of which are hidden along mountain creeks and streams, far from hiking trails. It's the same situation in the nearby Yosemite, Sequoia and Redwood national parks. ...
     Many of the plots are encircled with crude explosives and are patrolled by guards armed with AK-47s who survey the perimeter from the ground and from perches high in the trees.
     The farms are growing in sophistication and are increasingly cultivated by illegal immigrants, many of whom have been brought to the U.S. from Michoacan. ...
     But the growers leave more than litter to worry about. They often use animal poisons that can pollute mountain streams and groundwater meant for legitimate farmers and ranchers.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – AUSTRALIA, PUBLIC OPINION, POPULATION
Australians don't want more people - poll
The Australian, 1 March 2010.

     The public has rejected plans to massively boost Australia's population.
     The federal government wants to increase the population from 22 million to 35 million by 2050, largely through immigration.
     But a poll has found three-quarters of respondents think Australia does not have the services or infrastructure to cope with more people.
     More than 60 per cent wanted immigration slowed.
     And a majority of the 1000 people surveyed by Essential Research late last month thought the environment was too fragile to cope with more people, and there was not enough space for them.
     The government wants to boost the population because it means more young taxpayers to pay for the high costs of an ageing population.
     But the public aren't buying the economic argument either - just over half of those surveyed thought more people would not help the economy.
[Site link]

EXTREMISM – POLITICS, ISLAM
Islamic radicals 'infiltrate' Labour
Andrew Gilligan
Sunday Telegraph, 28 February 2010.

     A Labour minister says his party has been infiltrated by a fundamentalist Muslim group that wants to create an "Islamic social and political order" in Britain.
     The Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) – which believes in jihad and sharia law, and wants to turn Britain and Europe into an Islamic state – has placed sympathisers in elected office and claims, correctly, to be able to achieve "mass mobilisation" of voters.
     Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Jim Fitzpatrick, the Environment Minister, said the IFE had become, in effect, a secret party within Labour and other political parties.
     "They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it's at local government level or national level," he said.
     "They are completely at odds with Labour's programme, with our support for secularism."
     Mr Fitzpatrick, the MP for Poplar and Canning Town, said the IFE had infiltrated and "corrupted" his party in east London in the same way that the far-Left Militant Tendency did in the 1980s. Leaked Labour lists show a 110 per cent rise in party membership in one constituency in two years.
     In a six-month investigation by this newspaper and Channel 4's Dispatches, involving weeks of covert filming by the programme's reporters:
     • IFE activists boasted to the undercover reporters that they had already "consolidated ... a lot of influence and power" over Tower Hamlets, a London borough council with a £1 billion budget.
     • We have established that the group and its allies were awarded more than £10 million of taxpayers' money, much of it from government funds designed to "prevent violent extremism".
     • IFE leaders were recorded expressing opposition to democracy, support for sharia law or mocking black people. The IFE organised meetings with extremists, including Taliban allies, ...
     • Moderate Muslims in London told how the IFE and its allies were enforcing their hardline views on the rest of the local community, ... ...
     The IFE has particularly close links to Tower Hamlets council. Seven serving and former councillors said Lutfur Rahman, the current council leader, gained his post with the group's help. ... After Mr Rahman was elected, a man with close links to the group, Lutfur Ali, was appointed assistant chief executive of the council with responsibility for grant funding. ...
     Since Mr Rahman became leader, more council grants have been paid to a number of organisations which our investigation established are closely linked to the IFE. Funding for other, secular groups was ended or cut. ...
     Schools in Tower Hamlets are told by the council should close for the Muslim festival of Eid, even where most of their pupils are not Muslim.

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – LAW, RACISM
Think Tank: The race card upsets the scales of justice. Positive discrimination is saddling us with woefully bad lawyers
Sameena Patel
The Sunday Times, 28 February 2010.
[Sameena Patel (not the writer's real name) is a criminal barrister practising in the UK]

     Last week a report commissioned by the government concluded that a "lack of diversity" among judges was limiting judicial perspectives and was affecting the experience of people who used the courts. The report came up with more than 50 recommendations on how to tackle the problem, including schemes in which judges would encourage students from ethnic-minority backgrounds to pursue judicial careers.
     The legal world should think very carefully about this. It is right that the judiciary should reflect the society it serves, of course, but positive discrimination and politically correct initiatives are already, to my mind, having a detrimental effect on the law. Any more could be disastrous.
     I was called to the bar in 2006 and, as a British woman of Indian descent, I can hardly be accused of racism. So I perhaps feel freer to speak than some of my colleagues. But what we all see is the same thing: the race card being played in recruitment to legal firms and to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
     The frustration and resentment this generates is aired in private. In the pubs near chambers you often hear tales of friends finding themselves up against lawyers who can barely speak English and are unable to grasp complex points of law.
     A judge told me that he and his colleagues were scared to criticise for fear of being told "you have commented on my sub-standard English because I'm not English". So the issue is boxed away in a corner and it is a shame because the whole system is suffering. ...
     It is not so much at the bar but at the CPS, though, where there is a real problem. The bar is at least independent but the CPS is much more directly connected with the government and has to be seen to be a fair employer. Some of the CPS propaganda material is hilarious. It has gone so overboard in an attempt to be fair that you have to search hard to try to spot the white person in its illustrations.
     In London, at least, the organisation seems to be stuffed with people from ethnic minorities.
     It is worrying when you ring someone up about a case, often a serious one, and you have trouble understanding what they are saying. Or you get skeleton arguments or documents drafted that simply make no sense and are written in pidgin English. ...
     One of the problems is that CPS lawyers, who appear as higher court advocates, get appointed to cases beyond their capability. ... ...
     This is racism in reverse: and the biggest irony is that the people who suffer from racism now – middle-class white men – are ticked off or called racist if they complain.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS
Labour's hypocrisy over migrants: How the party is trying to woo voters with tactics that would shame the BNP [part 1]
Andrew Pierce
Daily Mail, 27 February 2010.

     The carefully worded letters all send the same sympathetic messages to local 'white families' about the difficulties caused by the record rise in immigration.
     Soothing words of comfort are combined with powerful pledges of action to ease the pressure on jobs, school places and council housing.
     'There is a great deal of worry about the pressure on schools, doctors' surgeries and housing allocations,' reads one of them. 'I want you to help me keep the pressure up on the Government in relation to reforming and updating our immigration and citizenship rules and laws.'
     Stirring stuff indeed. So which party do you think is promising to fight the Government on these policy failings? The Conservatives? UKIP, perhaps?
     No, with astonishing hypocrisy, these pledges come from the Labour Party itself. For the authors are senior Labour MPs who fear losing their seats as a result of the political fall-out from the mass immigration policy that they gladly helped to implement.
     Dozens of these letters from sitting Labour MPs have been passed to the Daily Mail - and the authors all have one thing in common. They are fighting for their political lives because of the threat posed by the odious, far-Right British National Party.
     They include Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary and key ally of Gordon Brown, and Margaret Hodge, the Culture Minister who is fighting a seat in the East End of London.
     Some of the leaflets sent out to constituents include dubious immigration questionnaires and promises that local people will be put first in the jobs queue.
     Labour's hypocrisy has come to light only days after the scale of Labour's deliberate plan to create a multicultural Britain through mass immigration was revealed. ...
     Today, however, on the cusp of a General Election, many Labour MPs have realised that their secret plan has backfired spectacularly. As a result of mass immigration, many of their core white working-class voters complain that they feel like second-class citizens in their own communities, and believe that immigrants are given unfair precedence for jobs and public services.
     As a result, Labour MPs in marginal seats or with a BNP threat are desperately scrambling to play the race card in a shameless attempt to be seen as acting tough on immigration after all. ...
     It is a similar story in Barking - the East London constituency where BNP leader Nick Griffin is fighting the Culture Minister Margaret Hodge.
     With one of the highest rates of immigration in Britain, Barking has seen a massive social upheaval as a result of Labour's policy, with many local families struggling to come to terms with the sheer number of new arrivals from abroad.
     Yet in a two-page letter to constituents, Mrs Hodge paints herself as being tough on immigration, saying that it can be 'very unsettling' for 'predominantly white' and 'traditional East End families'.
     She adds: 'I respect your concerns about the pace of change. It is wrong for others to dismiss these out of hand and rest assured that you do have my support on this.' ...
     Yet at no time has she accepted responsibility for her part in creating these problems, through her own Government's bitterly controversial 'social objectives'. Only now that her seat is under threat has she seen fit to speak out.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS
Labour's hypocrisy over migrants: How the party is trying to woo voters with tactics that would shame the BNP [part 2]
Andrew Pierce
Daily Mail, 27 February 2010.

     In Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the Government whip Mary Creagh has produced similar leaflets and surveys on immigration.
     'One issue comes up time and time again,' she writes, 'immigration, and in particular its impact on local communities and the Wakefield job market.' ...
     Or how about Tom Watson, the West Bromwich East MP and another close ally of the Prime Minister, who has also been busy posing as being tough on immigration? ...
     In a recent direct mail and survey about immigration, Watson declared: 'Most people told me that they were concerned about the level of immigration. More surveys were returned than on any other subject I have asked you about in the past.
     'There is a great deal of worry about the pressure on schools, doctors' surgeries and housing allocations.
     Also unsurprisingly, a lot of people also mentioned the issue of protecting local jobs. I want you to help me keep the pressure up on the Government in relation to reforming and updating our immigration and citizenship rules and laws.'
     In Burton, Labour MP Ruth Smeeth has gone even further, actively campaigning to portray the Tories as the party that is soft on immigration.
     Defending a majority of just 1,421 - smaller than the number of BNP votes in her constituency at the 2005 election - Ms Smeeth has highlighted how London's Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson is 'campaigning for an amnesty for illegal immigrants'.
     Such breathtaking hypocrisy from the party that has presided over the biggest influx of immigrants in British history has shocked even seasoned immigration campaigners.
     Sir Andrew Green, chairman of MigrationWatch UK, says: 'It would seem that some Labour MPs are singing to an entirely different hymn sheet from the rest of the Government.
     'We have been pressing the Government on these issues for years. It appears to be only the onset of a General Election that has caused some of them to respond - even if it is in a surreptitious manner.'
     Shown the evidence of Labour's new electioneering tactic, Lord Carlile, QC, the Government's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, accused the MPs involved of willfully stirring up resentment and prejudice against immigrants.
     He says: 'I don't think that any candidate should demean him or herself by grovelling on the ground occupied by Nick Griffin and the BNP.
     'We need a sensible debate, and a true analysis of the effect of immigration issues on the economy, benefits and the work place. But pandering to and encouraging prejudice is a very bad idea.'
     Lord Ouseley, the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, is similarly appalled by these 11th-hour demands for action from vulnerable MPs.
     'Where have they been for the past ten years while this is going on? It is only because it has become such a high-profile issue and they fear they are losing support that they are now raising it. No wonder people are so cynical.
     'They were too busy at Westminster to worry about the threat from the BNP. Yet their constituents have been worried about this issue for years. They are trying to shut the door now that the horse has well and truly bolted. ...'
[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.

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.

IMMIGRATION – CITIZENSHIP
Record number of migrants become UK citizens, figures show
Richard Ford
The Times, 25 February 2010.

     A record number of migrants became British citizens last year, according to official figures published today.
     More than five times as many people were given citizenship last year compared with the number when Labour came to power.
     The surge in people being given citizenship was accompanied by a rise of almost a third in the number of migrants allowed to settle in the country indefinitely.
     As the number of migrants deciding the UK is their new permanent home increased, fewer people from eastern Europe came to Britain seeking work.
     While the number of Poles registering for work fell by almost half, applicants from Latvia and Lithuania rose.
     Figures published by the Home Office show the number of people given citizenship last year jumped by almost 60 per cent to a record 203,865. When Labour came to power in 1997 the figure was 37,000.
     Overall 1,530,000 migrants have become British citizens since 1997.
     Home Office officials suggested that one reason for the surge in new citizens is because of changes in the law coming into force later this year. This will mean migrants will in future spend a time on probation before becoming a citizen.
     The Government is also proposing to link the granting of citizenship to the awarding of points based on age, educational and other qualifications.
     Separate figures show the number of migrants allowed to settle indefinitely in the UK rose by almost a third last year to 192,000.
     Permanent settlement based on employment jumped by more than a third to 81,200 and 70,000 were allowed to settle on the basis of family links with the UK – a rise of 27 per cent compared with 2008.
     Today's figures confirm that the biggest wave of migration in British history is over with immigration from the former Soviet bloc states continuing to fall.
     The number of migrants from Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia registering for work fell to 113,000 last year compared with 166,000 in 2008.
     Applications to work from Polish migrants fell from 104,000 in 2008 to 54,700 last year but the numbers from Latvia more than doubled to a record high of 15,300 and Lithuania from 11,560 to 14,720.
     Long term immigration into the UK remained broadly stable at 518,000 to the end of June last year and emigration increasing by under 10,000 to 371,000.
     Net migration – the difference between those leaving and those arriving – was 147,000, down from 168,000 in the previous year.
[Site link]

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – JUDGES
Women, gays and the disabled preferred as new judges
Daily Telegraph, 25 February 2010.

     Women, ethnic minorities, and homosexual and disabled people who apply to be judges should be given preferential treatment over white male candidates, according to a government review.
     The report by the Advisory Panel on Judicial Diversity, which has been accepted by ministers, called for "positive action" where two candidates were seen to have equal abilities. It would result in women or members of a minority being chosen over other candidates at the end of the selection process.
     One in five of all judges in courts in England and Wales is a woman and less than 5 per cent are from ethnic minorities.

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]

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS, RACISM, CRIME
Labour say we are all racists
Macer Hall
Daily Express, 23 February 2010.

     Labour dismissed the British public's widespread opposition to mass immigration as "racism", a Government document revealed yesterday.
     Officials made it clear that public opinion was strongly against relaxing border controls.
     But ministers were urged to ignore voters' "racist" views and press ahead with a secret policy to encourage migrants to flood into Britain. Whitehall experts even proposed a major propaganda campaign to soften up voters in preparation for the mass influx of newcomers.
     The details were laid bare in the original draft of a policy document released for the first time under the Freedom of Information Act.
     Last night critics accused the Government of snubbing the concerns of British citizens in their deliberate pursuit of a multicultural society.
     Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the population think-tank Migrationwatch UK, said: "This report confirms that ministers deliberately rode roughshod over public opinion in adopting a policy of mass immigration.
     "They concealed their real intentions in the hope they would benefit from the immigrant vote without losing their working-class supporters. They are now paying the price."
     Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: "The Government has simply not been telling the truth about its policies on immigration. More and more evidence is now emerging to show that they deliberately planned a big jump in immigration for their own political purposes."
     "Now they are trying to rewrite history to pretend those decisions never happened. Their conduct over all of this has been a complete disgrace."
     Written by staff at the Home Office and Cabinet Office in 2000 in the run-up to the expansion of the European Union into eastern Europe, the report made it clear that voters wanted tougher rather than looser border controls.
     "It is correct that public opinion favours relatively restrictive policies on immigration," the document said. But demonstrating thinly disguised contempt for much of the British public, the document said that this opposition was linked to racist attitudes. ...
     Ministers also ignored warnings that immigration would lead to an explosion in organised crime including trafficking in drugs, illegal migrants and prostitutes. "Migration has opened up new opportunities for organised crime," the report insisted.
     The document, titled Going With The Flow: Managing Migration in the 21st Century, went on to urge the Government to manipulate public opinion on the issue.
     "A new approach to migration policy would need to be not only accompanied by, but underpinned by, a clear strategy for public opinion and public debate," the report argued. ...
     It said: "Education and people's personal exposure to migrants make them less likely to be anti-migrant." The document went on to be heavily edited before being officially published in 2001, with all references to public opposition stripped out.
     References to migration opening up "new opportunities" for organised crime were also expunged from the final version.
[Site link]

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – POLICE
Taxpayer gives £1m to black police group
Richard Edwards
Daily Telegraph, 23 February 2010.

     A black police group linked to the disgraced commander Ali Dizaei has received more than £1 million of taxpayer funds over the past five years.
     The Metropolitan Black Police Association (MBPA) has been given grants by Scotland Yard of up to £272,760 a year, which have helped to pay for overseas conference trips.
     However it is understood that the funding to the organisation is being drastically cut in 2010-11. ...
     Sources said that questions have been raised as to whether the association needed an international travel budget of around £100,000. It is expected to receive a total budget of nearer to £40,000. ...
     There are 19 staff associations in the Met. The MBPA has received around five times as much funding as the second biggest, the Sikh Police Association.

RACISM – EMPLOYMENT, COSTS
CPS 'segregated black and white lawyers': Crown Prosecution Service faces eight racism cases brought by employees
Robert Verkaik
The Independent, 22 February 2010.

     The Government agency responsible for bringing prosecutions in England and Wales is facing widespread claims of racism, including allegations that senior black lawyers have been segregated from their white and Asian colleagues, The Independent has learnt. ...
     The CPS has confirmed that it is defending a total of eight cases of racism brought by members of staff working across the service, and is also trying to overturn a successful racism claim won two years ago.
     Two senior crown prosecutors, who are both black, have lodged claims under whistle-blowing legislation. ... ...
     Responding to the claims made by Ms Riley and Mr Ebuzoeme, a CPS spokeswoman said: ... She also said that since 2005, 35 CPS staff have complained of racism but none has been successful. It is not clear, however, how many of these cases were confidentially settled before reaching a tribunal.
     The CPS is still trying to overturn parts of an employment tribunal ruling which found the agency had discriminated against an Asian lawyer, Halima Aziz, who was victimised over false allegations made against her. She was awarded a record £600,000 in damages in 2008, but is still fighting the case despite winning in the Court of Appeal. A CPS spokeswoman said in addition to the £600,000 damages, the agency had spent £555,000 in legal fees defending the case.
[Site link]

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – EXTREMISM, ISLAM
Ft. Hood suspect was Army dilemma: His extreme views possibly overlooked in favor of diversity
Bryan Bender
The Boston Globe, 22 February 2010.

     Army superiors were warned about the radicalization of Major Nidal Malik Hasan years before he allegedly massacred 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, but did not act in part because they valued the rare diversity of having a Muslim psychiatrist, military investigators wrote in previously undisclosed reports.
     An obvious "problem child" spouting extremist views, Hasan made numerous statements that were not protected by the First Amendment and were grounds for discharge by violating his military oath, investigators found.
     Examples of Hasan's radical behavior have previously been disclosed in press accounts based on interviews with unnamed Army officials, including his defense of suicide bombings and assertions that Islamic law took priority over his allegiance to the United States.
     But the Pentagon's careful documentation of individual episodes dating back to 2005 and the subsequent inaction of his superiors have not been made public before.
     The Globe was permitted to review the Army's more complete findings on the condition that it not name supervisory officers who did not act, some of whom are facing possible disciplinary action. ...
     The report concludes that because the Army had attracted only one Muslim psychiatrist in addition to Hasan since 2001, "it is possible some were afraid" of losing such diversity "and thus were willing to overlook Hasan's deficiencies as an officer." ...
     They also contain the first official acknowledgement that superiors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he began his residency in 2003, were repeatedly informed of Hasan's radical statements but did not do anything about it. ...
     "Other officer students repeatedly raised concerns about Major Hasan's preoccupation with Islam, including allegations by students that Major Hasan justified suicide bombing and stated Sharia law took precedence over the US Constitution," the report said.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – SPAIN
The mounting cost of Spain's new illegal underclass
Jason Webb
Reuters, 22 February 2010.

     Spanish visa rules often deny renewal requests if migrants become unemployed and fail to make sufficient social security payments. So a side-effect of the economic contraction that has continued for seven straight quarters has been the growth of an illegal underclass. ...
     The black economy, estimated to account for almost a quarter of Spain's gross domestic product, costs the government up to 25 billion euros a year in lost tax revenue and also traps workers in low-skill, low-pay occupations.
     Already, large numbers of migrants survive by providing labor for cash in hand, no questions asked. ... ...
     Five million migrants arrived during Spain's decade of heady economic growth from the mid-1990s, finding work on mushrooming construction sites, in shops or as domestic helpers.
     There are no official figures but Carlos Gomez Gil, head of the Immigration Observatory at the University of Alicante, estimates as many as 300,000 could have lost their papers during the economic crisis.
     "This novel, extraordinarily rapid and profound crisis is going to have a big effect on Spain's recently arrived immigrant population, which still hasn't had time to settle down here and is still politically, socially and economically fragile," Gomez Gil wrote in a recent paper.
     "This is the first crisis Spain has ever experienced with an immigrant population," he said. ...
     ..., a large proportion of the newly illegal migrants are male manual workers from Latin America or North Africa – cast-offs from the building sites.
     "About 40 percent of immigrants have only been educated to primary school level, and, as those in the construction sector lose their jobs, there is a big problem finding them new employment," according to Josep Oliver, professor of applied economics and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. ...
     Despite the speed with which Spain became an ethnically mixed society, it has so far avoided the tensions associated with immigration seen in other European countries.
     "One of the principal forces for the integration of foreigners into Spanish society is work," said Marin.
     The Socialist government held an amnesty for 600,000 illegal immigrants in 2005, granting them visas if they could show proof of employment. And like left-of-center politicians elsewhere in Europe, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero welcomed immigration as a way to both to make Spain more tolerant and diverse, and to ensure an aging population would be able to continue to afford its social security system.
     The government once spoke of how immigration could increase Spain's population by 50 percent to 66 million.
     Now unemployment is around 18 percent – and 10 percentage points higher among foreign workers – it is changing its tune.
     It has drastically cut back on working visas, tightened rules on family reunification and offered money to migrants wanting to leave Spain. In a stark departure from its previous talk of diversity, the government put up billboards featuring dark-skinned people and the question "Thinking of going home?"
[Site link]

CITIZENSHIP – CRIME
Squatters' rights let thousands of illegal migrants stay in UK
David Barrett
Sunday Telegraph, 21 February 2010.

     Thousands of illegal migrants have been granted "squatters' rights" to remain in Britain permanently after proving that they have lived here for 14 years, ...
     A little-known rule, introduced by Labour in 2003, allows illegal immigrants to claim "indefinite leave to remain" if they have lived in Britain's black economy for long enough or are failed asylum seekers who avoid deportation. After 14 years they can apply to the Home Office, which decides whether an illegal immigrant can stay.
     If successful, the immigrant has full access to the welfare state and is eligible to apply for a British passport.
     Since the rules changed in April 2003, 7,245 immigrants who were in Britain illegally have won the right to live here permanently – more than 1,000 a year on average. It is likely that many paid no income tax during their 14-year residence.
     The Home Office estimated in 2005 that the illegal immigrant population in Britain was between 310,000 and 570,000 but other groups, including Migrationwatch UK, which campaigns against mass immigration, put the figure far higher.
     Migrationwatch believes it could be as high as one million. "It is wrong in principle that people who have been undercutting British workers for many years and often paying no tax should be granted full access to our welfare state," said Sir Andrew Green, its chairman. "This is a reward for crime, provided you get away with it for long enough." ...
     One immigration law adviser, who declined to be named, was surprised that this rule was still in force. "It is an anomaly when compared with the rest of Government policy, which purports to be getting tougher with immigrants who have irregular status," he said.
     The rules allowing illegal immigrants to claim residence after 14 years were formalised by the Home Office in 2003 but previously existed as a loose concession.

RACISM – POLICE
Race claims: Most complaints against Met fail
Daily Telegraph, 20 February 2010.

     Only two of almost 150 race claims made by officers against the Metropolitan Police in the past four years were upheld at employment tribunals. Most of the claims were backed by the National Black Police Association and its "legal adviser" Ali Dizaei, the commander jailed for corruption. The number of race claims has trebled since 2006. Dizaei is said to have encouraged a grievance culture among ethnic minority officers.

RACISM – POLITICS
Tories still racist under Cameron, say authors
Jon Swaine
Daily Telegraph, 20 February 2010.

     The Conservatives have not changed under David Cameron and many grassroots members remain racist and sexist, claimed authors who infiltrated the party.
     Chris Horrie and David Matthews, both journalists, spent more than two years working and socialising undercover with Tory activists. In their book True Blue – Strange Tales From a Tory Nation, they report on encounters with "race-obsessed" campaigners who hold "outdated views on gender".
     "What we found was that at the grassroots the Tory party has not changed at all," Mr Horrie said. "It's still very old, very Right-wing and very white.
     "Mr Cameron's leadership has been nothing but a rebranding exercise. There is now a smattering of 'trendy' candidates and a thin layer of professionals at the top who don't actually like Tory party members."

EXTREMISM – ISLAM
Swinging Sixties past of radical who wants sharia in Britain
Barney Henderson
Daily Telegraph, 20 February 2010.

     As part of the Bohemian scene in Swinging Sixties London, Ian Dallas inspired Eric Clapton to write Layla and counted George Harrison and Edith Piaf among his friends. ...
     But these days Mr Dallas is famed for very different reasons as the leader of an extreme Islamic group with thousands of followers across the world.
     He has called for Britain to be run by a Muslim council and likened the war in Afghanistan to the Holocaust. ...
     In 1967 he met Shaykh Abdalkarim Daudi in Fes, Morocco, converted to Islam and took the name Abdalqadir. He spent years travelling in north Africa, learning from various leading Muslim scholars, before founding the orthodox Murabitun Worldwide Movement in the 1980s.
     It now has more than 10,000 committed followers across the world – spread from Denmark to Indonesia – and thousands more who support the movement.
     Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, as he is now known, believes the Islam world will conquer the "Jewish-dominated" West with a hard-line interpretation of Islamic law. ...
     He has also claimed that Britain is on "the edge of terminal decline and it is the British Muslim population that alone can revitalise this ancient realm".

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – ITALY, SPAIN, GREECE
Southern Europe's Immigration Test
Nicole Itano
Time, 1 March 2010.
[This magazine is published more than a week before the date it carries]

     Millions of migrants have arrived in Greece, Italy and Spain over the past decade. To avoid serious social problems, those countries need to do a better job of making them feel welcome. ...
     The economic crisis will slow the flow but is unlikely to undo the demographic shift, not least because the birthrate among immigrants is much higher than the general population's. "If there's a lesson that can be learned from the northern European experience, it's that temporary migrants tend to remain," says Joaquín Arango, professor of sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid. Here's another: when a society marginalizes its newest members, trouble ensues. Southern Europe needed its immigrants. Now it needs to find a place for them. ... ...
     Demographically, Italy is transforming faster than almost anywhere in Europe. Last year, according to the Catholic charity Caritas, the percentage of noncitizen residents in the country – 7.2% – was greater than Britain's. And that's not counting the country's illegal population, estimated at well over half a million. In a country where the native-born population is aging rapidly, 1 in 6 babies delivered in 2008 was born to a foreign-passport holder. ...
     ... "People now accept that immigrants are here," says Giuseppe Sciortino, a sociology professor at the University of Trento. "But they're still in denial that they are a presence that will change Italy forever." ...
     In 1997, the number of foreigners living in Spain was just over 500,000; 11 years later it was 5.3 million, out of a total population of 46 million.
      ...
     Immigration is new to Greece, a country whose people emigrated en masse throughout much of the 20th century. ...
     Noncitizens now make up more than 10% of Greece's population. The vast majority of these new arrivals come from neighboring Balkan countries, especially Albania. But in the last few years, Greece has also seen a surge of illegal immigrants from Africa and Asia, most of whom set off from Turkey in tiny boats and wash up on one of Greece's many islands. ...
     Without a coherent immigration strategy in place, the government has been overwhelmed by the volume of people. The country's detention centers have spaces for only 1,000 people, but more than 95,000 undocumented migrants came in the first nine months of 2009 alone. Most new arrivals are simply held for a short period before being released with a paper telling them to leave in a month. There's also a backlog of 42,000 unprocessed asylum claims, not to mention the thousands more people who have not yet been able to submit their applications. The chaotic system has created a vast underworld of migrants who are living in legal limbo on society's fringe and are turning parts of Athens into crime- and drug-ridden slums.

IMMIGRATION – PUBLIC OPINION
Poll finds 77% want immigration cut
James Boxell
Financial Times, 19 February 2010.

     An increasing number of British people believe ethnic minorities are integrating well within local neighbourhoods even though most still want a sharp reduction in immigration, a government poll on social attitudes has found.
     The latest update of the "citizenship survey", which has sought people's views about community cohesion since 2001, showed that 77 per cent of people thought immigration should be cut, with slightly more than half saying it should be reduced "by a lot".
     Those figures will be seized on by anti-immigration lobby groups, who argue that the mainstream political parties remain out of step with the electorate over the issue, with many voters saying it is one of their highest priorities.
     However, the survey - conducted for the Department of Communities and Local Government - also showed that 84 per cent of people agreed that their local neighbourhood was a place where people from different backgrounds got on well together, up from 80 per cent in 2005. ...
     The 2008-09 survey also showed that negative attitudes towards immigration were not softening. There was a small decrease in the number of people who want to see a big fall in immigration, but the number who want some kind of cut remains stable at more than three-quarters.
     Students, better-paid workers and holders of degrees were far more favourable towards immigration than those further down the wage scale and people without qualifications, who often find themselves competing with migrant workers.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – ITALY, PUBLIC OPINION
Almost half of young Italians dislike foreigners: poll
AsiaOne [Singapore], 19 February 2010.

     Almost half of young Italians are intolerant of foreigners or xenophobic, according to a study presented to the country's parliament on Thursday.
     The poll of 2,000 people aged 18 to 29 found 46 percent expressed some form of hostility to foreigners, while 40 percent said they were "open" to people from other countries.
     Among those hostile to foreigners, the study identified three distinct groups. One, accounting for one in 10 of those surveyed, was made up of overt racists.
     A second, representing 15 percent, said it had a "phobia of Romanians, gypsies and Albanians", and was dominated by women.
     The third group, representing 20 percent of those surveyed, were xenophobic and wanted foreigners to live apart from them, preferably outside Italy, but did not condone violence against them.
     The study by the SWG research institute said there were around 1,000 xenophobic groups on the social networking website Facebook in Italy, including some 100 against Muslims, 300 against gypsies and 350 against immigrants.
     Responding to the survey, the speaker of Italy's lower house of parliament Gianfranco Fini called on deputies to come up with an Italian model for integrating immigrants. ...
     Fini said recent tensions between South American and North African immigrants in Milan showed "it was not enough to give them (the immigrants) a job."
     "We need to reduce the delays in obtaining nationality and give them the right to vote in local elections without being Italian," Fini said.
[Site link]

EMPLOYMENT
Public sector hires more foreign staff
Roland Gribben
Daily Telegraph, 19 February 2010.

     Public sector organisations are hiring migrant workers at a faster rate than their private sector counterparts despite the jobs shake-out, research shows.
     One-in-five employers has recruited foreign workers over the last three months, with almost 25pc of public sector concerns offering them jobs compared with 15pc of private sector businesses.
     The survey – by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and business advisers KPMG, based on data from 700 public and private sector employers – shows foreign workers are filling more British jobs overseas as well as at home.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – EUROPE
The Incredible Shrinking Continent
Stefan Theil
Newsweek, 19 February 2010.
[From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010]

     As bad as the surge of intolerance is for the foreigners who are its targets, it's a disaster for Europe. The continent is heading for serious long-term economic trouble unless it learns to manage immigration intelligently. Deaths are expected to outnumber births this year in 10 of the European Union's 27 member states. As of 2015 the EU as a whole will experience negative natural population growth, demographers say, and the gap will grow to 1 million excess deaths a year by 2035. ...
     The trouble isn't a shortage of immigrants. The European Union has attracted 26 million migrants in the past two decades – a full 30 percent more than America's 20 million over the same span. But most European countries tried to protect homegrown labor by shutting out foreign workers. The efforts mostly backfired, encouraging a massive influx of illegal aliens, who tend to accept rock-bottom wages and benefits because they have no legal recourse. At the same time, Europe's generous social benefits encouraged a massive surge of "welfare tourism." As a result, Europe has ended up with 85 percent of all unskilled migrants to the developed countries but only 5 percent of the highly skilled. Compare that with the United States, which has honed its innovative edge by attracting 55 percent of the world's educated migrants. And because immigration happens largely via networks, with established immigrants paving the way for their peers, such trends tend to endure. "It therefore takes decades to turn immigration policy around," says Thomas Liebig, a migration specialist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). ...
     ... Now many European countries have tabled important policy reforms such as the drafting of a continentwide asylum policy and the formulation of smarter immigration criteria based on education and skills. Others, like Spain and the Czech Republic, are actually paying migrants to go away. ... ...
     As Europe fiddles, some countries aren't standing still. At the onset of the global crisis, the Canadian government briefly considered slashing immigration quotas to protect its labor market. It then decided to keep its borders open and even to speed up acceptance procedures for some highly skilled arrivals. While migrants have lost some ground recently, they're still twice as likely as native Canadians to hold doctorates or master's degrees. Even within Europe, there are a few countries doing it right. ... Europeans' concerns aren't totally misplaced. The rapid pace of immigration over the past decade has strained Britain's infrastructure and social institutions. Germans and the French are particularly worried about the underclass immigrants who have isolated themselves from society at large. But now the continent is facing a pivotal decision. Closing its borders will only divert more migration into illegal and uncontrollable channels. Europe is no defendable, homogenous island; it's surrounded by the wildly growing populations of Africa and the Middle East. Europe's choice is not whether to stop migration, but whether to channel it to its own advantage.
[Site link]

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – POLITICS, DECEPTION
Tories' secret plan to kill off party dinosaurs
Daily Mail, 19 February 2010.

     A confidential blueprint for David Cameron's controversial bid to impose more women, gays and ethnic candidates on reluctant party activists has come to light.
     The explosive six-page document proposes the use of subterfuge to end the white, male and middle-class image of the Conservative Party. ...
     Action Plan for Candidate Selection in Safe Seats is a fascinating insight into how modernisers have planned a gradual Tory party takeover.
     Their efforts finally paid off last month when Mr Cameron imposed shortlists of 'suitable' Parliamentary candidates.
     The move has incensed the grassroots - who have always had a say over which candidates appeared on shortlists - and triggered a wave of protests and resignations.
     And the language in the document will further exacerbate tensions between the Tory high command and its army of hard working volunteers.
     The document suggests using 'stealth' and stresses the importance of keeping 'quiet' over the plans to ensure more women, ethnic and gay candidates. 'Like a conjuror, we'll get more applause if the audience cannot see exactly how the trick is performed,' the document says.
     It was written by Tory schools spokesman Michael Gove, an influential member of Mr Cameron's inner circle, and Dean Godson, a director of favoured think-tank Policy Exchange. ...
     Mr Cameron is unrepentant and his decision to seize power from local associations, say his friends, is the culmination of the secret plan on how to neuter the party faithful in the country.
     These members of the Tory grassroots, cruelly nicknamed dinosaurs, are seen by modernisers as impediments to a progressive party. Mr Gove's and Mr Godson's document was written in February 2002.
     But even Shadow Cabinet ministers concede it has been hugely influential and the central platform of Mr Cameron's programme. The paper accepts it was not the fault of local associations that so many white men were being chosen.
     'Most of the talented candidates on the list are white and male,' it states. 'The principal reason such people get selected for safe seats is because they tend to be the best on offer.' ...
     'The clever approach is to maintain the illusion that a good cross-section of approved candidates is being offered.'
     Suggesting a degree of subterfuge, the document goes on: 'There are several reasons why the Party should not publicly proclaim the new methodology.
     'The more that the profusion of women, black, Asian or gay candidates appears to be the result of spontaneous open-mindedness on the part of grassroot activists the greater will be the accolades.
     'Most Tories loathe political correctness and positive discrimination. If one tries to be 'in your face' about the fact that positive discrimination is taking place activists are much more likely to rebel; a version of 'don't ask, don't tell', is called for.
     'Yet another factor that should persuade us to do our good work by stealth is the fact our opponents don't believe we have got a cat in hell's chance of passing their test [for the selection of candidates]. It would be counterproductive to tip them off.'
[Site link]

POPULATION PRESSURE – ECOLOGY
Staring at extinction, many of man's closest relatives
Daily Telegraph, 18 February 2010.

     Nearly half of all primate species are in danger of becoming extinct, research published yesterday suggested.
     The findings, compiled by 85 experts from throughout the world, show mankind's closest living relatives – apes, monkeys, lemurs and other primates – are in need of urgent conservation help.
     Destruction of tropical forests, the illegal wildlife trade and commercial bushmeat hunting are all threatening their existence, according to the report, Primates In Peril: The World's 25 Most Endangered Primates.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – THAILAND
Thailand Serious About Deporting Unregistered Migrant Workers
Lawi Weng
The Irrawaddy, 18 February 2010.

     Thai authorities say that despite protests by human rights groups they are proceeding with plans to deport up to 1.4 million migrants who fail to complete national verification procedures by the end of February. About 80 percent of the migrants threatened with repatriation are Burmese. ...
     In January, the Thai Cabinet passed a resolution allowing for a two-year extension of work permits for about 1.4 million migrants provided they completed the national verification formalities, which involve processing by their home countries.
     Migrants seeking to work legally in Thailand must submit detailed biographical information to the Burmese authorities in order to complete the nationality verification procedure. Many fear for their safety and of repercussions against family members in Burma if they turn up at the military government offices to complete the paperwork. ...
     In Bangkok, Andy Hall, director of the Migrant Justice Programme, said deportation was "not realistic...the economy needs the workers."
     But Jirisak Sukhonchaat said: "We must have these workers 'above ground.' They must work according to the law." He said a decision would be taken later in the case of migrants who had problems proving their nationality, such as Rohingyas. ...
     Of an estimated 2 to 3 million Burmese migrants in Thailand, only 1,310,686 have registered as migrant workers.
     Many of the migrants are from ethnic minority groups, such as Mon, Karen and Shan, who have fled Burmese army oppression and human rights abuses.
     The rights groups say very limited public awareness has been raised about the national verification process and its benefits, both for migrant workers and employers.
[Site link]

RACISM – CRIME, AUSTRALIA
There is little that is black and white in attacks on Indians
Dr Kate Shaw
The Age [Australia], 18 February 2010.

     One of the problems with the debate about violence towards Indian students in Melbourne is that the analysis has focused on the victims and their nationality. It is hardly possible to make claims of racism or otherwise in these attacks without knowing something of the offenders. Who are they, and can they be understood solely in terms of their own nationalities (which is basic to the racist claim)?
     Are those who argue that the attacks are racially motivated assuming that the attackers are all of Anglo descent? If they were of Middle Eastern or African or South Asian heritage, would that make it different? Are all instances of inter-cultural violence racist?
     The treatment of race in this discussion has been simplistic. One-third of Melbourne's population was born overseas. Relative to Australia's indigenous people, every non-Aboriginal here has a recent heritage from elsewhere. Most of us are hybrids of one sort or another, meaning that the concept of race is complex. The answer to the question "where are you from?" from someone who looks Asian is as likely to be "Prahran" as "Thailand".
     It is partly because of this, according to Victoria Police, and partly because of concerns about racial stereotyping, that the racial backgrounds of the perpetrators and victims of crime are no longer routinely recorded in Victoria. The fact is, we don't know the race of people involved in the vast majority of crimes in Melbourne, let alone whether they are racially motivated. ... ...
     Simple solutions to urban problems are invariably wrong. In this anything but simple matter, the categorical claims for or against "Australia as a racist society" are neither meaningful nor helpful.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION
Migrants are not going anywhere, say influx towns
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 17 February 2010.

     Claims that migrants are returning home have been dismissed in the areas most affected by the recent influx.
     Ministers have said that Eastern European workers who arrived following European Union enlargement in 2004 have begun to leave.
     However, officials in some towns and cities insist migrants are still arriving. The head teacher at one school in Boston, Lincs, said children from overseas would soon account for six in 10 pupils.
     Three councils have given warning that official population estimates vastly understated the true picture and public services and budgets were "under enormous strain" as a result.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – UKRAINE, DEPORTATION
Illegal migrants detained in Ukraine every year
The National Radio Company of Ukraine, 17 February 2010.

     Over recent five years, the number of illegal migrants detained by Ukrainian law-enforcement bodies remains stable and makes up 12-14,000 a year.
     90 percent of them are deported from the country, First Deputy Director of the Interior Ministry Department Viktor Danylenko said during official handover of technical equipment of the perimeter security system worth EUR 70,000 in Chernihiv region. The funds for purchase and installation of this equipment were allocated by the European Union.
[Site link]

RACISM – CUBA
'I am not a racist': Cubans debate prejudice against blacks
The Daily Tribune [Philippines], 16 February 2010.

     Half a century after Fidel Castro's revolution claimed to have done away with racism, Cubans are publicly debating a stubborn strain of discrimination and prejudice that associates blacks here with quarrels, crime, sex and rum.
     "I am not racist, but I don't want my daughter to have a black boyfriend. No way!" said Celia, a 52-year-old former teacher of mixed race. "When she became a young lady, I told her: 'I married your father to go forward, not backwards.'"
     Experts discussed the problem on local television for the first time just recently, but ordinary Cubans readily acknowledge that racism is pervasive in Cuba, a former Spanish colony and the destination of hundreds of African slaves.
     "If 20 blacks pass by, the police will ask 18 of them for their identity cards. If 20 whites pass by, they will ask two of them," said Yeimi Mora, a 35-year-old housewife, explaining the situation to a white friend as she walked through a street in the center of Havana. ...
     In Cuban slang, someone who has an amorous relationship with a black person is said to have "a stain on his record," or that he or she "burns petroleum." ...
     "It's a low intensity racism, more differentiating than excluding, more diffuse," said Pablo Rodriguez of the Cuban Institute of Anthropology.
     Ethnologist Miguel Barnet, president of Cuba's Union of Writers and Artists, said these prejudices are seated deep "in the subconscious and to eliminate them requires education."
     Several weeks ago a document signed by personalities in the United States accused the government of Raul Castro of harassing blacks, a charge Cuba rejected.
     Cuban academics say the revolution of 1959 eliminated institutional racism with laws and policies that ensure equality, for instance in education.
     But after the revolution, racism was written off as solved. And for a long time little was said about it for fear of arousing divisions at a time of conflict with the United States.
     But when Cuba was engulfed in an economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the black population was hit harder than others in the country, accentuating their marginalization. ...
     More than 60 percent of Cuba's 11.2 million people are blacks and mulatos, even though 65 percent in the national census declared themselves to be white, says Esteban Morales, a political scientist at the University of Havana and a fierce defender of black rights.
     "We have to take the bull by the horns and debate this subject," he said. "It would be silly to imagine that despite 50 years of revolution racial stereotypes don't exist."
[Site link]

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – POLITICS
Cameron tells Conservatives to accept diversity
James Kirkup
Daily Telegraph, 16 February 2010.

     David Cameron has told Conservative activists opposing his attempts to select more female and ethnic minority candidates that they are "wrong" and must accept change.
     The Tory leader has pushed constituency associations to accept candidates from a wider range of backgrounds, leading to the adoption of more black and female candidates than in previous elections.
     However, grassroots Tories in several seats have protested against their candidates. ...
     At a campaign event meant to reach out to people who have never voted Conservative, Mr Cameron said ...
     "Just in case there is anyone out there who still thinks that the work we've done to get more women candidates, more black and minority ethnic candidates, that this is some kind of political correctness that Conservatives should avoid, I would say 'no'.
     "You're wrong. It is in the best traditions of our party, the one-nation tradition of Benjamin Disraeli, and it should inspire us again today.
     "Unless you can represent everyone in our country you cannot be a one-nation party."
     Conservative associations have selected six black candidates in winnable seats for the general election, most recently Sam Gyimah, a former banker, in Surrey East.
     Mr Cameron hailed those selections as proof that his party had changed.
     He also pointed out that his party was on course to have its first Muslim MP, having selected Sajid Javid, a banker, as its candidate in Bromsgrove.

NATIONAL IDENTITY – CULTURE, ETHNICITY
Linda Juang encourages a strong cultural identity
Mike Aldax
San Francisco Examiner, 16 February 2010.

     The associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University co-authored a new study which found that parents who continue to emphasize ethnic and cultural identity in their children beyond the age of 18 are doing a great service to their kids' lives.
     What were the results of the study? We found that, in general, ethnic minorities – including Latinos, Asian-Americans and mixed ethnic groups – tend to show strong ethnic identity, more than that of European or white American groups. We also found for white students, if their parents did engage in cultural socialization, they tended to explore their cultural background even in higher levels than in minority families.
     How does emphasizing ethnicity help shape a young adult? It is beneficial ... in terms of [one's] feelings about themselves. There is more life satisfaction [and] self-esteem, and less depression. Humans are social. We need to feel like we belong to a group. We need that to survive.
[Site link]

RACISM – CHILDREN, DIVERSITY
How to Raise Racist Kids
Jonathan Liu
Wired, 16 February 2010.

     Step One: Don't talk about race. Don't point out skin color. Be "color blind."
     Step Two: Actually, that's it. There is no Step Two.
     Congratulations! Your children are well on their way to believing that is better than everybody else.
     Surprised? So were authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman when they started researching the issue of kids and race for their book NurtureShock. It turns out that a lot of our assumptions about raising our kids to appreciate diversity are entirely wrong:
     

It is tempting to believe that because their generation is so diverse, today's children grow up knowing how to get along with people of every race. But numerous studies suggest that this is more of a fantasy than a fact.

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – EDUCATION
£50m of Third World aid is spent in Britain
Robert Mendick
Sunday Telegraph, 14 February 2010.

     The government department responsible for sending aid to the Third World has admitted spending almost £50 million in five years on projects in Britain.
     The British schemes paid for by the Department for International Development (DfID) included the teaching of "global citizenship" to two and three year-olds in Devon; Brazilian dance classes in east London and ... ...
     Projects include a £30,000 grant over three years to Devon Development Education, an educational charity based in Exeter which runs a number of "global citizenship" schemes.
     The grant pays for a training programme for nursery school staff that enables them to teach preschool children about "diversity and culture". ...
     A DfID spokesman ... said of the Devon preschool project: "These allegations are nonsense. This project educates teachers about global poverty. to help them in the important task of teaching young children about the world around them."
     Jane Habermehl, an early years coordinator at Devon Development Education, defended the scheme she runs.
     She said: "There is not enough done with preschool children.
     "We live in a multicultural world and we need to have open, honest attitudes to talk about colour and difference in a positive way."

MULTICULTURALISM – NATIONAL IDENTITY
A sinister plot to change the way you think
Janet Daley
Sunday Telegraph, 14 February 2010.

     Tony Blair's "forces of conservatism" speech; his improbable presentation of Britain as a "young country"; the advocacy of a multicultural society which would have to reassess its own history, replacing traditional pride with inherited guilt: all of this could be facilitated by a large influx of migrants whose presence in the population would require the wholesale deconstruction of the country's sense of its own identity. ...
     The phrase "altering consciousness", which had once meant awakening the proletariat to its own economic enslavement, now referred to raising awareness of social injustices, such as intolerance of cultural differences, social inequality, or discrimination against minorities. But the subtext was always self-examination and personal guilt: the indigenous Briton must be trained (literally, by the education system) always to question the acceptability of his own attitudes, to cast doubt on his own motives, to condemn his own national identity and history, to accept the blame even for the misbehaviour of new migrants – whose conduct could only be a reflection of the unfortunate way they were treated by the host population. ...
     Included in this programme for the newly constituted British psyche was a whole package of subliminal assumptions, which were adapted from the Old Left stable: international solidarity rather than national sovereignty, collective values rather than personal conscience, and "social equality" rather than individual achievement. It was a peculiarity of New Labour's vanity that it actually tried to persuade the country that, under the miraculous Blair dispensation, it could have both sides of these dualities at the same time. But the full consequences of the new country that it envisaged, and the role that immigration was to play in the creation of it, broke the most basic rule of the democratic process: the electorate was never told it was voting for that.
     The goal was a social revolution abetted by the influx of a huge variety of diverse cultures, which would provide both the need and the pretext for reshaping British life. ... ...
     Almost no one seems prepared to discuss the obvious danger: that if politics becomes a replacement for religion by taking upon itself the responsibility for transfiguring human nature then politicians, of all people, become the prophets and the priests. Just at the moment, I can't think of a more absurd idea.

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS
The beautiful ghost of big government: On both the left and the right, voters say they feel powerless. And in many ways they are
Ian Jack
The Guardian, 13 February 2010.

     Over the past dozen years Britain's demography has changed significantly and promises to change even further. As a fact, this is beyond dispute. Countable immigration rates more than tripled during the Blair epoch; since 1997, about 1.6 million people have been granted permanent right of residence and in 2008 nearly a quarter of all births in England and Wales were to foreign-born mothers (in London the figure is nearly a half). Add to these figures EU migrants who stay for long periods and it becomes clear that Britain has been socially transformed at a speed and on a scale unprecedented in its written history. The Windrush generation and Idi Amin's refugees were sideshows by comparison.
     Because "immigration" was once the codeword for "race", and because race led to racism and the British National party, slavery and Auschwitz, most public discussion of the subject has been awkward. When the economy was good and the unemployment rate low, only the bravest of liberals questioned the notion that mass immigration led to greater prosperity and a stimulating cultural diversity, and disadvantaged nobody. ...
     This week the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph have been filled with their version of the answer. The government had encouraged immigration not just because the country's existing pool of labour was too small or insufficiently skilled or unwilling, but also to promote certain "social objectives". These included the creation of new Labour-inclined populations that would help keep the party in power.
     In fact, the charge is pure speculation, though the phrase "social objectives" does occur several times in the early draft of an immigration paper prepared for the cabinet, the revised version of which was published in 2001. Using a freedom of information order, Sir Andrew Green, chair of MigrationWatch, recently obtained this draft – hence the coverage – after a former Blair adviser, Andrew Neather, disclosed its existence in a piece published last year by Neather's new employer, the London Evening Standard.
      ...
     He can be heard being slightly more circumspect on a BBC documentary on immigration policy in the Analysis slot, which is repeated tomorrow at 9.30pm on Radio 4. Its narrator and interviewer, David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect magazine, takes us calmly and lucidly through a story that mixes intention with happenstance. Neather says that "diversity" appealed to the Labour leadership as a substitute for class struggle: "I mean crudely seeing ethnic minorities as essentially the standard bearers of ... social justice rather than ... the white working class." David Blunkett says this is nonsense. The economic imperative was what drove government policy: "The idea [that, per se] it would be a very good idea to have a multicultural Britain was never debated in my presence or in cabinet; and if it had been, I would have poured cold water on it very strongly.'
     So far as Goodhart can discover, the cabinet has never debated what the country's immigration strategy should be. ...
     Could it have been otherwise? Possibly not. Jobs of all kinds needed filling, the potential for economic growth seemed infinite, and the business lobby was powerful. And yet, as Goodhart says, politicians made policy (if that's not too strong a word) with "a nervous glance over their shoulder, aware that their instincts were not shared by the majority of British citizens." As a result, the fabric of Britain is very different to 1997: its changed demography may well turn out to be Labour's most enduring legacy. "Nobody consulted us about any of this," will be the objection that meets many canvassers on doorsteps in a few weeks time. And the truth is that, for better or worse, nobody did.
[Site link]

POPULATION – ETHNICITY, ETHNIC ORIGIN
White Britons declining amid population rise
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 13 February 2010.

     White Britons are the only section of the population in which numbers have declined in the past decade after a third of a million left the country.
     The exodus meant that the number of people who classed themselves as "white British" had fallen overall by almost 160,000 since 2001. The number of those who said they were "white Irish" fell by more than 60,000.
     At the same time, Britons and migrants who described themselves in any other ethnic minority group had added almost two million to the population, according to official estimates. Immigration was the main driver of the rise. ...
     The patterns in ethnicity across England and Wales came from an experimental series of estimates drawn up by the Office for National Statistics and were based on self-assessment by individuals, both Britons and settled migrants, as to which ethnic group they belonged.
     The series, so far, covered the period from 2001 to 2007 and over that time the population increased by 1.7 million to 54 million. ...
     In every other group the numbers rose, including "white other", where there was an increase of 450,900 – or a 33 per cent rise – that was driven mostly by the large movement of Eastern Europeans following the expansion of the European Union in 2004.
     The number of Britons or migrants who classed themselves of Indian descent increased by 275,700, while those of "black African" descent grew by 241,700.
     Proportionately, the largest increase was among those of Chinese descent, where there was an increase of 75 per cent, or 175,500.
     The fall in the "white British" group was due to large numbers leaving Britain. Some 331,400 more people from that group left the country over that period than those who arrived. The overall fall was reduced through "natural change" – the difference between births and deaths – which continued to rise.

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS
For Hague, voters have two choices: change or ruin
Benedict Brogan
Daily Telegraph, 13 February 2010.

     William Hague stopped playing the piano when he was appointed to the front bench by David Cameron. ... ...
     We ask him specifically about immigration, ... Mr Hague took a robust line on the issue when he led his party in the 2001 election, but is not about to do so now. He says the party should stick to its priorities: protecting the NHS, reforming education, sorting out the economy. "We must not change that strategy and that means in the campaign itself those issues have to be to the fore. So if you are saying the Conservatives should make immigration a front-page issue then I say no. It would be a distraction to fight the election on immigration." However, he reiterates party policy, which is a cap on the number of migrants from outside the European Union. At the moment it is running at near 200,000 a year; Mr Cameron says it should be slashed the "tens of thousands". Mr Hague is firm: "We are not going to fight another election on immigration. It would not reflect the nation's priorities."
     He does argue that tackling immigration is among those things that voters can rely on a Conservative government to do in any circumstances, along with being tough on crime and not ceding more powers to the EU.

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.

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS
Paying the price for a decade of deception
Sir Andrew Green
Daily Mail, 12 February 2010.

     So there was indeed a Labour conspiracy to change the nature of our society by mass immigration.
     New evidence confirms claims made by a Labour political adviser last October which he subsequently tried to recant.
     In an article for the Evening Standard, Andrew Neather revealed that 'it didn't just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year ...was to open up the UK to mass migration'.
     He went on to describe a Government policy document which he had helped to write in 2000.
     He said that 'drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was paranoia about it reaching the media'.
     The paper eventually surfaced as a purely technical product of the research department of the Home Office but earlier drafts that he saw 'included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural'.
     We in Migrationwatch have now obtained an earlier draft of that policy paper, circulated in October 2000.
     It had already been censored but it was to be neutered still further. In the executive summary, six of eight references to 'social' objectives were cut from the version later published.
     What could have been meant by social policy in the context of immigration, especially as it was dressed up as combating social exclusion?
     This must surely have been code for increasing the numbers substantially, as Mr Neather revealed. If not, why all the secrecy?
     Why the censorship that has now been laid bare? Reading between the lines of these documents it is clear that political advisers in Number 10, its joint authors, were preparing a blueprint for mass immigration with both economic and social objectives.
     None of this was in the Labour manifesto of 1997 or 2001. One passage in the report that the political censors failed to cut was a prediction about foreign immigration from outside the European Union.
     This had it climbing from 142,000 in 1998 to nearly 180,000 in 2005 (in fact, it reached nearly 200,000 by that date).
     But what this shows is that ministers were clearly warned about a continuing rise in immigration which, even leaving aside the East Europeans, has been even greater than expected.
     So what can we deduce from all this? Mr Neather later withdrew some of his remarks but examination of the texts shows that he had, in fact, blurted out the truth.
     It seems there was a project led by Downing Street political advisers to introduce a secret policy of mass immigration.
     Their economic arguments surfaced in an obscure research document but the social objective of greatly increased diversity was entirely suppressed for fear of public reaction – especially from the white working class. ...
     One point to consider is the impact on the electorate. It is not generally realised that Commonwealth citizens legally in Britain acquire the right to vote in general elections as soon as they put their names on the electoral register.
     In Labour years we have now seen an additional 300,000 from the Old Commonwealth and about one million from the New Commonwealth.
     They may well have been conscious that they have much stronger support among the ethnic communities than their Conservative rivals.
     Given that mass immigration is heavily in Labour's electoral interest, they may
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS
Using immigration to turn Britain into a nation of Labour voters is so shameful I can hardly believe it
Stephen Glover
Daily Mail, 12 February 2010.

     What will future historians consider to be New Labour's greatest legacy? I don't believe it will be economic collapse or ill-judged foreign adventures or even the apparent peace settlement in Northern Ireland, though all of these will have long-term effects.
     My guess, bordering on conviction, is that the achievement for which the Government of 1997 to 2010 will be remembered above all is the unprecedentedly fast rate of immigration into this country.
     During this period, some three million immigrants were added to the British population.
     Historians may note that the 1997 Labour manifesto offered no clue whatsoever as to what was in store. It merely stated that 'every country must have firm control over immigration and Britain is no exception'.
     Neither the manifesto nor the utterances of leading Labour politicians gave the British people any reason to expect the ensuing surge that took place.
     Why did it? There were doubtless several reasons, most of which we are familiar with. ...
     But some of us have long suspected that there was a deeper cause which had more to do with New Labour's unspoken philosophy than economic forces. And yet, the suggestion that it had deliberately tried to re-engineer Britain for its own political advantage was almost too outrageous to entertain.
     Could a political party in a democracy really do that?
     A previously unseen official document from 2000 suggests it could. It makes clear that immigration policy was driven partly by economic needs but also by the Government's 'social objectives'.
     The phrase 'social objectives' appears eight times in the document's executive summary of a few hundred words, and in six instances was removed in a censored version published in 2001.
     Anyone who reads the uncensored document – which has been released following a Freedom of Information request by the pressure group MigrationWatch – can hardly be in any doubt as to the importance of these 'social objectives'.
     It is a reasonable inference that these included transforming the social make-up of Britain in a way that would be favourable to New Labour.
     Migrants, and to a slightly lesser extent their descendants, are much more likely to vote Labour than for any other party. It seems that one shameful motivation behind New Labour's open-door immigration policy was to alter the social composition of this country so as to improve the chances of the party being reelected.
     This confirms what Chris Mullin, the former Labour minister, wrote in his diaries. In January 2004, he lamented the failure of the Government to tackle immigration abuses such as 'the rackets that surround arranged marriages' before noting that 'at least 20 Labour seats depend on Asian votes'. ...
     Even as I write these words I can scarcely believe them. That a political party should have put its narrow, selfish interests above those of the country on so enormously important a matter is deeply shocking. To me it is a thousand times more shocking than all the MPs' expenses fiddles about which we have learned recently. ...
     Britain does not belong to Labour, and it is to the party's eternal shame that it has behaved as though it did.
[Site link]

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."

EMPLOYMENT – DOCTORS, EUROPEAN UNION
Foreign doctors in Britain
Sir Norman Browse
Daily Telegraph, 11 February 2010.
[Letter to the Editor]

     In the early 1990s, I, along with the presidents of the General Medical Council and the Royal College of Physicians, demanded of the Department of Health, as forcibly as we could, that doctors registered to practise medicine in other EU countries should have their knowledge and competence assessed before being allowed to practise in Britain.
     We based our arguments on our experience of the enormous variety of methods of medical education and training throughout Europe.
     The response was that this could not be allowed because it would breach a fundamental tenet of the EU – the free unrestrained movement of workers. Political dogma won and was followed by a multitude of errors by visiting doctors.
     When the new GP contract was introduced, the Government compounded the problem ...
     All these problems have arisen from the Government's slavish adherence to free movement of workers within the EU, without regard to its practical effects. ...

IMMIGRATION – SOCIAL OBJECTIVES, POLITICS
Labour's 'secret plan to lure migrants'
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2010.

     The release of a previously unseen document suggested that Labour's migration policy over the past decade had been aimed not just at meeting the country's economic needs, but also the Government's "social objectives".
     The paper said migration would "enhance economic growth" and made clear that trying to halt or reverse it could be "economically damaging". But it also stated that immigration had general "benefits" and that a new policy framework was needed to "maximise" the contribution of migration to the Government's wider social aims.
     The Government has always denied that social engineering played a part in its migration policy.
     However, the paper, which was written in 2000 at a time when immigration began to increase dramatically, said controls were contrary to its policy objectives and could lead to "social exclusion".
     Last night, the Conservatives demanded an independent inquiry into the issue. It was alleged that the document showed that Labour had overseen a deliberate open-door policy on immigration to boost multi-culturalism.
     Voting trends indicate that migrants and their descendants are much more likely to vote Labour.
     The existence of the draft policy paper, which was drawn up by a Cabinet Office think tank and a Home Office research unit, was disclosed last year by Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.
     He alleged at the time that the sharp increase in immigration over the past 10 years was partly due to a "driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multi-cultural".
     However, the full document was made public only yesterday following a Freedom of Information request by Migrationwatch, a pressure group. A version of the paper was published in 2001, but most of the references to "social objectives" had been removed. In the executive summary alone, six out of eight uses of the phrase were deleted.
     Labour has overseen an unprecedented rise in immigration, which has led to a rise of about three million in the UK population since 1997. Until recently, it accused opponents who called for tougher controls of playing the "race card". Labour was forced to change its rhetoric amid concerns that the economic and social reality of immigration had alienated voters in its heartlands.
     Gordon Brown pledged to secure "British jobs for British workers" as the recession led to a rise in unemployment and, just four months ago, he was accused of a U-turn when he insisted that it was "not racist" to discuss the issue.
     The document released yesterday suggested that Labour originally pursued a different direction. It was published under the title "Migration: an economic and social analysis" but the removal of significant extracts suggested that officials or ministers were nervous over references to "social objectives".
     The original paper called for the need of a new framework for thinking about migration policy but the concluding phrase – "if we are to maximise the contribution of migration to the Government's economic and social objectives" – was edited out.
     Another deleted phrase suggested that it was "correct that the Government has both economic and social objectives for migration policy".

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS, VOTES
The key: ethnic communities vote heavily for Labour
Andrew Green
Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2010.

     I rubbed my eyes with disbelief when I saw an article by Andrew Neather, a former speech writer for Blair, Blunkett and Straw, saying that mass immigration "didn't just happen: the deliberate policy of Ministers from late 2000 ... was to open up the UK to mass immigration".
     At last the truth was out. ... ...
     Labour got away with it for the best part of 10 years until the white working class started to abandon them in droves. This is a risk they must have seen. Indeed, Mr Neather revealed that the policy of mass immigration was surrounded by tight secrecy for this very reason. ...
     According to research conducted for the Electoral Commission in 2005, the ethnic communities vote heavily in favour of Labour. Labour gets about 80 per cent support from the African and Caribbean vote, compared with 2-3 per cent for the Conservatives. For Asian voters, it is about 50 per cent to 10 per cent. ...
     Mr Neather's revelations confirm what many have suspected for a long time. Labour have never been honest about the scale of immigration, nor serious about controlling it.

TERRORISM
Terrorist threat 'will last decades'
Chris Irvine
Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2010.

     The so-called 'war on terror' is likely to last as long as the Cold War, a senior security official has warned.
     Charles Farr, the head of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, said that while the names of terrorist groups threatening the UK were likely to change, the threat itself would continue for decades.
     Within ten years, al-Qaeda could have been replaced by a different group with a similar ideology, he said.
     He made the comments in private evidence sessions with the Commons home affairs select committee, extracts of which have been published.

RACISM – CRIME, POLICE
Family of barrister shot dead by police to challenge Dizaei at inquest
Richard Edwards
Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2010.

     Ali Dizaei, the disgraced Scotland Yard officer, ... ...
     It emerged yesterday that, just before Dizaei was promoted to the £90,000-a-year role of commander in 2008, Scotland Yard's anti-corruption unit was warned of his link to someone of "great concern" to the Serious Organised Crime Agency.
     Glen Smith, the former Metropolitan Police Federation chairman, said that Dizaei's repeated allegations of racism during his career had "paralysed" the Met.
     "It was like walking on egg-shells. People were just afraid to act upon their instincts and what they saw before them," he said.

RACISM – POLICE
Time to arrest the grievance culture
David Green
Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2010.

     Former Metropolitan Police commander Ali Dizaei has been convicted of corruption offences almost exactly 11 years after the publication of the Macpherson Report, in 1999. The connection between the two events is that Dizaei's brazen exploitation of the pernicious Macpherson doctrine of institutional racism led to the doctrine being holed below the waterline for the first time.
     "It is vital to stress," Macpherson said, "that neither academic debate nor the evidence presented to us leads us to say or to conclude that an accusation that institutional racism exists in the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] implies that the policies of the MPS are racist. No such evidence is before us. Indeed, the contrary is true."
     So far so good, but then Macpherson went on to define institutional racism in terms that eradicated the distinction between true and false. Before Macpherson, a racist incident was "any incident in which it appears to the ... investigating officer that the complaint involves an element of racial motivation". After Macpherson, it became "any incident perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person".
     The hate-crime manual produced by the Association of Chief Police Officers repeatedly states that facts are not relevant. When speaking of police victimisation, it says that it "takes place whether or not the police are indifferent ... if that is how the victim feels about the interaction. Whether or not it is reasonable for them to feel that way is immaterial."
     The extraordinary notion that perception is everything and the truth nothing has persisted because there are many, like Dizaei, who profit from it.

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS, DECEIT
The deceit of Labour's immigration policy
Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2010.
[Leading article]

     This Government has presided over the biggest inflow of immigrants in our history. In the past 12 years, three million immigrants have made the United Kingdom their home. Our society has been transformed and that transformation will continue. In 2008, a quarter of all births in England and Wales were to foreign-born mothers: in London, it was half. Our population, boosted by this immigration, is expected to reach 70 million by the middle of the century, and many towns in England (already the fifth most densely populated large country on the planet) are experiencing immense pressures on housing and welfare services as a consequence.
     It has become commonplace to attribute all this to a catastrophic failure of policy by a Government that simply lost control of our borders. Now we learn that, to the contrary, it was all part of a plan – albeit a secret one – to change the social fabric of this country and make it, in the words of one official involved, "truly multicultural". A policy document written in 2000 was so incendiary that it had to be bowdlerised before publication. The Migrationwatch think tank has, under a Freedom of Information request, obtained the unexpurgated original. It reveals Labour's real agenda just as the floodgates were opening. The document notes that migration pressures would intensify, "but this should not be viewed as a negative"; trying to stem the flow would anyway "be very difficult (perhaps impossible)"; the Government had "both economic and social objectives for immigration policy"; the benefits included "a widening of consumer choice and significant cultural contributions"; entry controls, on the other hand, "can contribute to social exclusion"; and, most devastating of all, the previous policy of curbing immigration had "no economic or social justification".
     Here, at last, is the truth of what the Government really thought about immigration but never dared tell the electorate.

RACISM – POLICE
Now is not the time for the police to backtrack on race
Herman Ouseley
The Guardian, 9 February 2010.

     Ali Dizaei is taking his porridge at Her Majesty's Pleasure, after being convicted of trying to frame an innocent man and lying to cover up his abuse of office. Dizaei's crime was made worse by his position as a commander with the Metropolitan Police Service. And as leader of the National Black Police Association, where for years he has loudly demanded that the police get to grips with institutional racism, there is a long queue of his former colleagues and detractors ready to bury him under a huge pile of abuse.
     Brian Paddick, a former Met deputy commissioner, told Radio 4's Today programme that previous disciplinary actions against Dizaei had been dropped for "politically driven" reasons. "My understanding is that it might have been the case that some of those disciplinary charges against him could have been proven," Paddick said.
     As the self-appointed terminator of institutional racism and incompetence in the Met, Dizaei did not care who got in his way. His actions and style made many enemies and created fear among many, even his managers. But what is now worrying, as that chapter comes to a close, is the prospect of the Met believing they can put on the back burner the quest to root out sexism and racism. Already, some voices are urging an end to strident anti-racism efforts.
     For the Met to heed such calls would be a disaster. As statistics for grievances and disciplinary cases highlighted by the NBPA show, ethnic minority officers are still more likely to be disciplined than their white colleagues. ...
     As someone who worked with the Met on several occasions over the last 20 years, I found there a fear of getting things wrong, rather than confidence in taking action and justifying decisions. Managers tended to leave sensitive decisions to others for fear of being labelled a racist. ... ...
     The change to acknowledging racism in the Met – and tackling it – came on the back of confrontation, sacrifice and conflict. The 1999 Macpherson report into Stephen Lawrence's death was the catalyst.
[Site link]

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.

RACISM – POLICE
Metropolitan Police 'still institutionally racist'
BBC, 9 February 2010.

     The Met remains "without doubt" institutionally racist, claims the Metropolitan Black Police Association.
     Chairman Sgt Alfred John was speaking after Met Commander Ali Dizaei was jailed for four years for corruption.
     Dizaei had earlier claimed he was the victim of a racist campaign after allegations of false expense claims.
     The Met said the "institutional racism" tag, first used in the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, was not helpful in its efforts to improve.
     On Monday, Dizaei was found guilty of misconduct in a public office and perverting the course of justice after he assaulted and falsely arrested a man in a dispute over £600.
     He was a former president of the Metropolitan Black Police Association (MBPA).
     In the aftermath of the conviction, ex-deputy assistant Met commissioner Brian Paddick said the imprisonment of Dizaei "will do little to improve race relations in the police service".
     The case has thrown the question of racism at the Met back into the spotlight.
     Asked on Tuesday if the Met was still institutionally racist, Sgt John told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Without a doubt. There is no two ways about that.
     "The evidence is that by the Met's figures, black people are still disproportionately disciplined, they are still disproportionately asked to resign, there is still a lack of progression for black people."
[Site link]

EMPLOYMENT
Immigrants handed 1.3m jobs in Britain
Macer Hall
Daily Express, 8 February 2010.

     More than 1.3 million immigrants have been given the right to work and claim benefits in Britain since Gordon Brown promised "British jobs for British workers".
     Damning Whitehall figures revealed last night prove a shattering new blow to Labour's open-door border policies.
     Official statistics show that a total of 1,370,820 foreigners have been granted National Insurance numbers over the last two years. And the influx has continued despite hundreds of thousands of British-born workers losing their jobs in the recession and unemployment rising to 2.46 million.
     Latest evidence of the collapse of Britain's border controls will be a huge embarrassment to the Prime Minister following his now discredited vow to put British-born workers first.
     And it raises fresh questions about Britain being a target for "benefits tourism", with concerns that immigrants are using National Insurance numbers to get state pensions and other welfare handouts. ...
     The Department of Work and Pensions figures – obtained by the Tories – confirm that over half a million newcomers every year are joining Britain's employment and welfare system.
     Nearly half of the overseas workers getting National Insurance numbers come from east European countries such as Poland and Lithuania. But the figures also show that more than 400,000 migrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East came to Britain between July 2007 and June last year.
     Overall, a total of 4.1 million National Insurance numbers have been handed out to foreign workers since 2002, the figures reveal. Total net immigration to the UK increased from 51,000 a year between 1993 and 1997 to an average of 209,000 a year from 2004 to 2008.
     Separate figures show that one in 13 workers in jobs in Britain are non-UK citizens, a total of around 2.2 million. And evidence suggests that growing numbers are settling in Britain for the long term and not returning home. Employment-related grants of settlement rose by 63 per cent to 60,770 in 2008 compared with 2007. ...
     Last night Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said: "We recognise the benefit to our economy and culture from immigration. We're also very clear that it needs to be controlled."
[Site link]

MULTICULTURALISM – EDUCATION
Children in one town speak 150 languages
Heidi Blake
Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2010.

     Schoolchildren in just one town have been found to speak as many as 150 different languages in their homes, highlighting the pressure placed on teachers by growing numbers with little or no command of English.
     The Government described the number of languages and dialects spoken by pupils in Reading, Berks – uncovered in a survey by the local authority – as "extraordinary" and conceded that it would place extra pressure on schools. ...
     Reading borough council has been forced to offer cheap English lessons to pupils and their parents to tackle the rising number of children who cannot communicate in class.

IMMIGRATION
Lord Tebbit calls for zero immigration policy
Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2010.

     Lord Tebbit, the former Conservative cabinet minister, has called for a policy of zero immigration.
     In a blog on The Daily Telegraph website, Lord Tebbit said: "These islands are our islands. We live here and it is we, the people, who have the absolute right to decide who may, and who may not, come here and upon what conditions they come." ...
     Lord Tebbit concluded: "It seems to me that we must assert that we need to aim for a zero net immigration policy. We cannot achieve that while our frontiers are open to EU citizens, and although that is not too threatening at present, some of the prospective new member states would act like wide open doors to Third World migration."
     Lord Tebbit said Britain needed a "decent policy of giving sanctuary to true refugees" but, he added: "We must close the door to others and start serious work on deporting those here illegally, as well as reinstating proper border controls.
     "There is much to be done – but the political class will do almost anything to avoid talking about it at the forthcoming election."
[Site link]

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".

REPATRIATION/DEPORTATION
Jobless migrants living in shanty towns offered free flights home
Simon Barber
The Observer, 7 February 2010.

     Homeless east European migrants are being offered free flights back to their home country by a government-funded scheme set up to combat the rise of shanty towns in rural Britain.
     The scheme, known as the National Reconnection Service, is expected to cost about £150,000 and is being trialled in Boston, Lincolnshire, and Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, two towns that have experienced a large influx of migrants seeking work.
     In 2008, the government said that a quarter of Boston's population was made up of migrants and that 65 languages could be heard in the streets and fields of the county. Workers came to the Lincolnshire town to pick fruit and vegetables, but the jobs dried up during the recession and many migrants returned home.
     However, a significant number have remained, hoping that things would get better. As the economy faltered, some found themselves without work or any entitlement to social security benefits. Ultimately, a number became homeless. As a result, some of Boston's residents now speak of a new phenomenon – shanty towns.
     Boston's authorities have become so concerned that they have enlisted the assistance of Crime Reduction Initiatives (CRI), an organisation funded by government and local authorities, designed to address the causes of disorder in communities. Its job is to assess the homeless and ascertain if they can get state benefits. If they are not eligible, they can be offered a one-way ticket back to their country of origin.
[Site link]

TERRORISM – BORDER SECURITY, EXTREMISM
Britain 'faces attack from toxic cocktail of enemies'
James Kirkup
Daily Telegraph, 4 February 2010.

     Britain will be attacked by a "toxic cocktail" of state-sponsored terrorists, extremist groups and criminal gangs in the coming decades, military analysts have warned.
     A Ministry of Defence assessment of future conflicts and threats concluded that the growth of communications technology and lax border controls would make it easier for enemy states or terrorist groups to carry out attacks on British soil.
     The strategy document was at the heart of the defence Green Paper published yesterday, which was intended to begin a debate on the future size, structure and purpose of the Armed Forces.
     The document, The Future Character of Conflict, suggested that Britain's security would be threatened at home as well as abroad.
     It said: "The merging of state proxies, extremist ideologies and criminal interests into a toxic cocktail, along with the effects of globalisation, such as more porous borders, will make some non-state actors harder to counteract.
     "They could employ a wide spectrum of military capabilities, albeit some at a limited scale, but they will nevertheless be capable of innovative tactics that exploit inherent UK vulnerabilities."

EMPLOYMENT – DOCTORS
Foreign doctors' English not checked properly, says study
Rebecca Smith and Rosa Prince
Daily Telegraph, 4 February 2010.

     A catalogue of failures in out-of-hours GP services has been found by a critical review after the death of a pensioner at the hands of a foreign doctor. ...
     The review, carried out by Prof Steve Field, president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, and Prof David Colin-Thome, national clinical director for primary care, found widespread failings in the out-of-hours system. ...
     Foreign doctors coming in to work for out-of-hours providers did not have their language skills checked thoroughly and they did not undergo proper inductions.

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]

RACISM – AUSTRALIA, INDIANS
Brumby again criticises Indian media
Hindustan Times, 4 February 2010.

     Strongly criticising Indian media for blowing up the racism issue, Victorian premier John Brumby on Thursday asked people to wait for facts about the assaults before crying racism.
     Brumby condemned the Indian media and certain sections of Australian media for stirring up the racism issue that does not exist, an AAP report said.
     "We condemn in the strongest terms any racist attacks," he said.
     "But I am not going to stand by and see Victoria's standing internationally diminished by what are inaccurate and unbalanced reporting and comment in India", he said.
     Brumby said people should wait for the facts about assaults before crying racism.
     Brumby further claimed that the story in the daily 'The Age' that said that Indian High commissioner Sujatha Singh complained over the attacks issue to Governor General Quentin Bryce in Sydney was "unattributed" and "entirely unsubstantiated".
     "Our Indian population is under represented in terms of assaults," he said and added "We have a very large Indian and Sri Lankan population, they are nearly 7 per cent of our population and on average if you have 14 crimes that occur every week one will effect that community.
     But that doesn't mean that they are being targeted or it's racially motivated.
[Site link]

MULTICULTURALISM – FRANCE, ISLAM, DRESS
France's burka ban a boost for equality
Greg Sheridan
The Australian, 4 February 2010.

     Of all the countries of Europe, France has the best chance of coping successfully with large-scale Muslim immigration. That's not to say it's a very big chance, but it has some chance. This is because of France's strong republican ideology. This enables it to confer benefits as well as responsibilities on citizens regardless of ethnicity. French republicanism demands something of the citizen and asserts certain fundamental values.
     This is most evident in the law banning the hijab, or Muslim headdress, from state schools. Last week a French parliamentary committee recommended banning the full Muslim burka in government offices, public transport, hospitals and schools.
     The hijab is a bit more than a loose scarf that covers all the hair and generally the shoulders. The niqab reveals only the eyes and the burka covers everything, allowing a woman to see only through some sort of mesh arrangement. However, burka is the term most commonly used in the West to mean full face-covering, body length female Muslim attire. ...
     When, in 2005, the French banned the hijab, I thought they were making a mistake. Broadly speaking, I don't really care what anybody wears. But I was wrong. Spending time in France last year, I realised the French see this as a great liberal reform in the interests of women's rights. The French go to great lengths to distinguish secular from religious spaces. They have gone to great lengths to make this law non-discriminatory. At state schools, Christians cannot wear large crosses, Jews cannot wear yarmulkes, Sikhs cannot wear turbans.
     The truth is this law was aimed at Muslims. And everyone knows this. One consequence of large-scale Muslim immigration, therefore, is that all of France has to become a little less liberal, in that Christians, Jews and Sikhs must suffer restrictions when there was no problem at all in their religious dress. But the hijab is both a symbol and a tool of the repression of women. The reform has been such a success because for several hours each day, young Muslim women at state schools are French women, with the rights and independence and respect that accrue to French women. They are for that time no longer subject to the rules of their brothers and fathers and the religious extremists in their communities.
     Incidentally, the French rules are similar to those that have applied in Turkey for much of its modern history.
     But the most important aspect of the French law is that it makes explicit to the Muslim minority the demand that to be a French citizen you must subscribe to, and live up to, certain French civic values, of which equality for women is one. The proposed limited ban on the burka is an extension of this. And here is a perplexing conundrum. If you really believe that women, but not men, should be fully covered, why would you want to live in a society such as France, or indeed Australia, in the first place?
     Here we meet a hard truth of Muslim immigration to Europe, and perhaps to Australia. There is a strong body of belief that at least a large number of the African, and especially Maghrebi, Muslims who move to Europe do so not to embrace the European lifestyle, that is to pay the immigrant's traditional compliment to the new society, but to recreate their Third World lifestyle at a European standard of living.
     ...
[Site link]

NATIONAL IDENTITY – PUBLIC OPINION
National identity in peril, say women
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 3 February 2010.

     National identity is under threat because of the scale of immigration, one of the country's largest women's organisations has warned.
     Eight out of 10 members of the Townswomen's Guild want net immigration reduced, with more than a quarter wanting no inflows at all.
     Net migration is the balance between the number of migrants entering and leaving the country. The survey, in the group's magazine Townswoman, received five times the average number of responses in what officials said reflected "such a hot topic".
     The lobby group, which has 34,000 members aged from 18 to women in their eighties, is the second largest women's organisation.
     It was started when all women got the vote in 1928. In the poll, 95 per cent agreed that current levels of immigration would cause the country to lose its identity while nine out of 10 were concerned about the population reaching 70 million.
     A similar proportion said they were concerned about the pressure on public services and 94 per cent said current levels were putting a strain on community relations.
     Some 50 per cent of the 1,427 women who responded to the survey wanted no net immigration, while 29 per cent wanted none at all.
     Sue Smith, the guild's national chairman, said: "TG has never been afraid to tackle thorny issues and receiving five times the normal response to this questionnaire was to be expected on such a hot topic.
     "For Townswomen, the issue isn't race. It's numbers and they clearly feel immigration policy needs to protect our way of life and environment and recognise the increasing pressure on already over-stretched public services."
     Frank Field MP, the co-chairman of the cross-party group on balanced migration, said: "The political parties would be foolish not to heed this groundswell of concern as they write their manifestos."

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.

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.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – RUSSIA
Migration Drives Population Growth
Alexander Bratersky
The St. Petersburg Times, 2 February 2010.

     The Federal Migration Service announced Friday that it had contributed to Russia's first demographic increase in 15 years by granting Russian citizenship to about 400,000 people last year.
     The new Russians along with 227,000 migrants who arrived to Russia in 2009 have helped to offset the country's shrinking population and even allowed a small growth of 1.4 percent, Federal Migration Service chief Konstantin Romodanovsky said.
     "This is the first demographic increase in the past 15 years," Romodanovsky said, Interfax reported.
     President Dmitry Medvedev touted the end of a 15-year drop in the country's overall population in mid-January after Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova announced that preliminary statistics for last year showed that the country's population of 141.9 million had either remained stable or increased by 15,000 to 25,000 people.
     The Federal Migration Service expelled 34,000 migrants from the country last year, an increase of 70 percent from 2008, and called $113 million in fines from people and companies that violated migration laws, Romodanovsky said.
     He said 1.3 million migrants are expected to work in Russia this year, far below a cap of 2 million set in a government quota announced late last year.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – AUSTRALIA
Populate and we will perish
Barry Cohen
The Australian, 2 February 2010.

     Now that Kevin Rudd has informed us that he favours a "big Australia" with a population reaching 35 million by 2050, will he also tell us what happens then? Do we continue to pursue policies that will further double our population by 2100, causing us to cease immigration altogether and then apply the Chinese solution: one child per family? And if the population is to increase to 35 million, what's the rush to get there so quickly?
     Thanks to the ABC, Kerry O'Brien and The 7.30 Report, which devoted most of last week to showcasing the question of population growth, it appears that at last we are going to have the public debate some of us have been seeking for years.
     I once asked in question time whether the prime minister was aware that immigration levels were causing concern because of the pressure they exert on "education, health and social services, housing and land prices and the consequent diminution in the quality of life that overcrowded cities have on our environment". I asked for a white paper on immigration to evaluate the costs and benefits of continued large-scale immigration. That was on June 10, 1970, and John Gorton's answer indicated he was none too pleased with my question. ...
     My view then was that Australia couldn't have an immigration policy without first having a population policy. It hasn't changed.
     The then minister for immigration, Phil Lynch, understood what I was on about. He set up an inquiry under Wilfred Borrie, but when Borrie eventually reported in 1978, no mention was made of population numbers.
     What surprises me is that Rudd has decided to support a massive increase without the matter being debated in public, the parliament, the party or the press. I am not alone in my concern.
     What advocates of big Australia haven't yet done is spelt out clearly the benefits from such a huge population increase. In the early 1990s our annual growth rate, including immigration as well as births and deaths, dropped below 1 per cent. It is now, thanks to more babies and more people living longer, almost 2 per cent.
     With a population of 22 million, the deterioration in the quality of life in our cities is already obvious. Daily our media highlights the inadequacy of our schools, hospitals and transport system, housing and water shortages, and spiralling land prices. You don't need to be an urban planner, demographer or sociologist to see the problems.
     If the 35 million predicted by 2050 is correct, with Sydney and Melbourne rising to seven million each, we are courting disaster. Double the population and life in the cities will be intolerable.
     No, no, say the big Australians, we can take millions more. We can but who will benefit? It is up to the big Australians to show how this will improve the quality of life for present and future generations of Australians. ...
     Why has it taken so long for this debate to take place? One reason is that the ethnic lobby brands anyone who questions immigration as racist. That won't work with the type of people who are now entering the debate. People of the calibre of Dick Smith, Bob Carr and, if I may say so, yours truly can't be so labelled.
     More and more Australians are speaking out on this issue and they will not be silenced out of fear of being blackguarded by those afraid to seriously debate the issue.
     Barry Cohen was a minister in the Hawke government.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – USA, POLITICS, CITIZENSHIP, VOTERS
Obama adviser: Amnesty to ensure 'progressive' rule
Aaron Klein
WorldNetDaily, 2 February 2010.

     Granting citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants would expand the "progressive" electorate and help ensure a "progressive" governing coalition for the long term, declared a recent adviser to President Obama whose union group is among the most frequent visitors to the White House.
     "We reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters," stated Eliseo Medina, international executive vice-president of Service Employees International Union, or SEIU.
     Medina was speaking at a June 2009 Washington conference for the liberal America's Future Now!
     Medina said that during the presidential election in November 2008, Latinos and immigrants "voted overwhelmingly for progressive candidates. Barack Obama got two out of every three voters that showed up."
     "Can you imagine if we have, even the same ratio, two out of three? Can you imagine 8 million new voters who care about our issues and will be voting? We will be creating a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle."
     ... The SEIU is closely linked to the controversial Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. SEIU President Andrew Stern was the most frequently logged White House visitor, according to an official list released in October.
     Medina and the SEIU are top supporters of Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez's Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Bill, which seeks to document up to 12 million illegal immigrants inside the U.S.
     During the most recent presidential campaign, Medina and Gutierrez served on Obama's National Latino Advisory Council. Also on the council was Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., the co-sponsor of Gutierrez's immigration reform bill.
     Medina was a chief lobbyist credited with a change in the longstanding policy of the AFL-CIO, the largest union federation in the U.S. The union reversed its stance against illegal immigration in February 2000, instead calling for new amnesty for millions of illegals.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – USA
Obama's Amnesty Footnote
Virgil Goode
Townhall.com, 1 February 2010.

     At the very end of his State of the Union address, President Obama said, "we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system – to secure our borders and enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation."
     Like most Americans, I agree with those broad principles, and that is exactly why Obama was so vague in his speech. His claim that "jobs must be our number one focus in 2010" would be exposed as a complete fraud if he promoted giving amnesty for illegal immigration and importing hundreds of thousands of additional legal foreign workers in the same address.
     The situation is already bad enough as it is. At least twelve million illegal immigrants are in this country and eight million illegal aliens are in the American workforce. Additionally, our government issues 75,000 permanent work visas and 50,000 temporary work permits to foreign workers every single month. A recent census study found that one out of every six workers in this country is foreign born. ...
     "The steps forward on immigration reform" to which he is referring is HR 4321, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act of 2009 or "CIR ASAP" sponsored by Rep. Louis Gutierrez, Solomon Ortiz, and 90 other Democrats.
     As we all know, "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" and "Path for legalization" are nothing but code words for amnesty. The last two times the open borders folks introduced amnesties, they at least established some preconditions and made illegal aliens jump through a few hoops and before they could get amnesty. Under Gutierrez's bill, every single illegal alien in this country the day of the bill is signed will be eligible. This gives foreigners a great incentive to come to this country illegally because they know they'd soon be eligible for amnesty. A recent Zogby found that 56% of Mexicans said themselves or people they knew would be more likely to enter America illegally if they knew an amnesty was coming.
     To make matters worse, when proving they have jobs and were in the country before the amnesty passed, illegal aliens apply for amnesty they are allowed to use their stolen identities, fake green cards, and fraudulent social security numbers without fear of prosecution.
     In addition to giving legal status to the 12 million illegal aliens already here, it will make it much easier for more illegal aliens to break into our country in the future. Contrary to Obama's claim that the bill will increase border security, CIR ASAP does the opposite.
     It guts successful enforcement measures, limits raids on illegal immigrants, prohibits use of troops on the border, and replaces the effective E-Verify system used to ensure that employers only hire legal American workers. It also overturns all state and local laws that crackdown on illegal immigration, and abolishes the successful 287 (g) program that allows local law enforcement to cooperate with federal authorities in apprehending criminal illegal aliens.
     On top of the millions of illegal immigrants in this country, 1.5 million legal foreign workers come into our country each year. But this number isn't high enough for Gutierrez and his friends. ...
     Additionally, CIR ASAP will create 100,000 visas from the countries that send the most illegal immigrants every year. This rewards countries such as Mexico who intentionally promote illegal immigration.
[Site link]

RACISM – CUBA
Q&A: "Being Poor and White Is Not the Same as Being Poor and Black" in Cuba
Patricia Grogg
TerraViva, 1 February 2010.
[Interview with University of Havana researcher Esteban Morales]

     The elimination of racism remains unfinished business in Cuba today. "We have to admit that the problem exists, determine its impact on the social model that we defend, and tackle it in depth," says Esteban Morales, an Afro-Cuban economist, political scientist and author of numerous articles and essays on the subject.
     As a researcher at the University of Havana's Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States (CEHSEU), Morales could also be considered an expert on U.S. affairs. ... ...
     Q: Why has the Cuban revolution's social model not succeeded in eliminating the disadvantages faced by the black population?
     A: Despite the radical nature of the process that got underway in 1959, the country's social policies failed to take skin colour into account. In terms of social policy, after the triumph of the revolution, all poor people were treated equally, without differentiating between whites and blacks. But this was something that needed to be done, because the colour of one's skin in Cuba is a significant variable in social differences. ...
     Despite the fact that everyone's living standards improved and black Cubans achieved a more favourable position over the last half century, the profound differences did not disappear entirely. During the special period [the economic crisis of the 1990s, following the collapse of the East European socialist bloc], we realised that those who were hit hardest by the crisis were in fact black Cubans, who had fewer possibilities of forging a livelihood.
     Even in Cuba today, being poor and white is not the same as being poor and black.
     Q: And yet the Cuban government declared in 1962 that the problem of racism had been overcome.
     A: That was a mistake, caused by idealism and wilfulness, and the pressures of political circumstances in those years. From that time on, there was a long period of silence on the subject, since talking about racial differences was seen as playing into the hands of the enemy. Anyone who insisted on bringing up the subject was considered racist and divisive.
     The issue of racism re-emerged during the special period, and with the kind of virulence you would expect from a problem that was supposed to have been solved, but actually wasn't. ...
     The problem is not with the institution of education, but rather with aspects and problems of social life, with dysfunctionalities and imperfections in our society. In Cuba there is still a lack of racial awareness. For whites, it isn't important, because they have always been in power. But blacks need racial awareness in order to fight against racism and fight for their place in society.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – USA
Business and Labor on Immigration Contrasting Views of Leaders vs. Rank and File [part 1]
Steven A. Camarota
Center for Immigration Studies, February 2010.

     A new Zogby poll of senior executives, business owners, and members of union households finds that each of these groups thinks the best way to deal with illegal immigrants in the country is to enforce the law and cause them to return home. This is in stark contrast to lobbyists for large companies, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which argue for legalization. The findings of the survey are consistent with surveys done by the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small enterprises, showing strong opposition to legalization. Among unions, the leadership strongly supports legalizing illegal immigrants, but the survey shows enforcement – not legalization – is by far the option favored by union members and their families. The survey uses neutral language and includes 7,046 members of union households, 2,490 executives (e.g., CEOs, CFOs, VPs or department heads), and 9,990 small business owners.
     Among the findings:
     When asked to choose between enforcement that would cause illegal immigrants in the country to go home or offering them a pathway to citizenship with conditions, most members of the business community and unions choose enforcement.
     Executives (e.g. CEOs, CFOs, VPs etc.): 59 percent support enforcement to encourage illegals to go home; 30 percent support conditional legalization.
     Small Business Owners: 67 percent support enforcement; 22 percent support conditional legalization.
     Union Households: 58 percent support enforcement; 28 percent support conditional legalization.
     One of the most interesting findings of the survey is that members of the business community think there are plenty of Americans available to fill unskilled jobs. Union members feel the same way.
     Executives: 16 percent said legal immigration should be increased to fill unskilled jobs, 61 percent said there are plenty of Americans available to do unskilled jobs, employers just need to pay more.
     Small Business Owners: 13 percent said increase immigration; 65 percent said plenty of Americans are available.
     Union Households: 10 percent said increase immigration; 72 percent said plenty of Americans are available.
     Most members of the business community and union households do not feel that illegal immigration is caused by limits on legal immigration, as many of their lobbyists argue; instead, members feel it is due to a lack of enforcement.
     Executives: Just 13 percent said illegal immigration is caused by not letting in enough legal immigrants; 75 percent said inadequate enforcement.
     Small Business Owners: 10 percent said not enough legal immigration; 79 percent said inadequate enforcement.
     Union Households: 13 percent said not enough legal immigration; 74 percent said inadequate enforcement efforts.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – USA
Business and Labor on Immigration Contrasting Views of Leaders vs. Rank and File [part 2]
Steven A. Camarota
Center for Immigration Studies, February 2010.

     In contrast to many business groups and union leaders, most executives and union members think immigration is too high.
     Executives: 63 percent said it is too high; 5 percent said too low; 16 percent said just right.
     Small Business Owners: 70 percent said it is too high; 4 percent said too low; 13 percent said just right.
     Union Households: 63 percent said immigration is too high; 5 percent said too low; 14 percent said just right.
     Introduction
     While it is often assumed that the business community wants to legalize illegal immigrants and increase the level of legal immigration in the future, a new Zogby poll indicates that this is a minority position among top executives and small business owners. The reason for this mistaken impression is that a number of politically influential business lobbying organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association, and the National Association of Home Builders have all endorsed legalization and increased future immigration. It is important to note that the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which is by far the largest organization representing small businesses, has not endorsed this position and, in fact, endorsed legislation that would have increased immigration enforcement efforts. Part of the reason for this is that NFIB, unlike other business associations, surveys its members and asks them what positions they should take on controversial subjects. NFIB's surveys show strong support for immigration enforcement and strong opposition to legalization, which explains its position on immigration. The Zogby poll confirms this finding, with small business owners wanting enforcement, not legalization.
     The union movement has reversed its long-standing position that high levels of immigration are bad for labor, and in recent years has become an important part of the coalition critical of almost every enforcement effort and in favor of legalizing illegal immigrants. This is true both of the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), part of the Change to Win coalition, has been at the forefront of this argument. The union movement generally has been critical of guestworker proposals, but supportive of efforts to increase permanent immigration.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – USA, PUBLIC OPINION, MINORITY VOTERS
An Examination of Minority Voters' Views on Immigration
Steven A. Camarota
Center for Immigration Studies, February 2010.

     While it is sometimes assumed that minorities, particularly Hispanics, favor increased immigration and legalization for illegal immigrants, a new Zogby survey finds that minority voters' views are more complex. The poll of Hispanic, Asian-American, and African-American likely voters finds some support for legalization. But overall each of these groups prefers enforcement and for illegal immigrants to return home. Moreover, significant majorities of all three groups think that the current level of immigration is too high. These views are in sharp contrast to the leaders of most ethnic advocacy organizations, who argue for increased immigration and legalization of illegal immigrants. The survey used neutral language, avoiding such terms as "amnesty," "illegal alien," or "undocumented."
     Among the findings:
     In contrast to the leadership of many ethnic advocacy groups, most members of minority groups think immigration is too high. ...
     Most members of minority groups do not feel that illegal immigration is caused by limits on legal immigration as many ethnic advocacy groups argue; instead, members feel it's due to a lack of enforcement. ...
     Most members of minority groups feel that there are plenty of Americans available to fill unskilled jobs. ...
     When asked to choose between enforcement that would cause illegal immigrants in the country to go home or offering them a pathway to citizenship with conditions, most members of minority groups choose enforcement. ...
     ... What the poll does show is that, like most Americans, Hispanic, Asian, and black voters want the law enforced and illegal immigrants to go home. Moreover, they think the overall level of immigration is too high. When some leaders of minority groups speak on immigration and argue for legalization they are merely offering their own personal opinions, not necessarily those of voters in these communities.
[Site link]

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."

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – USA, POLITICS
U.S. Jews and Latinos form unlikely bond over immigration policy
Nathan Guttman
Haaretz.com, 31 January 2010.

     Even as health care reform twists in the wind, immigration policy looms as the next big political debate, and Hispanics and Jews are moving to the forefront in a burgeoning political alliance. ...
     But Jewish activists also see the joint work as an opening for cooperation with the Hispanic community on other issues, such as Israel.
     "If we want to engage with the Latino community on issues that are of concern for us, including Israel, we need to engage on issues that bother their community," said Gideon Aronoff, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. "We want to create growing bonds with the Latino community, and we cannot create these bonds if we are indifferent to the issues that are of concern to them." ...
     The organized Jewish community is more committed than ever to immigration reform. A letter supporting immigration reform, which will be sent out to all Senate offices in early February, was signed by dozens of national Jewish organizations.
     Joining forces with the Hispanic community has been a longstanding goal for Jewish groups. But what seems to be a rare chance to reform immigration laws has helped galvanize the relationship. ...
     Jewish groups bring to the table their experience and well-established network of political contacts, a contribution highly appreciated by Hispanic organizers.
     "For us, as newcomers to the society, this experience is extraordinary," said Gutavo Torres, president of Casa Maryland, a Hispanic group active in the metropolitan Washington area. "They know how to work through the system, how to lobby, how to advocate. The Jewish community has a lot of experience and a lot of power."
     Jewish organizations have been increasing their efforts to reach out to the Hispanic community for several years, and most national groups have established joint programs and sponsored Jewish-Hispanic events. With the rapid growth of the Hispanic community and with its rising political clout, Jewish groups see added value in building bridges to the community.
[Site link]

CRIME
Hundreds of foreign prisoners on the run
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 30 January 2010.

     At least 250 released foreign prisoners, including two rapists, who should be back in custody are at large after authorities failed to track them down.
     Overseas criminals account for a third of 754 released inmates who are missing when they should have been returned to custody either for committing new crimes or breaching their conditions.
     ... Of those still at large, 250 were foreign criminals and 66 should have been deported but were released by immigration judges.

TERRORISM – ISLAM
You cannot stop the terrorist threat if you are unable to profile it
Charles Moore
Daily Telegraph, 30 January 2010.

     Sir Paul Stephenson, who became Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police last year, is interested not in politics, but in policing. Unlike his predecessor, Sir Ian Blair, he does not want policing to be permitted or prevented by negotiations with endless political/community/pressure groups. He sees it as a contract with the public. That is why he has pursued a relentless policy of stop-and-search in relation to carrying knives in London. Knife crime has fallen. He rejects "proportionality" about who is stopped and searched if it means that you don't find the knives. Knife crime in London is a problem evident in young males, predominantly but not exclusively black. So it would be wasting police time to stop and search pedestrians in Richmond upon Thames on a Saturday afternoon.
     The Met now want common sense in relation to potential terrorists. They don't want a stop-every-Muslim policy: that would be almost as useless as random selection, and offensive, too. What they want is a method which assesses all relevant risks. ... ...
     Look again at the case of the Detroit bomber. ...
     Look at Major Nidal Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who shot 13 people dead at Fort Hood, Texas, last November. Colleagues had been worried earlier by his public defence of suicide bombers, but had not dared to complain in case they were accused of Islamophobia. In both cases, the terrorists were admirers of the al-Qaeda imam Anwar al Awlaki, now on the run. Major Hasan had a lengthy email correspondence with him.
     Now switch to Britain. One leading Muslim networker here is a man called Azad Ali. He was until this month the president of the Civil Service Islamic Society (he works at the Treasury). He is chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain's membership committee, and on the council of the civil liberties organisation, Liberty. He sits on a Whitehall body advising the Director of Public Prosecutions about counter-terrorism and is treasurer of the Muslim Safety Forum, which has an official role in trying to oversee police dealings with Muslims.
     In his blog – written, by coincidence, exactly a year before the Fort Hood massacre – Azad Ali described Imam al Awlaki as "one of my favourite speakers... I really do love him for the sake of Allah". On another occasion, he blogged in favour of a man who argued that it was a duty under jihad to kill British and American troops in Iraq. This week, Azad Ali lost a libel action against a newspaper which had highlighted his words. His case had an "absence of reality", said the judge. But still Azad Ali is in the Treasury, in the MCB, on the council of Liberty and giving his views about police behaviour in the Muslim Safety Forum.
     True, he has dissociated himself from al Awlaki since the Fort Hood massacre; but the story illustrates how difficult it is for our authorities. At every turn, there are bodies like the MSF, stuffed with people like Azad Ali, telling them that they are wrong, insensitive, over-reacting, and racist. And often excusing people like Azad Ali are civil libertarians, such as Liberty, in a weird alliance with some of the least libertarian people imaginable. An "absence of reality" indeed.
     There is a threat. Long before it translates into a deadly act, it begins as a deadly thought. To counter it, we must profile it.
[Site link]

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]

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – COSTS
Quangos are a luxury we don't need, and certainly can't afford
Jeff Randall
Daily Telegraph, 29 January 2010.

     The UK Film Council, a government-backed agency, the role of which is to ensure that "the economic, cultural and educational aspects of film are represented effectively at home and abroad", advertised for a head of diversity.
     This, I promise, is not a spoof. The council is looking for an "exceptional individual" to run its diversity department. Yes, department. How many of them are there, for goodness sake? ...
     ... According to the council's website, the right candidate will "develop an active dialogue with key groups and opinion formers", "allocate funding to diversity activities" and, naturally, "manage the diversity department team". It's true: there's a team.
     Now for the knockout question: what do you think the salary is? ... For context, here's a range of jobs currently on offer elsewhere in the public sector. A crime bureau investigator with Essex Police is paid £16k-£22k. A staff nurse at an acute-care hospital in central London gets £28k-£29k. An Army sergeant can expect £32k-£36k.
     ... But what about the Film Council's head of diversity? ... The answer is £70k, plus benefits.
     As a Cabinet minister said to me: "Could this task not have been handled by the Film Council's personnel officer?"

POPULATION PRESSURE – HOUSING, GREEN BELT
Green belt warning
Louise Gray
Daily Telegraph, 28 January 2010.

     The green belt is too important to the health of the nation to allow the planned construction of 200,000 homes on protected countryside, campaigners have warned.
     The Campaign to Protect Rural England said green belt land was threatened by the Government's plans to build three million homes by 2020.
     By analysing local authority records, the group calculated that there were proposals to build 199,000 homes on green belt land between now and 2026.

REPATRIATION/DEPORTATION – CRIME
Escaped detainees still at large
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 28 January 2010.

     More than 100 illegal migrants and foreign prisoners who escaped from removal centres are still at large in Britain.
     It means the Home Office and police failed to track down three out of four people who absconded from immigration centres in the past four years.
     A total of 148 people have escaped from immigration detention centres since 2006, of whom 108 have not been found. They are either illegal migrants, foreign prisoners who had finished their sentences or failed asylum seekers. All faced deportation.

CRIME – COSTS, IMPRISONMENT
Prisoners from 160 countries in British jails
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 27 January 2010.

     Britain has become the "United Nations of crime" with criminals from about 160 of the world's 192 recognised countries behind bars here.
     The disclosure that 80 per cent of the world's nations are represented in jails across England and Wales will raise fresh concerns over the impact of the Government's immigration policy on communities.
     Foreigners now make up one in seven of the prison population, at a large cost to the taxpayer. It costs around £40,000 a year to keep a prisoner in jail. ...
     In a written parliamentary answer, the Government disclosed that about 160 of the 192 nations recognised by the Foreign Office and United Nations are represented in prisons in England and Wales. Of those convicted, as opposed to being on remand, 10 countries account for 49 per cent of the foreign offenders, including Jamaica, Vietnam, Poland and China.
     About a third are convicted of violence or sex offences and almost a fifth are guilty of drug crimes. Other offences include robbery, burglary and fraud.
     Last month, there were 11,546 foreign prisoners in England and Wales, or 14 per cent of the 84,231 behind bars.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – NEW ZEALAND
Immigration always controversial in New Zealand - Feature
Earth Times, 27 January 2010.

     Today, Maoris account for only about 15 per cent of the 4.3 million population. Nearly one-in-four residents were born overseas, and significant numbers of migrants from the Pacific and from Asia have made New Zealand richly diverse and multi-cultural.
     A recent government study concluded there was no doubt that immigration benefited New Zealand hugely - helping boost the exports that the small trading nation relies on for its livelihood, growing the economy and generally enriching society. ...
     Although successive governments never admitted to an official "white New Zealand" policy, British people were allowed free entry and residence until the mid-1970s, when the world oil crisis and worsening conditions at home prompted a flood of new arrivals who threatened to overwhelm the country's infrastructure.
     Despite the introduction of controls, preference continued to be given to Britons until 1986, when a new policy announced that new immigrants would be selected "on personal merit without discrimination on grounds of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, sex or marital status, religion or ethical belief." ...
     By 1995, the number of people from North Asia - mainly Taiwan, China and Hong Kong - granted residence in New Zealand had jumped from just over 400 to more than 24,500.
     Residence approvals to British people, which totalled nearly 4,400 in 1986, increased by only 2,000 in the same period. ...
     Britons again topped the list of residence approvals in the budget year ending June 30 with 9,200 people, as Chinese fell from a peak of 10,000-plus in 2002-03 to fewer than 7,400.
     South Africans were the third highest number at 5,576, followed by Filipinos at 4,318.
     Many Taiwanese, whose numbers peaked at more than 12,300 in 1995 - nearly twice as many as Britain - became disenchanted with New Zealand First's anti-immigration campaign, and only 158 received residence approval last year.
     The government, which accepts that New Zealand continues to need migrants if it is to develop, maintains a target of 45,000-50,000 new immigrants a year, and the number of approvals actually topped 52,000 in 2008-09.
     The traffic is not one way. New Zealanders and Australians can move freely between their countries, and more than 420,000 New Zealanders live in Australia. Another 35,000 moved there in each of the last two years as New Zealand weathered recession.
     New Zealand has also become increasingly attractive to Australians, with 14,300 crossing the Tasman Sea to take up residence last year, nearly double the number making the move a decade earlier.
     This makes Australia the biggest source of migrants to New Zealand last year, though they do not figure in official immigration statistics because of the historic freedom of movement between the two neighbours.
[Site link]

CRIME – MARRIAGE, REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
Gardai halt wedding over fears that union is 'bogus'
Allison Bray
Irish Independent, 26 January 2010.

     A Pakistani man's plans to walk down the aisle with a Lithuanian teenager this week were cancelled after gardai objected to the marriage.
     The Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) intervened to stop Muhammad Shafi's marriage to the 18-year-old woman from going ahead. ...
     However, the wedding was cancelled after GNIB Det Chief Supt John O'Driscoll lodged an objection to the marriage on the basis that immigration officials believe it would be a marriage of convenience for residency purposes.
     The bureau's intervention was revealed in court yesterday after Mr Shafi was fined €250. He had pleaded guilty at Blanchardstown District Court to possessing both a bogus Italian and Hungarian passport. ...
     The court heard that Mr Shafi was one of more than 20 cricket players from Pakistan who arrived here on a seven-day visa for a supposed cricket match in July, 2008, but that the entire "team" disappeared after gaining entry to the State.
     The matter of so-called residency marriages was also raised by Justice Minister Dermot Ahern this weekend at an EU summit on immigration in Spain, where he said there was growing evidence of such abuse.
     "The love affair between Pakistan and the Baltic states shows no sign of abating," he said. ...
     Fine Gael's immigration spokesman Denis Naughton, meanwhile, said the case illustrated the urgent need to crack down on such sham marriages.
     "In 2006, 1,207 applications for residency were made in Ireland by non-EU nationals by virtue of being married to an non-Irish EU citizen. In 2009 this figure rose to 2,116. Unusually, even though the number of EU nationals resident in Ireland is reducing, the numbers seeking residency on the basis of marriage to an EU citizen has increased by 175pc."
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – AUSTRALIA, RACISM, POLITICS
Immigration debate 'stifled by racism'
news.com.au, 25 January 2010.

     Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says Australians must be able to engage in a mature debate about immigration without being branded racist.
     Mr Abbott has been criticised for saying last week that he believed some Australians were anxious that citizenship was granted too lightly.
     But he said there must be room for a debate on immigration, without allegations of racism immediately being thrown around.
     "What I said was that there was an anxiety among some people that this might be the case," he told ABC Radio today.
     "I think that when people see a questioning of what might be described as core Australian values, I think when people see boat people being let in in ways which look like the Government has backed down, I think this whole population issue feeds into an immigration debate."
     He added: "We've always had our anxieties about immigration but I have to say that by and large we've managed a really successful immigration program despite those anxieties.
     "The important thing is to be able to have a mature and intelligent debate about immigration without ... the instant (that) issues are raised, people rushing around with accusations of racism."
     He said people came to Australia from all over the world, with all sorts of attitudes.
     "But once we get here I think it is important that we remember that we are part of the Australian team," he said. ...
     Mr Abbott later said: "I think the greatest prize in the world is to be an Australian.
     "I think we can only take in a certain number of people and as long as that program is run firmly in Australia's national interest we can continue to be a great country of immigrants," he said.
[Site link]

TERRORISM – ISLAM
Leading Muslim fears a 'new 7/7' is imminent
Jonathan Wynne-Jones
Sunday Telegraph, 24 January 2010.

     Britain will remain a target for home-grown suicide bombers for years to come because Muslims have not fully integrated into society, a senior government adviser has warned.
     Iqbal Wahhab, a Muslim businessman, said divisions between Islamic communities and the wider population will remain for another 100 years.
     He blamed Labour for failing to tackle the unemployment and deprivation he argues are factors in leading young Muslims to turn to extremism.
     Mr Wahhab, who chairs a Whitehall panel that advises ministers on race issues, expressed deep concern that Britain will suffer more attacks in the future as the terrorists become more sophisticated and more Muslims become radicalised.
     His comments follow a report that said Britain is believed to have the greatest number of Islamic extremists linked to al-Qaeda of any Western nation.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – AUSTRALIA
Population boom risks starvation
Dick Smith
news.com.au, 24 January 2010.

     Plans to massively boost Australia's population are a bad idea and must be stopped, entrepreneur Dick Smith says.
     The Federal Government favours a "big Australia" and wants to increase the country's headcount from 22 million to 35 million by 2050, largely by immigration.
     But Mr Smith said this was ridiculous.
     "We need to do something about this incredible increase," he said at an Australian of the Year dinner in Parliament House today.
     "No one is allowed to talk about it ... I am."
     Mr Smith said Australia did not have enough water or food to support millions more people.
     It was crazy that seawater was being desalinated for drinking water to supply a booming population.
     "I believe in 100 years time people in Australia will be starving to death."
     The intake of skilled migrants should be slashed and women should be discouraged from having more than two babies, Mr Smith said.
     He believes nine out of 10 Australians do not want a population boom.
     Mr Smith is working on a documentary on the issue.
     The Government wants to increase the population because it means more young taxpayers to pay the rising health and pension costs of the ageing population.
     But a recent poll showed most people did not like that plan and some green groups have voiced concerns about the environmental costs.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – AUSTRALIA, PUBLIC OPINION, MULTICULTURALISM
Poll shows Aussies want immigration capped
Ellen Whinnett and Carly Hennessy
Sunday Mail [Australia], 24 January 2010.

     Australians are spooked by record high immigration and also believe the country is increasingly racist, according to an exclusive Sunday Mail poll by Galaxy.
     Two-thirds of respondents - 66 per cent - think the Federal Government should cap immigration rates.
     Of these, 72 per cent of Australians polled favour an immigration cap, while 55 per cent of those who live here but do not consider themselves Australian also favoured an immigration cap.
     Leading immigration expert Dr Bob Birrell said the figures show "the tide is turning".
     "It's a significant finding because it suggests public discussion of congestion and house prices may be beginning to bite," Dr Birrell said yesterday.
     In the past four to five years, polling indicated Australians were reasonably comfortable with immigration levels, which are based on a Government target of around 190,000 a year.
     The results come as Opposition Leader Tony Abbott used an Australia Day Council address during the week to raise immigration issues, stand by the tough stance on boat arrivals in the Howard era and suggest he favoured more migration to boost our population.
     "My instinct is to extend to as many people as possible the freedom and benefits of life in Australia," Mr Abbott said.
     Dr Birrell said the economic shock of the global financial crisis, increasing house prices and continuing controversy over illegal immigration would have played a part in changing opinions.
     He also pointed to the fact that only 55 per cent of non-Australians were in favour of an immigration cap, compared to 72 per cent of locally-born Australians.
     Dr Birrell said Australian-born people took a more negative view of immigration, because they did not like their culture threatened by change. ...
     More than half the respondents felt Australia had changed for the worse in the past 20 years. ...
     And, perhaps reflecting recent controversy over the violence inflicted on Indian students in Melbourne and Adelaide, 52 per cent of respondents think we are a racist nation, 45 per cent say we're not and 3 per cent are undecided.
     And while 63 per cent rate the standard of living the best thing about Australia today, only 5 per cent rated multiculturalism the best thing. ...
     He said Asian respondents had been the most optimistic, with 62 per cent of those who considered themselves of Asian ethnicity saying they believed Australia was changing for the better.
[Site link]

RACISM – EMPLOYMENT, DISCRIMINATION, TEST
How racist are you? Workplace test will tell
Martin Beckford
Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2010.

     Employers will be encouraged to find out how bigoted they are using a new test developed by the Government.
     The online tool, called Know Yourself, will describe a series of scenarios to users and ask them to give their reactions.
     It will analyse replies and determine whether the manager subconsciously discriminates against job candidates based on their race, age, gender or disability.
     The Department for Work and Pensions is developing the 10-minute bias quiz with Ernst & Young after a "sting operation" last year found that employers were less likely to offer interviews to applicants with Asian or African names.
     Details were included in a document called Tackling Race Inequality, which was published by the Government last week. ...
     A spokesman said: "The tool is for self-assessment purposes only and the results are known only to the user.
     "It is not designed to report behaviours to line managers or to gather information for Government."

EGALITARIANISM – INEQUALITY
White working class areas being failed
Rosa Prince
Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2010.

     White working-class communities are among the most disadvantaged in the country, a report into inequality will confirm next week.
     The independent report, commissioned by the Government and chaired by Prof John Hills of the London School of Economics, is understood to provide evidence confirming that poor white areas are being failed by the authorities. ...
     The Daily Telegraph understands that the report also echoes some of the warning given by John Denham, the Communities Secretary, earlier this month, when he accused state agencies of focusing too closely on ethnic minorities.

CRIME – PROSTITUTION, TRAFFICKING, SHOPLIFTING, BENEFIT FRAUD
Prostitution linked to trafficking gangs
HeraldScotland, 22 January 2010.

     An illegal sex industry is seen as a "market opportunity" for organised gangs trafficking women into Scotland, a police body has said.
     The claim was made to MSPs investigating the economic impact of human trafficking and migration.
     The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (Acpos) said people-smuggling generates large amounts of money for gangs and opportunistic criminals, particularly in the Strathclyde force area.
     It also described the multi-million-pound cost to the economy of benefit fraud linked to migration. ...
     Acpos also detailed an operation which found more than 100 Slovakian children were involved in an £8 million two-year fraud.
     The submission added: "This is an example of the economic damage of trafficking for benefit fraud.
     "Although this operation only identified two incidents of trafficking for exploitation, it is believed that many of the families involved were brought to the UK by criminals under false pretence of jobs and simply sent home when their personal details had been obtained, unaware that their migration had been a 'scam"'.
     Organised crime groups from Lithuania were also identified as operating in Scotland, trafficking young men to carry out shoplifting.
     Police said "large amounts" of stolen goods were being sent back to the Baltic country - and the people carrying out the crimes were being threatened with serious assault.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION – POLES
Are Poles returning home?
Sanchia Berg
BBC, 22 January 2010.

     A leading Polish expert on migration has told the BBC that it is simply not true that half the Polish migrants in the UK have returned home.
     A recent report estimated that at least half the 1.5 million eastern European migrants who have come to the UK since 2004 have returned home.
     Most migrants - one million - are estimated to be Polish.
     "We do not see them here," says Prof Krystyna Iglicka, of the Centre for International Affairs in Warsaw.
     The report, commissioned by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), follows a 2008 report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) in 2008 which also said half the migrants had returned.
     But the Polish Central Statistical Office produces its own estimates of Poles working abroad. According to their figures, the total rose consistently until 2008, when there was a slight fall - a fraction of the British estimates.
     Professor Iglicka cited real figures too - not estimates - for the numbers of the returning Poles who have registered at their local labour offices.
     She said they would have to do this to transfer any benefits earned abroad, or to claim benefit in Poland. The figures for 2008 were just 22,000 for the whole country.
     There are as yet no figures nor estimates for 2009, but Professor Iglicka said she would expect a large number of returnees to affect the labour market or unemployment figures - both of which have remained stable.
     She personally would assume that around a million Polish migrants - workers, dependents, students - remain in Britain.
     Dr Pawel Kaczmarczyk of the Centre for Migration at Warsaw University helped the Polish government set up the "powroty" or return website, which was intended to help entice the migrants back.
     But he too says that the great return has not taken place. He also considers the British estimates inaccurate.
     "Definitely 50 percent did not come back," he said.
     It was the IPPR which came up with a way of calculating the numbers of migrants who have left, using existing data and some additional research. The second report by the Migration Policy Institute built on their work.
     The IPPR have defended their methods - saying that their technique is robust, and the best that could be done with the data available.
     Director of Strategic Communication at the IPPR Tim Finch stressed that all such work came with a "health warning" and wouldn't be 100% accurate. He suggested that the missing Poles might have gone to another European country.
[Site link]

EXTREMISM – POLICE, ISLAM
Muslim police say Islam not to blame for terror attacks
Robert Winnett
Daily Telegraph, 21 January 2010.

     Muslim police officers have rebelled openly against the Government's anti-terrorism strategy, warning that it is an "affront to British values" which threatens to trigger ethnic unrest.
     The National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) claimed that ministers were wrong to blame Islam for being the "driver" behind recent terrorist attacks.
     Far-Right extremists were a more dangerous threat to national security, it said.
     The officers told MPs that Muslims were being "stigmatised" by the Government's attempts to tackle terrorism, which was adding to "hatred" against entire communities.
     In the official intervention, the association said the Government's anti-terrorism policies could not "continue unchecked".
     The comments, made in a seven-page memorandum to a parliamentary committee investigating extremism, are embarrassing for Gordon Brown. ...
     The organisation, which represents more than 2,000 officers, was previously publicly backed by Mr Brown. ... ...
     There is growing criticism among Muslim groups of the government strategy, which was welcomed by mainstream police organisations.

EMPLOYMENT – DOCTORS
Patients 'at risk' from foreign doctors
Rebecca Smith
Daily Telegraph, 21 January 2010.

     Patients are not being properly protected from poor foreign doctors, the General Medical Council has warned.
     The council called for tighter rules on doctors brought in from abroad.
     European rules mean that medical qualifications from within the EU must be recognised even if they are not up to British standards.
     The doctors' regulator cannot order language or skills testing and must allow them on the medical register to practise here.
     It is left to employers to ensure they are happy with the competency of doctors. ...
     Niall Dickson, the new chief executive of the GMC, said: "The current situation is profoundly unsatisfactory.
     "To ensure patient safety, when doctors register with us we need to be able to test their English language proficiency and we need to be able to test their clinical knowledge and skills. At present we can do that for doctors from outside Europe but we can't do it with doctors from within the European Economic Area."

EGALITARIANISM – RELIGION, CHRISTIANITY
Christians 'forced out of jobs'
Daily Telegraph, 21 January 2010.

     Christians are being forced out of jobs in the public sector because of a secular agenda against them, according to a senior cleric.
     The Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Rev Michael Scott-Joynt, told the House of Lords that councils, police forces and judges were wrongly using rules on equality and diversity to punish Christians.
     He claimed that religion was seen as "undesirable" by many employers, who wanted Christians to keep their faith "in a little box" rather than express it in public or at work.
     The bishop, the fifth most senior prelate in the Church of England, spoke in support of an amendment to the Equality Bill that would ensure that workers were not penalised for Christian acts such as offering prayers.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – USA, RACE, ETHNICITY
Census Figures Challenge Views of Race and Ethnicity
Sam Roberts
New York Times, 21 January 2010.

     New census figures that provide a snapshot of America's foreign-born population are challenging conventional views of immigration, race and ethnicity.
     What it means to be African-American, for example, may be redefined by the record number of blacks – now nearly 1 in 10 – born abroad, according to the report from American Community Survey data, which was released Wednesday. It found that Africa now accounts for one in three foreign-born blacks in this country, another modern record.
     More than 1 in 50 Americans now identify themselves as "multiracial." But the pattern of race reporting for foreign-born Americans, is markedly different than for native-born Americans. The foreign born are more likely to list their nation of origin when identifying race or ethnicity.
     For example, while 87 percent of Americans born in Cuba and 53 percent born in Mexico identified themselves as white, a majority born in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, who are newer immigrants, described themselves as neither black nor white.
     "The concept of race and how we view it culturally has changed," said Elizabeth M. Grieco, chief of the Census Bureau's immigration statistics staff, which analyzed 2007 data. "It's a part of not knowing where they fit into how we define race in the United States."
     Recent arrivals "might not be sure how to classify themselves," Dr. Grieco said. (The census treats race and Hispanic origin as separate categories.)
     The changing perception of race is being driven largely by immigration and higher birthrates among the foreign born. While immigrants account for 13 percent of the population, the share of recent births to foreign-born mothers rose to 20 percent. As a result of intermarriage with native-born Americans, a growing number of American children – now more than one in four under the age of 6 – are being raised by at least one foreign-born parent. ...
     Kenneth M. Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, noted that more that two-thirds of the growth of the Hispanic population last year came from births, not immigration.
     "You could shut off immigration tomorrow and the impact of the foreign born on U.S. demographic trends would still be a powerful force," he said.
     Among the nation's 37.3 million blacks, more than 8 percent are now foreign born, compared with 1 percent in 1960. Of those, more than half came from the Caribbean. Some 34 percent emigrated from Africa, compared with 1 percent in 1960.
     The census recorded 10,500 American blacks born in Africa in 1970; in 2008, the number of African-born Americans topped one million for the first time.
     Seventy-eight percent of native-born Americans reported their race as white, followed by 13 percent who said they were black. Among the foreign born, 46 percent identified themselves as white and 23 percent as Asian.
     Since 2000, the Hispanic foreign-born population has increased 45 percent, to 18.5 million from 12.8 million. Latin Americans represent more than half of the foreign-born population.
     Among all who identified themselves as Asian-Americans, which is often understood to mean born here, 67 percent were, in fact, foreign born.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – ISRAEL
PM: Infiltrators pull us towards Third World
Tani Goldstein
Ynet News, 21 January 2010.

     In speech to Manufacturers Association, Netanyahu warns against 'surge of refugees who threaten to wash away our achievements, damage our existence as Jewish democratic state'.
     "Infiltrators cause cultural, social and economic damage, and pull us towards the Third World," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a Manufacturers Association assembly.
     "We suffer from a problem that actually stems from Israel's economic success," he said, explaining the problems that arise from the breached border with Egypt.
     "We have become almost the only First World country that can be reached by foot from the Third World. We are flooded with surge of refugees who threaten to wash away our achievements and damage our existence as a Jewish democratic state."
     He went on to say, "Anyone walking around Arad, Eilat, or even south Tel Aviv today, can see this wave, and the change it is creating, with their own eyes. They are causing socio-economic and cultural damage and threaten to take us back down to the level of the Third World. They take the jobs of the weakest Israelis." ...
     Addressing the members of the Manufacturers Association, he said, "You will not like this, but we plan to legislate strict laws and enforce them with a firm hand against the illegal employment of infiltrators and foreign workers." ...
     "This is a strategic decision, that will ensure the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel," he said at the time, while promising that, "Israel will remain open to war refugees, but will not allow its borders to be used to flood it will illegal foreign workers."
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – NEW ZEALAND
China displaces UK in family migration to NZ
Lincoln Tan
The New Zealand Herald, 18 January 2010.
[The first of a three-part series on migration trends and their impact]

     China has for the first time outstripped New Zealand's traditional source of family immigration - the United Kingdom - to produce the highest number of new residents through the Family Sponsored Stream and the Partnership policy.
     Figures issued today in the Department of Labour's Migration Trends and Outlook also show that last year, for the second time in five years, China was New Zealand's top source of new immigrants aged 20 and over.
     There were 6361 new Chinese residents aged 20 and over, topping the UK's 6302.
     China also produced the highest number of new residents through the Parent Sibling Adult Child Stream and the Parent policy.
     "The growth in Chinese immigrant numbers overall reflects the fact that increasing numbers of Chinese nationals are choosing to study here, gain recognised qualifications and then compete for and obtain skilled employment in New Zealand," said Immigration Minister Jonathan Coleman.
     Dr Coleman said New Zealand's immigration policy was designed "to attract the type of migrants we want".
     Family policies were aimed at reuniting close family members, with caps on numbers of parents and adult siblings who could be approved in any year.
     Professor Paul Spoonley, a Massey University immigration researcher, said New Zealand's immigration policies and "centre of gravity" requirements made it easy for Chinese nationals to sponsor parents and family members to come to New Zealand because of China's one-child policy.
     "Unless there's a major shift in policy, this trend of more Chinese coming is unlikely to change," said Professor Spoonley. ...
     A total of 46,097 people were granted permanent residence in New Zealand last year, 62 per cent of them from the skilled and business stream.
     Overall, the UK was still the biggest source with 8641 new residents - but 2339 were aged 19 or younger, possibly children of the main applicants.
     Most of the new Chinese residents were either aged 20-29 (4202) or aged 50 and over (1146), and business analyst Keng Lim said it showed New Zealand was not getting the "right type" of Chinese immigrants. ...
     Labour's China-born list MP, Raymond Huo, said the rise in numbers of Chinese immigrants was just part of "the natural progression of things" which was a reality New Zealand must learn to face.
[Site link]

EMPLOYMENT – WAGES
Migrants ARE driving down wages of the poor as equalities watchdog blames East European influx
James Slack
Daily Mail, 18 January 2010.

     The 'almost unprecedented' influx of 1.5 million Eastern European workers into the UK in recent years is likely to have driven down the wages of less well-off Britons, the equalities watchdog said yesterday.
     Poorer parts of the country may become locked in a 'vicious circle' where the only jobs which are created are low-skilled and likely to be taken by migrants, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission said in a landmark study.
     The research also found that, overall, Eastern Europeans had better employment rates than British workers and had received dramatically bigger pay rises from bosses who value their 'excellent work ethic'.
     'Their wages have grown by an average of 5 per cent a year compared with 1 per cent for natives', the study says. Many are highly skilled but downgrade their 'occupational status' when they come to the UK, making them more attractive to employers.
     Researchers for the EHRC examined dozens of studies into the 'almost unprecedented scale and speed' of migration from Eastern Europe since 2004 when the UK's labour market was thrown open to workers from Poland and seven other former Eastern Bloc countries.
     They estimate that 1.5 million people have arrived here, although only 700,000 remain, and found that the 'new EU citizens' overall fiscal impact is probably small but positive'.
     But their report adds: 'Perhaps more significant is the impact on local areas: local public services have had to adjust to concentrated increases in population and larger numbers of non-English speakers.' ...
     Ministers had always denied that pay to British workers had suffered from the influx of Eastern Europeans predominantly doing low-skilled jobs.
     But the report, written for the EHRC by the Migration Policy Institute, says: 'The recent migration may have reduced wages slightly at the bottom end of the labour market, especially for certain groups of vulnerable workers, and there is a risk that it could contribute to a "low-skill equilibrium" in some economically depressed areas.'
     It defines this as 'a situation in which the local labour force has low skill levels and so local employers only create low-productivity jobs'.
[Site link]

REPATRIATION/DEPORTATION – COSTS
Six-year farce of asylum seeker who wants to go home and has been trying to escape FROM Britain
Rebecca Camber
Daily Mail, 18 January 2010.

     Unlike the many asylum seekers desperate to remain in Britain, all Rashid Ali wants is to leave and get out of the cold.
     The 31-year-old Moroccan has spent the past six years trying to escape and has stowed away on cargo ships at least six times.
     Yet more than 12 months after a judge vowed to 'kick some backsides' and get him deported, he remains stuck in the system.
     He is being held in a detention centre costing taxpayers more than £100 a night.
     Immigration officials say they will not send him home until he produces his passport, as the authorities in his native country will not allow him in without proof that he is one of its citizens.
     But Ali ripped up his passport and identity papers on arriving in Britain in 2004, hoping he would have more chance of gaining asylum if he pretended to be Algerian.
     It was in December 2008 that Judge Michael Hubbard, QC, vowed to 'kick some backsides', saying he would write to government ministers to make sure Ali was promptly repatriated.
     But with border officials still at an impasse with Moroccan authorities, there appears little prospect of Ali being allowed to leave, even though the saga has cost the public more than £300,000. ...
     Eventually he was jailed for nine months in June 2005 after stealing a coat to keep warm.
     North Somerset magistrates ordered him to be deported after serving his sentence. ...
     At Bristol Crown Court in December 2008, Judge Hubbard called for an inquiry, saying it beggared belief that the Home Office had failed to repatriate him. ...
     It costs around £43,000 a year to lock up failed asylum seekers - more expensive than sending them on a world cruise. ...
     Removal centres cost so much to run because they must follow rules including providing failed asylum seekers with activities, TVs and health care.
[Site link]

TERRORISM – ISLAM, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
GOP rep.: Ft. Hood report 'sanitized'
Jake Sherman
Politico, 18 January 2010.

     The Pentagon's 86-page report on the Fort Hood massacre was "sanitized" to avoid discussing Islamic terrorism, the congressman who represents the base told POLITICO Monday.
     The report, released last week, says that the Army's middle management missed signals about Nidal Malik Hasan in the months leading up to the mass shooting.
     But missing from the report is any discussion of what Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) said was the a "crisis" with Islamic terrorism. Hasan allegedly wore ritual Muslim garb shouted "God is great" in Arabic when opening fire on a group of soldiers on the base – facts Carter said should have been disclosed in the report to help soldiers identify such signs in the future.
     A search of the report does not turn up any mentions of Islam.
     "People are afraid to speak out and label someone because they'll be accused of being a racist or accused of profiling or being prejudiced against a certain religion or race of people," Carter told POLITICO. "But in a time of national crisis, which I believe we are in, all identifiers must be discussed."
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION – PUBLIC OPINION, POLITICS
Cameron's call for immigration cap woos voters in Labour seats
David Leppard
The Sunday Times, 17 January 2010.

     David Cameron could clinch a general election victory by placing a cap of 50,000 on net immigration, a new opinion poll shows.
     A YouGov poll in 43 Labour marginals shows that nearly half the respondents were more likely to vote Tory if Cameron backed a 50,000 cap.
     The poll is significant because it suggests for the first time that immigration curbs could have a decisive impact on the general election result.
     The Conservatives need to win the marginals to help to secure an effective working majority at the election.
     With 85% of voters worried about the population reaching 70m by the end of the next decade, the poll indicates that Cameron's pledge to cut net migration to ensure the population remains below that figure could reap benefits.
     The Tories will seize on the poll as evidence that placing immigration centre stage in their coming campaign will not backfire, as it did when Michael Howard led the Tories to defeat in 2005.
     Then, any talk of a cap on migrants was considered political suicide by most MPs. But the recession and the pressure that record migration has put on jobs and public services has transformed the debate. ... ...
     The poll, commissioned by Migrationwatch, a right-wing think tank, found that only the economy is more important than immigration to voters in Labour seats.
     When asked which issue was most likely to influence them, 36% of voters in Labour seats named the economy while 13% said it was immigration. Taxation, at 8%, and health, at 6%, were next.
     YouGov found that 85% of people in the Labour marginals were worried about the population reaching 70m, with 49% saying they were "very worried".
     The poll found that 44% in Labour marginals would be more likely to vote Conservative if Cameron were to say outright that a Tory government would reduce immigration to 50,000 or below.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS
Clegg attacks Tory plans on immigration and marriage tax breaks, and calls for area-based policies for migrant workers
Daily Mail, 17 January 2010.

     Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg today said that he would reform the immigration system by allowing workers into the country on an area by area basis to address the shortage of workers in the north while clamping down on over-saturation of migrant-workers in south-east England.
     Mr Clegg said Conservative plans to introduce a cap on immigrants completely ignored parts of Britain where 'some industries were crying out for people'.
     He called instead for an Australia-style area-based immigration policy, which would tie an immigrant worker to a particular part of Britain, and would not allow them to work in a more congested part of the nation.
     'Some parts of Scotland ... and the fruit-picking trade in Lincolnshire, for example, badly need more workers to come in,' the Lib Dem leader said.
     He said it was absolutely plausible to make people register to work in a particular area if there is a shortage of workers there in a system that has proven to work in Australia.
[Site link]

RACISM – USA, POLITICS, CANDOUR
King's dream is kept in the dark as race remains taboo
Toby Harnden
Sunday Telegraph, 17 January 2010.

     The matter in hand was comments by Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, made during the 2008 election campaign. Obama was electable, Reid observed, because he was "light-skinned" and did not "speak with a Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one".
     Reid knew he was in big trouble and immediately rushed out a statement of apology when his words, quoted in a new campaign book, became public.
     He had forgotten that race was a taboo subject.
     His use of the term "Negro" was a little anachronistic, though the National Council of Negro Women and United Negro College Fund still exist. But it wasn't exactly the other N-word.
     Reid, ..., has said many stupid things. ... ...
     But this time his sin was really to speak the truth. ... ...
     It was Republicans who jumped on Reid and accused him, with stultifying predictability, of being a racist. But Democrats have played the same game. ...
     Republican operatives confide that one of the reasons why Michael Steele cannot be ousted as party chairman just yet – despite widespread dissatisfaction with his performance – is because he is black. ...
     American politicians have got themselves into a real bind. They have to fret constantly about race but cannot talk honestly about it.

TERRORISM – EXTREMISM, ISLAM
British al-Qaeda hub 'is biggest in West'
Con Coughlin and James Kirkup
Daily Telegraph, 16 January 2010.

     Britain has the greatest number of Islamic extremists linked to al-Qaeda of any Western country and poses a grave risk to international security, the US government believes.
     Terrorist groups are using this country as a base to plot attacks around the world, say officials.
     American leaders believe the Government is failing to combat the threat of extremism among Muslims living in Britain. ...
     "The level of al-Qaeda activity in Britain is becoming a major source of concern," said a senior State Department official. ... ...
     Among some US politicians and security experts, the British capital has been dubbed "Londonistan" because of the presence of so many radical Muslims and mosques with connections to extremist preachers. ...
     UCL, together with many other British universities, has been accused of failing to stop radical preachers giving talks on campus for fear of being accused of Islamophobia. ...
     Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, said in 2008 that his service was aware of around 2,000 radicalised Muslims in Britain who might be involved in terrorism plots. The Security Service has not updated that number since, but American officials believe it has risen.

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."

RACISM – HONG KONG
Vocal Witness
Ishaan Tharoor
Time, 25 January 2010.
[This magazine is published more than a week before the date it carries]

     Fermi Wong had her moment of revelation one day in 1998. The social worker was roving the streets ...
     But while Hong Kong, a city whose 7 million population is more than 90% Chinese, garbs itself with a sleek cosmopolitanism, casual bigotry still shapes the daily experience of many of its nonwhite, non-Chinese residents. Local Chinese, Wong says, have a lack of understanding of minorities in their city, especially South Asians and Africans, and cling to shallow and negative stereotypes. ... Even many of Wong's social-worker colleagues are bewildered by her interest in defending the rights of South Asians over improving the lot of fellow Chinese. "There is no empathy here," she says. ...
     Countering both widespread cultural biases and an indifferent government has been an uphill battle. ...
     She has lectured at police academies "that not every South Asian is a potential criminal." ... "No one is born racist," says Wong. "Discrimination is learned."

MULTICULTURALISM – RACISM, CLASS
Labour admits ignoring white working class
James Kirkup
Daily Telegraph, 15 January 2010.

     White working-class people have been left behind by Labour's policies and can suffer greater disadvantage than successful members of ethnic minorities, a minister admitted yesterday.
     In a shift in Labour's approach, John Denham, the Communities Secretary, said that social class was sometimes more important than race in determining the progress that people made in life.
     His attempt to "move on" from Labour thinking on racial equality and social policy came after the British National Party made electoral breakthroughs in Labour heartlands last year.
     In another departure, Mr Denham also accepted that the unprecedented levels of immigration overseen by Labour had "a big impact" on race relations in Britain. ...
     Yesterday Mr Denham claimed that Labour's race policies had addressed many of the race-based inequalities that minorities used to suffer, which allowed ministers to "broaden the focus" to address the class divide. ...
     "We must avoid a one-dimensional debate that assumes all minority ethnic people are disadvantaged," he said. Non-white people were no longer automatically disadvantaged because of their race.

MULTICULTURALISM
Bishop: multicultural experiment a mistake we must not repeat
Martin Beckford
Daily Telegraph, 15 January 2010.

     Britain must never again repeat the multicultural experiment of recent decades, a prominent clergyman said yesterday.
     The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, said immigrants should accept Britain's Christian values and be willing to adapt to them.
     He also called for an end to the segregation of Muslims in British cities, which he said provided a breeding ground for extremists.
     The bishop made his comments after Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, backed a campaign by the cross-party Balanced Immigration Group to stop Britain's population reaching 70 million.
     Bishop Nazir-Ali, who grew up in Pakistan, said in a statement: "Both he and the group are right that every country has limits to the numbers of new arrivals that it can accommodate and the UK, in particular, as a small country cannot take an indefinite number of people who wish to live here.
     "The question, however, is not simply one of numbers but also of the quality of would-be immigrants. One of the missing features of the mass immigration of the 1950s and 60s was any concern for the congruence of such immigration with the values, culture and language of the host country. We must never again allow this to happen.
     "All would-be immigrants should be willing to adapt to living in a context shaped by traditional British values, which have been largely derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
     "This does not, of course, exclude their own contribution once they are here, but we should expect not hostility but a desire to become good residents or, for some, citizens. ..."

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – GERMANY
Politicians reject immigrant quota for public service sector
The Local [Germany's news in English], 15 January 2010.

     Politicians on Friday rejected legally mandated quotas to increase the number of people with immigrant backgrounds in public sector jobs.
     The federal government's integration commissioner, Maria Böhmer, on Thursday announced she backed an initiative to make sure civil service employment better reflected the population of Germany – where every fifth resident has an immigration background.
     But on Friday politicians from her own conservatives as well as those from the opposition centre-left Social Democrats rejected any sort of affirmative action to boost recruitment.
     "A quota is not compatible with our constitutional and legal culture," SPD deputy parliamentary group leader Olaf Scholz told daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.
     Scholz said that the goal was admirable, but a target was not suitable for its achievement. Instead personnel management in the public sector should be more active in bringing people from immigrant backgrounds into their fold, he said.
     Meanwhile conservative MP Hans-Peter Uhl also said he rejected legal requirements to employ a certain sector of the population.
     "It's a legal automatism that leads to abuse," he told the paper, adding that such a measure would only be suitable for cities, because rural areas had a lower proportion of immigrants.
     But the head of the TGD Turkish advocacy group Kenan Kolat told daily Berliner Zeitung that he was in favour of the initiative.
     "Only a quota can insure that the population structure mirrors itself in public and administrative offices," he said, rejecting the assumption that too few immigrants possess the skills to qualify for such jobs.
[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.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
Refugee racism 'worse during recession'
Jennifer Hough
Irish Examiner, 13 January 2010.

     Irish attitudes towards immigrants are changing for the better but the recession is making integration more difficult, the head of the Refugee Information Service has warned.
     Speaking at the launch of a new integration guide for immigrant youth and parents – the first ever of its kind – Jo Ahern said during the Celtic Tiger things were easier for people, but now in the recession, with 18% of all dole claimants immigrants, it was becoming more difficult.
     The issues surrounding integration are not going away though, Ms Ahern said.
     "Given the current global economic crisis, there were still close to 60,000 people who moved here in 2009, taking the estimated total number of first and second generation immigrants living in Irish communities to more than half a million people," she said.
     "Integration therefore continues to present significant challenges and opportunities in terms of the current and longer term contexts."
     Ms Ahern said most migrants tended to remain and now the children of those who had come in the Celtic Tiger era were growing up.
[Site link]

RACISM – DISCRIMINATION, LENDING, USA
Justice Dept. Fights Bias in Lending
Charlie Savage
New York Times, 13 January 2010.

     The Justice Department is beginning a major campaign against banks and mortgage brokers suspected of discriminating against minority applicants in lending, opening a new front in the Obama administration's response to the foreclosure crisis.
     Tom Perez, the assistant attorney general for the department's Civil Rights Division, is expected to announce Thursday in New York that the administration is creating a new unit that will focus exclusively on unfair lending practices.
     "We are looking at any and every practice in the industry," Mr. Perez said in a recent interview. ...
     Mr. Perez plans to formally announce the new unit at the "Wall Street Project" conference organized by the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. He characterized the effort as a major turnaround, and criticized the previous administration as failing to scrutinize lending practices amid the subprime mortgage boom.
     While past lending discrimination cases primarily focused on "redlining" – a bank's refusal to lend to qualified borrowers in minority areas – the new push will instead center on a more recent phenomenon critics have called "reverse redlining."
     In reverse redlining, a mortgage brokerage or bank systematically singles out minority neighborhoods for loans with inferior terms like high up-front fees, high interest rates and lax underwriting practices. Because the original lender would typically resell such a loan after collecting its fees, it did not care about the risk of foreclosure.
     It is a rarely used theory, and it carries political risks. Some critics have contended that government rules pushing banks to lend to minority and low-income borrowers contributed to the financial meltdown. The campaign could rekindle that debate.
     "They encourage lenders to make risky loans for reasons such as diversity, and then when lenders have a problem because they made too many risky loans, they condemn them for that," said Ernest Istook, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma.
     Still, Mr. Istook emphasized that he was "not defending anybody who engages in wrongful redlining practices." ...
     Under federal civil rights laws, a lending practice is illegal if it has a disparate impact on minority borrowers, and the Obama administration is signaling that it intends to make the enforcing of fair lending laws a signature policy push in 2010.
     The division has already opened 38 investigations into accusations of lending discrimination.
[Site link]

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – HERITAGE
'Pointless' push to attract minorities to historic sites
Stephen Adams
Daily Telegraph, 12 January 2010.

     An initiative to encourage more people from minorities to visit historic sites has been pointless, MPs have said.
     English Heritage was set "unrealistic targets" to attract more ethnic minorities, poorer people and those with disabilities, according to a report by the Commons' public accounts committee. ...
     The department for Culture, Media and Sport met its aim for the number of people from black and ethnic minority groups visiting historic sites between 2005 and 2008. But it failed to attract enough people from lower socio-economic groups or those with disabilities.

MULTICULTURALISM – ISLAM
Muslim prisoners reject 'reform' group therapy
Daily Telegraph, 12 January 2010.

     Muslim prisoners are refusing to take part in group therapy sessions saying it is against their religion to talk about their "past crimes" in front of others.
     Scores of Britain's 10,000 Muslim prisoners – one in eight of all inmates – are refusing to take part in Offending Behaviour Programmes, claiming it is forbidden or "haraam".

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – ISRAEL
Israel to build another security wall on Egyptian border
Rob Crilly
Daily Telegraph, 12 January 2010.

     Israel has unveiled plans for a security barrier along the Egyptian border to keep out militants and African migrants.
     The country already has hundreds of miles of fences and walls designed to keep out terrorists. ...
     Announcing the £167 million project, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said: "This is a strategic decision to ensure the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel. Israel will remain open to war refugees but we cannot allow thousands of illegal workers to infiltrate into Israel via the southern border and flood our country."

POPULATION PRESSURE – ECOLOGY
Humans' success speeds up extinction
Daily Telegraph, 12 January 2010.

     Human expansion is wiping out species at about 1,000 times the "natural" rate and something must be done to slow the decline, the United Nations warned yesterday.
     Marking the start of the International Year of Biodiversity, Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, said the ongoing loss of species around the globe would seriously affect the future of humans.

RACISM – SCIENCE FICTION
Critics give Avatar's blue-skinned aliens red card for 'racism'
Anita Singh
Daily Telegraph, 12 January 2010.

     James Cameron's $1 billion science-fiction epic, Avatar, has suffered a barrage of accusations that it is racist.
     Critics claim the story of a Caucasian US marine who saves an alien race perpetuates the "white messiah fable" and suggests that non-whites are primitives incapable of helping themselves. ...
     Avatar is set on a distant planet populated by the Na'vi, eco-conscious, blue-skinned aliens with no understanding of modern technology.
     The disabled marine ... is sent to infiltrate the tribe but goes native and leads them in defending their homeland against white invaders.
     He falls in love with an alien woman, who rejects a Na'vi suitor and becomes his wife. The main Na'vi characters are played by black actors.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – REPUBLIC OF IRELAND, EDUCATION
Immigrant pupils need new state schools, says OECD
John Walshe
Irish Independent, 12 January 2010.

     A leading international think-tank has proposed that the Government set up new state-run primary schools to better cater for the new multi-ethnic pupil population.
     The new state schools could even take over some existing primary schools, the majority of which are run by the Catholic Church. The radical proposals are contained in a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), which suggests that the present system of individual patron bodies running 3,300 primary schools is out of date.
     At present, one in 10 primary school students are immigrants. The report says that the current patronage model has started to show strains, as immigration adds to the diversity of Irish society.
     One alternative is to increase the diversity of patron bodies. The number of multi-denominational and interdenominational primary schools has increased from 39 to 67 from 2005 to 2008. ...
     Schools in areas where the numbers of immigrants would be too small to justify the setting up of additional establishments could have difficulty in preserving their ethos while accommodating diversity. ... ...
     The OECD also recommends that existing schools should network and co-operate to ensure a more even distribution in the enrolment of immigrant students. Integration Minister John Curran said the report would help the development of the new Intercultural Education Strategy which will be finalised shortly.
[Site link]

MULTICULTURALISM – POLITICS
Ethnic Minority Vote Stronger Than Ever But Massively Undervalued By Main Parties
University of Warwick, 12 January 2010.
[Press release. The book is "Ethnic Minorities and Politics: The British Electoral System" by Muhammad Anwar, published by LAP Lambert Academic Publishing]

     New research just published by Professor Muhammad Anwar, from The University of Warwick's Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, shows that ethnic minority votes will be more important than ever in the forthcoming general election but ethnic minority voters are still massively undervalued and under-represented.
     In his new book, Ethnic Minorities and Politics Professor Anwar notes that ethnic minorities voter registration is approaching levels of white voters and turnout is now higher than the national average. In the last general election the national average turnout was 61.4% yet for Bangladeshi voters it was 76%, Pakistanis 70% and Indians 67%. Black Africans matched the national average at 61% and only Black Caribbean voters were lower at 54%.
     Professor Anwar says:
     "Our research shows that the higher levels of turn-out among Asians and particularly Muslim groups are likely to continue in future. Since, in recent years, Muslims in Britain and elsewhere have become a focus of attention for politicians and the media, Muslims themselves have become more conscious of their rights and responsibilities as British citizens, including participation in the electoral process."
     He also notes that although nationally ethnic minorities are 10% of the population, there are actually 25 parliamentary constituencies where over 40% of the population were categorised as being from an ethnic minority in the 2001 census. These include: East Harrow 66.3%, Birmingham Ladywood 64.9%, Birmingham Sparkbrook and Small Heath 64.8%, and Brent South 64.6% ...
     Professor Anwar is concerned however that while ethnic minorities are 10% of the UK population, the total number of ethnic minority origin MPs does not reflect that. To do so there should be over 60 MPs of ethnic minority origin when there are only 15. The ethnic minority representation in the House of Lords is over 30 although to reflect the ethnic minority population it should be over 70. ...
     Professor Anwar argues that the shift in Muslim support from Labour to the Liberal Democrats caused by the Iraq war remains an important factor. He notes that many members and councillors defected from Labour to the Liberals between 2003 and 2007 and as a result many ex-Labour councillors represent the Liberal Democrats in places like Birmingham. Professor Anwar says his research indicates that that pattern is likely to continue into the next general election. It is clear however that the Labour Party are working hard to try and reverse this.
     Finally Professor Anwar stresses:
     "The effective representation of ethnic minorities in politics is crucial to the achievement of equality of opportunity across our society. There has been some progress but Britain has a long way to go in providing equality for ethnic minorities in the decision making process."
[Site link]

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.

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS
Limit on immigrants would be set each year under Tories
Rosa Prince
Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2010.

     Immigration levels would be capped "in the tens of thousands" each year under a Conservative government, David Cameron said yesterday.
     The Tory leader said an annual cap on new arrivals would be announced, based on the number of people who left Britain. Net immigration would be kept in the "tens of thousands", rather than the current level of "hundreds of thousands".
     Mr Cameron said he opposed a rise immigration that would take the population above 70 million. ...
     The Tory leader said he was in favour of immigration.
     "But I think the pressures, particularly on our public services, have been very great", he said.

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – POLITICS
Quotas to create more female MPs
Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2010.

     Political parties may be given legal quotas for the number of women they put forward as parliamentary candidates.
     A cross-party review concluded that such a move should be considered if there was not a "significant" increase in the number of woman MPs after the forthcoming general election. It also called for the introduction of candidate lists that excluded white people, although they would not be mandatory.

RACISM – POLICE
Father arrested for 'racist' email
Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2010.

     A businessman was investigated by police after council officials accused him of being "offensive" to gipsies in an email he had not even written.
     The 45-year-old IT company manager, who was arrested in front of his wife and son, even had his DNA taken.
     It happened after staff at Rother district council in East Sussex declared that the phrase, "It's the 'do as you likey' attitude that I am against" – sent in an email to their planning department – was potentially racist because "likey" rhymed with "pikey".
     The businessman was held in a cell for four hours until officers established that he had nothing to do with the email. "This was a ridiculously heavy-handed police reaction," he said.

MULTICULTURALISM – RELIGION
Rise of Islam in the UK feared
Sunday Telegraph, 10 January 2010.

     The public are concerned at the rise of Islam and fear that Britain is deeply divided along religious lines, the British Social Attitudes Survey will show this month.
     More than half the population would be strongly opposed to a mosque in their neighbourhood, the annual poll of more than 4,000 people has found.
     Only a quarter of Britons feel positive towards Muslims; 52 per cent consider Britain to be deeply divided along religious lines, and 45 per cent said religious diversity has a negative impact.

EGALITARIANISM – RELIGION, FREEDOM
Ban on women priests 'to be illegal'
Patrick Hennessy
Sunday Telegraph, 10 January 2010.

     The Roman Catholic ban on women entering the priesthood will become illegal under Harriet Harman's Equality Bill, a Christian charity suggests.
     A report by CARE, backed by a legal opinion from a QC, says that the Bill will make it impossible for churches and faith-based charities to insist that senior staff lead the lives in accordance with organisations' religious beliefs. ...
     CARE's report, A Little Bit Against Discrimination?, warns that the proposals contained in the Bill are a serious threat to religious liberty in Britain. ...
     The report's author, Dr Daniel Boucher, said: "The Equality Bill is a direct assault on the freedom of all faith-based organisations, from churches to charities. ..."

MULTICULTURALISM – RELIGION, EDUCATION
Schools dropping Christian assembly
Julie Henry
Sunday Telegraph, 10 January 2010.

     Nearly 100,000 pupils are being taught in schools that have dropped Christian assemblies in favour of Islamic or multi-faith worship.
     More than 230 schools have applied to councils for exemption from the legal requirement to hold a daily act of collective worship of a "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character". Some hold Islamic assemblies instead, while others run secular or multi-faith assemblies. ...
     In most schools with opt-outs, the vast majority of pupils were from ethnic minorities. One in four children in primary school is from an ethnic minority – double the figure a decade ago.

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – EMPLOYMENT, USA
Diversity Efforts Uneven In U.S. Companies
Kevin Whitelaw
NPR, 10 January 2010.

     The United States is becoming an increasingly diverse nation, but progress in the workplace has been a bit slower.
     On one side, there are companies like Xerox, which have gone well beyond making a concerted effort to hire minorities and women. ...
     Not only do Xerox employees regularly fill out surveys to measure how satisfied and engaged women and different minority groups are inside the company, but performance reviews for senior managers include a section on how much they are doing to promote diversity.
     But for every Xerox, there are many other companies that do little more than pay lip service to the issue of diversity, says Robin Ely, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. ...
     Still, experts say that most companies, particularly the Fortune 500 firms, are trying to move beyond the legally mandated minimum when it comes to affirmative action and anti-discrimination efforts.
     "The vast majority of them have gotten on the diversity train and aren't going to get off it anytime soon," says Eric Peterson, the diversity manager at the Society for Human Resource Management. "They realize it's necessary for their long-term prosperity."
     But Peterson adds an important qualification: "They don't all do it well, necessarily,"
     Indeed, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported a record number of discrimination charge filings in fiscal 2008 – some 95,402 nationwide, which marked a 15 percent increase over the previous year.
     There have been dramatic gains in recent years in hiring practices, but when it comes to promoting minorities in particular, most companies still have a long way to go.
     The latest available EEOC statistics show that in 2007, minorities made up 33.4 percent of office and clerical workers – remarkably close to the overall proportion of minorities in the workforce, which is 34.1 percent. But at the executive and senior manager level, minorities represent just 16.6 percent of the total. ...
     Part of the problem is that the entire topic of diversity, particularly when it comes to race, remains extremely difficult for many people to discuss openly.
     "It's something that's still taboo to talk about," Ely says. "People are afraid to talk about it. They don't want to offend others." ...
     Many U.S. companies are too small to support formal diversity programs or devote significant resources to training.
     "We're talking about a small slice of American employers when we're talking about these issues," notes Carl Van Horn, at Rutgers' Heldrich Center. "Most companies don't even have an HR [human resources] department, let alone a person in the company who's focused on diversity issues."
[Site link]

EXTREMISM – ISLAM
UK Muslim TV channel linked to al-Qaida cleric al-Awlaki
Jamie Doward
The Observer, 10 January 2010.

     A London-based satellite broadcaster that describes itself as "the voice of authority for Muslims in the UK" has been accused of giving a platform to Anwar al-Awlaki, the extremist cleric with alleged links to al-Qaida and to the man charged with trying to blow up a transatlantic jet on Christmas Day.
     The Islam Channel, a free-to-air English-language channel that claims to be "a trustworthy source to the two million-plus population of Muslims in the UK", last year carried adverts for a box set of DVDs of Awlaki's sermons and for at least two events at which the cleric was due to be the star speaker via a video link.
     The channel's website has allowed visitors to click through to a pooled archive of Islamic scholars, from which they can download sermons by Awlaki, including "Stop Police Terror", "Brutality Towards Muslims" and "It's a War against Islam".
     Islamic scholars have expressed concern. "Anwar al-Awlaki is asking all Muslims to unite against the west as Muslims," said Dr Irfan al-Alawi of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism. "He supports jihad to ensnare all naive, young people who get emotionally attached and go on jihadist tirades." ...
     Awlaki, a US-born engineer-turned-cleric, is now based in Yemen, where some reports suggest he was killed just before Christmas in a strike on a suspected al-Qaida base. His family insist he was not harmed in the raid.
     Leading British Muslim organisations, including the Islamic Society of Britain, have promoted Awlaki's lectures in the past, but now condemn his views.
     Haras Rafiq of Centri, a counter-extremism consultancy, said Awlaki's online influence over young radicals was becoming a serious concern. ...
     The channel's chief executive officer, Mohamed Ali Harrath, has been on an Interpol wanted list since 1992, after his native Tunisia accused him of attempting to create "an Islamic state by means of armed revolutionary violence". Harrath denies the charges.
     A spokeswoman for the channel said it had been unaware its website had provided links to Awlaki's sermons. She said the sermons were in an online archive shared with many websites. "Islam Channel has not at any time given a platform to Mr Awlaki," she said. The channel has now removed the link.
[Site link]

POPULATION PRESSURE – FOOD CRISIS
It's time to get back to the land
Geoffrey Lean
Daily Telegraph, 9 January 2010.

     Prof Tim Lang, of City University, perhaps Britain's top food academic, says: "We are sleepwalking into a major food crisis." Prof Sir John Beddington, the Government's chief scientist, forecasts "a perfect storm" as population growth, diminishing resources and climate change create shortages in food, water and energy. ... ...
     Over the last 20 years, the proportion of food that we grow for ourselves has slumped: we produce just three fifths of what we need. The gap between imports and exports doubled between 1995 and 2005, and is now the largest in Europe.
     The alarm bells went off three years ago, when wheat and maize prices more than doubled, and those of rice more than tripled, in just 12 months, creating the first steep and sustained rise in world hunger for decades. Most ominously, it happened at a time of record global harvests, and was largely caused by soaring demand from the mushrooming middle classes in China and India, and by the rush to produce biofuels. How much worse will things be if world production falters?
     ... Agriculture uses vast amounts of water – 20,000 litres goes to produce just one kilogram of beef, including growing feed, watering the cattle and processing the meat – which will get much scarcer as populations and demand grow.

MULTICULTURALISM – RELIGION, SECULARISM
The church fights back against Islamisation
Damian Thompson
Daily Telegraph, 8 January 2010.

     Only one Church of England bishop has resigned his see in protest at Church leaders' feebleness in the face of Islamism, and he is an immigrant. Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester. In contrast, the rest of the hierarchy, together with all the Roman Catholic bishops of England and Wales, still adhere to the old orthodoxy that immigration is by definition a glorious blessing because it "enriches" our culture.
     In Europe, however, many Catholic bishops never really subscribed to that orthodoxy in the first place, and now they are talking openly about the coming "Islamification" of Europe. ...
     ... The Islamification of Europe is indeed under way. As Christopher Caldwell says in his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Muslims "vie for dominance" in Rotterdam, Strasbourg, Marseilles, suburbs of Paris and Berlin, Bradford, Leicester, the periphery of Manchester and east London. ...
     The message that "secularism" is the real enemy of Christianity is parroted by liberal bishops everywhere. Although they may be horrified by Cardinal Vlk's talk of Islamification, they share his belief that the essential division in the world is between "people of faith" and rootless materialists. Pope John Paul II also subscribed to that world-view. But Pope Benedict XVI, significantly, does not. Benedict wants to convince secular-minded people that, in an odd way, they are already part of the Christian flock, because many of their ideals are rooted in the ethics of Christianity.
     In other words, the Church's respect for the dignity of the human person is broadly shared by those secular intellectuals committed to a free society. The Pope recognises this, which is why he has spent so much time talking to them; so does Bishop Nazir-Ali, whose friends include atheist thinkers whose respect for the West's Christian heritage is far greater than that of Muslim community leaders or their multiculturalist allies.
     In the long term, the future of Western civilisation can be secured only by an alliance between Christians and secularists against the totalitarian ideology of Islamism. That is a strange prospect; and even more uncomfortable is the realisation that Christianity's survival as a mass movement may depend on something as prosaic as immigration control. But that is surely what Lord Carey is hinting at, and it is brave of him to do so.

IMMIGRATION ABROAD – USA
Immigration: Legalization would boost U.S. economy, study says
Gary Martin
San Francisco Chronicle, 8 January 2010.

     Legalizing the status of the roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants living in America would create jobs, increase wages and boost the sagging U.S. economy, according to a study released Thursday.
     The study by UCLA associate professor Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda found that citizenship and flexible limits on legal immigration would serve future labor demands and boost wages for native-born workers.
     "Immigration has a positive effect on the economy," Hinojosa-Ojeda told reporters, saying legalizing undocumented immigrants already in the United States could add $1.5 trillion to the gross domestic product over the next 10 years.
     President Obama has urged Congress to pass immigration reform legislation this year that provides a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Republicans have opposed citizenship as an amnesty for those who broke the law and entered the country illegally.
     Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, disagreed with the study's conclusions, saying, "Illegal immigrants take jobs from American workers. With 15 million Americans out of work, it's hard to believe that anyone would give amnesty to 12 million illegal immigrants."
     Daniel Griswold, an economist with the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, agreed with many of the study's findings. He said previous enforcement-only efforts to curb illegal immigration have been costly failures.
     The study was released by the Center for American Progress and the Immigration Policy Center, groups that back legalization proposals.
[Site link]

CRIME – NORWAY
Criminality as a Career Path
Rita Karlsen
FrontPage, 8 January 2010.
[This article first appeared in Norwegian at the website of Human Rights Service, rights.no, and was translated into English by Bruce Bawer]

     What is Norway up to? ... – and now comes the news that criminal foreigners who serve more than a year in jail will henceforth automatically qualify for welfare. After three years in prison, they will have a right to a government pension and to health coverage. This will be the case even if they have come to Norway illegally. In other words, it pays for foreigners to come to Norway and commit serious crimes – and the more serious the crime, the greater the reward.
     The word "shocking" is hardly sufficient. Indeed, some news is so shocking that one hardly believes what one is hearing. This new development falls under the category of things that you just can't imagine a country's leaders ever coming up with. But I am not making this up. You can read all about it on the website of the newspaper Aftenposten: in order to qualify for welfare, foreign criminals will have to commit crimes that are serious enough to put them behind bars for a year or more. But if they are found guilty of even more serious offenses, so that they are sentenced to at least three years, they will also have the right to a basic government pension starting at age 67.
     According to Aftenposten, a person who has spent three years in the can will receive a so-called 3/40 basic pension, which amounts to 455 kroner ($80) a month. I assume this means that somebody who has served seven years will get a 7/40 basic pension, and so forth. It is impossible to imagine a policy that would more clearly reward people for breaking the law. And unfortunately, this isn't all. Because if the same criminal foreigners are citizens of countries belonging to the EU or the European Economic Area, such as Lithuania, Poland, or Bulgaria, they will also have a right to Norwegian pensions even if they have moved out of Norway. We can thus expect that in the years to come, the Norwegian welfare system will find itself paying out considerable amounts in health and pension benefits to felons living abroad.
     We can also expect that the Norwegian "goodness industry," as I like to call it, will soon be telling us that this new policy is discriminatory: why shouldn't criminals from countries outside the EU or EEA have the same rights as criminals from Europe? For under Norwegian law, citizenship is not predicated on one's land of birth: if a man is a Norwegian citizen, all of his children have the right to Norwegian citizenship as well, regardless of whether they are born in Norway, Lithuania, Pakistan, or Somalia, and regardless of whether their mother is wife #1 or wife #33. As Human Rights Service has noted repeatedly, if this is called equality under the law, there is something wrong with the law.
     There is also something wrong with a law that encourages people to pursue lives of crime, and that in fact amounts to a gilt-edged invitation to come to Norway to commit serious crime. According to Aftenposten, we already have quite enough crime of this sort, thank you very much. As of January 2010, 1,001 foreign citizens are in Norwegian prisons. This amounts to 32 percent of all prisoners. Seven out of ten of these foreigners, moreover, are serving terms more than a year long.
     ...
[Site link]

MULTICULTURALISM – RELIGION
Europe has only itself to blame for rise of Islam, says Cardinal
Simon Caldwell
Daily Telegraph, 7 January 2010.

     Europeans are allowing Islam to "conquer" the continent, a leading Roman Catholic cardinal has said.
     Miloslav Vlk, the Archbishop of Prague, said Muslims were well placed to fill the spiritual void "created as Europeans systematically empty the Christian content of their lives".
     He said: "Europe will pay dearly for having left its spiritual foundations."
     This was the last chance to do something about it, and the opportunity would not last for decades, he added. ...
     "Unless he Christians wake up, life may be Islamised and Christianity will not have the strength to imprint its character on the life of people, not to say society." ...
     He did not blame Muslims for the crisis, he said, because Europeans had brought it on themselves by exchanging their Christian culture for an aggressive secularism that embraced atheism.
     "Europe has denied its Christian roots from which it has risen and which could give it the strength to fend off the danger that it will be conquered by Muslims, which is actually happening gradually," he said.
     "At the end of the Middle Ages and in the early modern age, Islam failed to conquer Europe with arms. The Christians beat them then. Today, when the fighting is done with spiritual weapons which Europe lacks while Muslims are perfectly armed, the fall of Europe is looming."

MULTICULTURALISM – RELIGION, DEMOCRACY
Christians need to stand up for themselves, says Carey
Daily Telegraph, 7 January 2010.

     Christians have been "too soft" and let others "walk over them" to avoid upsetting people, a former Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.
     Lord Carey said the Church of England needed to be more outspoken in preserving its beliefs.
     His attack may be seen as a criticism of his successor, Dr Rowan Williams, who has said that it "seems inevitable" that some parts of Islamic sharia would be enshrined in UK law.
     Lord Carey said: "I think we need a tougher Church. We Christians are very often so soft that we allow other people to walk over us and we are not as tough in what we want, in expressing our beliefs, because we do not want to upset other people."
     He also said that migrants should show an understanding of Britain's Christian heritage and its language, history and values. ...
     "I worry about my grandchildren," he said. "I want this country to carry on being one that values the Christian heritage, but most of all values the democratic standards and all that this country has fought over."

CRIME – AUSTRALIA
Indians are warned over visiting Australia after student murders
Bonnie Malkin
Daily Telegraph, 7 January 2010.

     India issued a travel warning for its citizens in Australia yesterday after two students were murdered in what were thought to be racially motivated attacks. ...
     Attacks against Indians have become more frequent as the boom in students from the subcontinent has forced them into less affluent suburbs where they compete for part-time jobs and housing with low-skilled youths from other migrants backgrounds.

REPATRIATION/DEPORTATION – FRANCE
France; 29,000 illegal immigrants expelled in '09
ANSAmed, 7 January 2010.

     In an interview with radio network Europe 1, French Immigration Minister Eric Besson said that 29,000 illegal immigrants were expelled from the country in 2009. The figure is similar to that of 2008, but well above the 27,000 goal set by President Nicolas Sarkozy. This is not the first time that the number of expulsions has exceeded the agreed-on objectives. In 2008, France expelled 29,799 "undocumented" foreigners. At that time, the objective was 25,000. In 2009, 108,000 foreigners were naturalized while 175,000 "entered France with a long-term visa", the minister explained.
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION – MULTICULTURALISM
Migration threatens the DNA of our nation
George Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury
The Times, 7 January 2010.

     Too often in recent years the call for a rational debate on mass migration has degenerated into name-calling and charges of racism. Even the campaign for Balanced Migration, which I have supported, representing cross-party politicians, has barely been heeded by party leaders who have run scared of the issue.
     This is why we have launched a declaration calling on the leading political parties to make manifesto commitments to prevent the UK population reaching 70 million, which is projected in official figures by 2029.
     The fact is that a rise in the UK population by ten million in two decades will put our nation's resources under considerable strain, stretching almost to breaking point the enormous reserves of tolerance and generosity of the British people.
     The declaration by no means spells out a halt to immigration. In fact we welcome the contribution of both economic migrants and asylum seekers to our lively cosmopolitan culture. But we urge a return to the levels of the early 1990s, about 40,000, compared with 163,000 in 2008. Failure to take that action could be seriously damaging to the future harmony of our society.
     Last year nearly a million votes were cast for the British National Party. We cannot ignore the fact that such far-right groups exploit genuine concerns about both overpopulation and the ability of this nation to integrate new communities whose values are sometimes very different, even antithetical, to our own.
     In Dagenham, where I was brought up, there is a very real danger that a white working-class electorate, alienated by far-reaching social change and largely ignored by the mainstream parties, could vote for a BNP Member of Parliament. This would be a tragedy in our long history of parliamentary democracy. Yet we play into the hands of the far Right if we do not seriously address the concerns that have led to some otherwise decent people supporting modern-day fascism.
     There are two aspects to this debate, but they are related. The sheer numbers of migrants from within Europe and elsewhere put the resources of Britain under enormous pressure, but also threaten the very ethos or DNA of our nation.
     Recent debates over what it means to be British have been urgently arranged against the background of constitutional changes and the exigencies of mass migration. The Prime Minister has urged us to heed shared values such as tolerance, fair play, pluralism. However, the reality is that these values cannot be said to be solely British. So we must look also to language, institutions and our shared history in valuing what it means to be British and what we could lose if the make-up of our nation changes too rapidly. ...
     Yet, is there anything distinctly Christian about such a call? Some will say "no". Our values lie rather with the Enlightenment than with the Church. I believe that history is against them. It is my firm view that our society owes more to our Christian heritage than it realises and to overlook this inheritance of faith will lead to the watering down of the very values of tolerance, openness, inclusion and democracy that we claim are central to all we stand for.
[Site link]

RACISM – CUBA
CUBA: Racism - "Taboo, Complicated and Thorny" Issue
Patricia Grogg
IPS, 7 January 2010.

     The first documentary on racial discrimination in this Caribbean island nation was filmed here in 2008, incorporating opinions from well-known artists and intellectuals that go to the heart of the controversy. "Raza" (Race), by young filmmaker Eric Corvalán, could serve as a starting-point to launch the long-delayed debate.
     "So far, racism has only been talked about in academia, among intellectuals. I think there should be an open, public discussion, even in parliament," the 36-year-old Corvalán told IPS.
     "In 50 years (since the revolution), women's issues and homosexuality have been debated: why hasn't racism?" asked the filmmaker. ... ...
     In the debate on race in Cuba, the media have drawn some of the heaviest criticism for allegedly fomenting stereotypes that identify black people and people of mixed ancestry with crime, or with very specific activities like sports and music, while establishing the idea of white "normality." ...
     According to Irene Ester, who holds a degree in audiovisual communications, television will never contribute to demythologising race as long as it only emphasises the high proportion of black people in prison, working as prostitutes, or unemployed, instead of the "heroism" and special characteristics of black families. ...
     Blacks and people of mixed-race heritage officially make up 34.9 percent of Cuba's total population of 11.2 million, according to the latest census, carried out in 2002.
     However, most Cuban academics estimate that between 60 and 70 percent of the population is black or "mulatto".
     Article 42 of the Cuban constitution states that "discrimination because of race, skin colour, sex, national origin, religious beliefs and any other form of discrimination harmful to human dignity is forbidden and punishable by law." In May 1961, the government eliminated racial segregation by nationalising all clubs and associations.
     But equality before the law has not succeeded in closing the socioeconomic gaps between different racial groups. ...
     "Equal rights does not mean social equality," Morales says. "We do not have the same social standing, nor the same opportunities. This is what has generally happened to non-white and black people in Cuba."
     "If, 50 years after the revolution, there are still visible signs of racism in society, it means that equality of rights hasn't been sufficient," says Alfonso.
     The issue of racism remains "taboo, a complicated and thorny" question, as Corvalán was told by some institutions where he showed his documentary, ...
[Site link]

IMMIGRATION – POLITICS
Cut migration, says cross-party alliance
Tom Whitehead
Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2010.

     A cross-party group of MPs and peers, including a former Commons speaker and a former Archbishop of Canterbury, has demanded that the British population be kept under 70 million or put harmony at risk.
     The Parliamentary Cross-party Group on Balanced Migration has called on the main political parties to make an election pledge to slash immigration.
     The group includes Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Baroness Boothroyd, the former Speaker, and Lord Jordan, the former president of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union.
     They have signed a declaration demanding net immigration be reduced from 163,000 to 40,000, so the population does not pass 70 million within two decades. ...
     The group says: "We are convinced that failure to take action would be seriously damaging to the future harmony of our society. Nearly a million votes by our fellow citizens for an extremist party amount to a danger sign which must not be ignored.
     "If politicians want to rebuild the public's trust in the political system, they cannot continue to ignore this issue which matters so much to so many people. The time has come for action."
     In a joint statement, the co-chairmen of the group, Frank Field, the Labour MP, and Nicholas Soames, the Tory MP, said: "Poll after poll shows the public to be deeply concerned about immigration and its impact on our population."

IMMIGRATION – GURKHAS
Fears over migrant Gurkhas
Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2010.

     Armed Forces' charities said yesterday they were concerned over their ability to cope with the numbers of former Gurkhas asking for help.
     One predicted that up to 12,000 former soldiers could apply for British residency over the next three years after winning the right to settle here last year. Many will need accommodation and basic equipment on arrival. ...
     The Ministry of Defence said that more than 2,000 people had attended its resettlement office in Nepal since it opened three months ago.

TERRORISM – SECURITY, PROFILING, RACE
Passengers may be searched by race
Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2010.

     Air passengers could be searched according to ethnic background, age and gender after the Home Secretary said he was looking at "additional targeted profiling" in response to the attempted Detroit plane bombing.
     Announcing a series of new security measures, Mr Johnson gave warning that people flying would face further delays as more were searched before they boarded airliners. ...
     However, enhanced passenger profiling is the most controversial of the measures.
     Supporters say it entails looking for abnormal behaviour such as paying cash for a ticket or arriving for a long-haul flight without any check-in baggage. But opponents fear it will simply mean ethnic minorities are treated more harshly than others.

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.

NATIONAL IDENTITY – FRANCE
France is losing its identity, voters tell Sarkozy
Henry Samuel
Daily Telegraph, 5 January 2010.

     The French government yesterday claimed its attempts to define "national identity" had overwhelming public support, despite accusations it was exploiting xenophobia.
     President Nicolas Sarkozy launched a "great debate" in November, calling it a "noble" meditation on what it means to be French.
     Now he is facing increasingly vocal calls, including from within his own camp, to scrap what critics say has become a slanging match over immigration.
     Yesterday, the man Mr Sarkozy asked to lead the debate trumpeted it as an "immense popular success".
     Eric Besson, the minister of immigration and national identity, announced the results of a poll that he ordered, suggesting that 80 per cent of the French felt national identity was "weakening".
     Responding to claims that a website set up to encourage discussion had turned into an immigrant-bashing forum, he said: "The vast majority of contributions are perfectly respectful of our republican values."
     About a fifth of the 50,000 entries have had to be erased. "They're not publishable," Mr Sarkozy was reported to have complained. ...
     Mr Besson insisted that only a third of comments on his website referred to immigration and Islam. ...
     Mr Besson will give a "synthesis" of the debate to the president this month, who will decide whether new legislation is required to better protect French identity.

EMPLOYMENT
Arrival of 30,000 migrant IT workers 'deprives Britons of jobs'
Richard Ford
The Times, 5 January 2010.

     Tens of thousands of foreign IT workers are being sent to work for their companies' subsidiaries in Britain, sparking fears that British workers are being denied job opportunities.
     Almost 30,000 non-EU technology workers entered the country under so-called intra-company transfers last year, with the overwhelming majority coming from India.
     Most of those arriving came for low and mid-level IT jobs where there are not significant skills shortages among British-born workers, fuelling suspicion that British workers are losing out to foreign workers who are being paid lower wages.
     Ann Swain, the chief executive of the Association of Professional Staffing Companies, which represents recruitment companies, said that such transfers were designed to allow specialists within a particular company to fill senior positions abroad. But he added that they were being abused to fill lower level roles in which the skills used are largely standardised.
     "Intra-company transfers are being done on an almost industrial scale," she said.
     The system allows international companies to transfer their staff to Britain without having to advertise a job vacancy here. They are supposed to pay their employees an equivalent British salary.
     Staff can stay in the country for three years with a possible extension of two years. From next year they will have to work for the company for twelve rather than six months before being eligible for transfer and will no longer be able to apply to settle.
     A total of 45,000 non-EU foreign workers came to Britain under the scheme last year – up from 15,400 when Labour came to power. Almost 70 per cent of them were Indians, according to Home Office figures. ...
     Figures released by the Border and Immigration Agency show that seven of the top ten companies bringing in IT workers were Indian. Topping the list is Tata Consultancy Services, which sponsored 4,465 intra-company transfers last year, followed by Infosys Technology with 3,030.
     Many of the applications approved were in low-level jobs, including almost 18,000 in what were described as "other IT-related occupations". ...
     Ms Swain said that many of the transfers were for jobs for which there were not shortages of British workers. She said: "These figures show how easy it is for foreign companies to bypass the UK labour market." ...
     Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, defended the transfers, saying that they made Britain an attractive place in which to do business. He said: "Workers that come in via this route must display the appropriate level of earnings and qualifications and the numbers are strictly controlled by the points-based system, meaning only those the UK needs can come here."
[Site link]

CRIME – EMPLOYMENT, ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
Jobs for illegals at Home Office as dozens of NHS and public bodies ignore immigration laws
Tom Harper
Mail on Sunday, 3 January 2010.

     Illegal immigrants have been working at some of the most sensitive Government offices in the country - including the headquarters of the UK Border Agency - a Mail on Sunday investigation has discovered.
     Following our enquiries, the Home Office admitted employing a dozen illegal foreign staff over the past four years - 11 Nigerians and a Ghanaian. ...
     The embarrassing disclosures come despite repeated pledges by Labour to crack down on illegal immigration.
     Using Freedom of Information legislation, The Mail on Sunday contacted each Government department, council and hospital in Britain for details of employees later discovered to be illegal immigrants since 2006.
     Three Government departments, 34 local authorities and 54 NHS trusts admitted hiring a total of 349 unlawful foreign workers. The list featured 37 nationalities, including migrants from Kazakhstan, Zambia and Venezuela. ...
     Many councils and health trusts admitted that some fraudulent workers vanished when questioned about their immigration status. ...
     However, The Mail on Sunday asked each of the 91 public bodies who admitted employing illegal foreign workers to provide details of any penalties they received.
     Not one of them had received a fine, which can be as high as £10,000.
     The local authority that employed the highest number of illegal immigrants was Haringey, in North London. It gave jobs to 35 unlawful foreign workers, including two Jamaican carers working with elderly and disabled residents. ...
     Three Whitehall departments admitted employing unlawful workers: the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for International Development.
     The Ministry of Justice gave jobs to three illegal foreign workers, including a Botswanian administrator working in the Access To Justice Department in Central London, which routinely handles sensitive data concerning legal aid funding. ...
     The Department for International Development admitted employing 'fewer than five' illegal immigrants in each of the past four years. Despite repeated requests, it refused to provide any more details. ...
     In hospitals across Britain, The Mail on Sunday found 176 unlawful foreign workers treating patients and running clinics. ...
     One 34-year-old Indian managed to land a job as a dentist after providing health chiefs with forged documents generated by what the trust described as a 'sophisticated national fraud'. However, the trust refused to provide further details.
     The same NHS trust also employed a 46-year-old Ghanaian illegal immigrant as a part-time doctor in a Carlisle hospital. The trust refused to comment.
     In another striking case, two South American illegal immigrants stole the identities of a British couple living abroad and used them to get clerical jobs in an Accident and Emergency unit in South London. ...
     A Home Office spokesman said: 'The 12 illegal workers identified were all sub-contractors. None of them were directly employed by the Home Office. ...
     The Home Office said it had fined 2,400 organisations for employing illegal immigrants in the past two years. However, it refused to say whether any were in the public sector.
[Site link]

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]

EGALITARIANISM – EDUCATION
Race rules that could brand top schools as failures
Graeme Paton
Daily Telegraph, 2 January 2010.

     Schools risk being branded inadequate by government inspectors for failing to promote race relations, gender equality and human rights.
     Even those with good educational records could be placed in "special measures" by Ofsted under new rules that put equality on a par with exam results and child safety. ... ...
     The guidance tells teachers that inspectors will check for differences in results between groups, including those from ethnic minorities, children from broken homes and those with disabilities. Classes should promote equal opportunities, eliminate discrimination and ensure that "stereotypical views are challenged", the guidance adds.
     Advice handed out to inspectors said schools "should be aware of gender imbalances in 'upper-ability' groups, and which groups of learners, by ethnicity, are participating in after-school sport".
     Schools are expected to set out policies designed to tackle gender, race and disability discrimination in a single "equality plan" document. ...
     Ofsted said three areas – pupils' achievement, procedures for keeping children safe and the extent to which schools "promote equality and tackle discrimination" – would be classed as "limiting judgments" and effectively given higher priority. Previously, all parts of the inspection were given roughly equal weight. ...
     An Ofsted spokesman said: "Inspections place a strong emphasis on outcomes for pupils, and we believe attention to equality and diversity is essential in assuring the quality of their development and wellbeing."

DIVERSITY PROMOTION – BBC
La Plante: BBC would take Muslim boy's script over mine
Neil Midgley
Daily Telegraph, 2 January 2010.

     Lynda La Plante, the creator of Prime Suspect, has criticised the BBC, claiming that its drama commissioning team would rather read a script by a "little Muslim boy" than one she had written. ...
     "If my name was Usafi Iqbadal and I was 19, then they'd probably bring me in and talk," she said. ...
     The corporation does have a target that 12.5 per cent of its employees should be from ethnic minorities by December 2012. Last January, the figure was 12 per cent.

MULTICULTURALISM – USA
The color of faith
David Van Biema
Time, 11 January 2010.
[This magazine is published more than a week before the date it carries]

     Despite the growing desegregation of most key American institutions, churches are still a glaring exception. Surveys from 2007 show that fewer than 8% of American congregations have a significant racial mix.
     Since Reconstruction, when African Americans fled or were ejected from white churches, black and white Christianity have developed striking differences of style and substance. The argument can be made that people attend the church they are used to; many minorities have scant desire to attend a white church, seeing their faith as an important vessel of cultural identity. But those who desire a transracial faith life have found themselves discouraged – subtly, often unintentionally, but remarkably consistently. In an age of mixed-race malls, mixed-race pop-music charts and, yes, a mixed-race President, the church divide seems increasingly peculiar. It is troubling, even scandalous, that our most intimate public gatherings – and those most safely beyond the law's reach – remain color- coded.
     But in some churches, the racial divide is beginning to erode, and it is fading fastest in one of American religion's most conservative precincts: Evangelical Christianity. According to Michael Emerson, a specialist on race and faith at Rice University, the proportion of American churches with 20% or more minority participation has languished at about 7.5% for the past nine years. But among Evangelical churches with attendance of 1,000 people or more, the slice has more than quadrupled, from 6% in 1998 to 25% in 2007.
     Call it the desegregation of the megachurches – and consider it a possible pivotal moment in the nation's faith. Such rapid change in such big institutions "blows my mind," says Emerson.

EXTREMISM – EDUCATION, ISLAM
British universities: seats of learning – and loathing
Ruth Dudley Edwards
Daily Telegraph, 2 January 2010.

     It's not that universities haven't had enough warnings. Sheikh Musa Admani, an imam at London Metropolitan University, pleaded with both the Home Office and academic leaders to supervise and control Islamic societies. ...
     Admani's common-sense advice – for instance, that prayer rooms should be open to all, not just Muslims, and that speakers should be vetted – were seemingly ignored by most academics and officials. So what he had observed continued: university after university provided Muslim prayer rooms that were all too often taken over by extremists who changed the locks, showed innocent freshers heavy-duty propaganda films of Muslim suffering at the hands of wicked Jews, Americans and Brits, and brought to the campus inspirational speakers who encouraged the young to sacrifice themselves for Allah.
     Then there was Professor Anthony Glees who, four years ago in his book When Students Turn to Terror, named more than 30 universities where "extremist and/or terror groups" were to be found. He was denounced by the National Union of Students and met with hostility from the academic establishment. The following year, when an all-party parliamentary commission reported on the rise in anti-Semitism that was accompanying increasing support for Islamism on campuses, in the words of its chairman, the respected Denis MacShane, "university vice-chancellors and the university lecturers' union pooh-poohed our concerns". ...
     And all this denial has continued, despite a steady stream of evidence about the university background of notorious jihadists like ... There are close to 100,000 Muslim students in the UK, and extremists are swimming among them. In the work of radicalisation, the agents of the controversial Hizb ut-Tahrir – which works to set up a global caliphate – infest the campuses of Britain unchecked.
     The truth is that a mixture of greed, knee-jerk Left-wingery, anti-Semitism and pusillanimity have combined to make our universities breeding grounds for Islamism. The greed is two-fold. Starved of funds and bullied by the Government into dropping standards in the name of social and ethnic diversity, universities court more foreign students than they can cope with and do nothing to upset them. Equally alarmingly, they woo benefactors from such rotten societies as Iran and Saudi Arabia.
     In A Degree of Influence: the Funding of Strategically Important Subjects in UK Universities, the Centre for Social Cohesion revealed how universities have been seduced by vast sums of money from Arabic and Islamic sources. ... ...
     Academics tend towards the Left and, for a variety of perverse reasons, the Left has allied itself with radical Islam, choosing to ignore the brutality, the oppression of women, the stifling of dissent and many of the other repellent aspects of countries ruled by Sharia law. There will always be a substantial body of students who are idealistic, radical and hot-headed, but all too many academics seem incapable of grasping that the Islamist variety is a threat to the very foundations of democratic society: even the worst of the small number of student lunatics in the late Sixties were not suicide bombers intent on random mass murder.
     Worse still, fearful of being accused of racism and cultural insensitivity, the academic establishment is running scared of Islamic bully-boys. ...
     Society has always laughed at the unworldliness of ivory towers, but the times are too dangerous now for such indulgence. If vice-chancellors of universities that contain festering ideological cesspits do not clear them out, they should be replaced.
[Site link]

CRIME – FRANCE
Hundreds arrested in French violence
CBC News, 1 January 2010.

     New Year's Eve celebrations turned violent in regions across France as youths burned more than 1,000 cars overnight and police arrested nearly 400 people.
     Car burnings have become a regular occurrence in the poor, immigrant-heavy suburbs that ring France's biggest cities, but the incidents of arson are especially prevalent on New Year's Eve.
     The Interior Ministry mobilized 45,000 police during the night, 10,000 more than last year.
     The ministry said 398 people were taken into police custody – nearly twice the figure of a year ago.
[Site link]

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