Immigrants & Penal Substitution

A traditional understanding of punishment maintains that each person should be held accountable for their own actions and no person should be punished for the actions of others. As Ezekiel 18:20 puts it: "The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him."

So, why is the Shadow immigration minister Damian Green suggesting that relatives of foreigners who outstay their visas should face imprisonment? Jailing someone for another's misbehaviour seems as unfair as Government proposals requiring relatives of foreigners to pay a £1,000 bond to ensure their visitors do not outstay visas. More than being unfair, such a move would also set a dangerous precedent. For what other crimes might it then become politically convenient to find an innocent scapegoat to penalise?

This is not the way to deal with the negative repercussions of unprecedented mass migration. If politicians really want to establish a sense of collective accountability, perhaps they should begin by returning to the days when ministers accepted responsibility for the mistakes made by their departments.

Legitimising Illegitimacy

Commenting on today's news that more than one in five births in Britain last year was to a woman from overseas (a fact that goes some way to explaining how Mohammed has now become the most popular boy's name in Britain), the Spectator's CoffeeHouse interestingly observes that, if you strip out immigrants, then 2007 will prove to be the first year in recorded British history that a majority of children have been born outside marriage — a fact that is only masked by mass migration. Quite what this apparent absence of commitment and responsibility reveals about the health of society I suppose will only truly become evident in another couple of decades...

Conspiracy Of Silence

Last night's Ten O'Clock News had a good report on the rise of neo-nazism in Russia, including an interview with Nikolai Kuryanovich, a member of the extreme nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and deputy of the State Duma. Unfortunately, it left the viewer with the impression that ill-feeling towards the "ten million foreigners" who have moved to Russia in recent years is only to be found in the country's equivalent of the BNP. However, the truth is that Central Asians, such as the Uzbek they interviewed who had been beaten up for being "dark-skinned filth" (a rather tame translation of regular abuse that is actually as harsh and inflaming as was "filthy n****r" in America), were always treated as second-class citizens in the former Soviet Union and, as economic migrants today, continue to be harassed and exploited by both the authorities and population at large. Anti-Turkic, anti-Muslim, anti-Western, and even anti-Georgian or anti-Ukrainian stereotypes dominate the mainstream, Kremlin-controlled media.

I say that not simply to point fingers at the racist attitudes endemic in another country, but to question to what extent race has been allowed to subvert a proper and reasoned debate over immigration here† and to question whether we are aware of the ways that our attitudes towards "outsiders" are shaped by our own positive perceptions of national identity and expression of national pride. I am conscious that these are inconvenient questions that the politically correct might like to brush aside, but they are ones on which our elected representatives cannot afford to remain silent.

† Consider, for instance, the recent over-reaction to comments made by Nigel Hastilow, the now former Conservative parliamentary candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis, who observed:

"When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most people say immigration. Many insist: “Enoch Powell was right”. Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 “rivers of blood” speech warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably.

He was right. It has changed dramatically. But his speech was political suicide. Enoch’s successors in Parliament are desperate to avoid ever mentioning the issue. It’s too controversial and far too dangerous. Nobody wants to be labelled a racist. Immigration is the issue that dare not speak its name in public."

Britain's Brain Drain

The Spectator's CoffeeHouse has picked up on an OECD report which sheds further illumination on yesterday's observations about immigration:

We’re so focussed on the 1,500 arriving here every day that no one really focuses on the 1,000 leaving every day. Figures from the OECD show more graduates, 1.3million, have fled Britain than any other developed country (even America, which has five times our population). On Brits deemed to have “high skills,” 15% have left to live abroad – the highest ratio in the developed world save for the notoriously itinerant Irish and Kiwis.

One could hope that this might be because we have a lot of people committed to providing humanitarian assistance in the developing world, but I suspect not. In fairness though, what Fraser Nelson doesn't note is that we also have one of the highest percentages of highly qualified immigrants and, indeed, have a net inflow of 108,507 highly qualified migrants, as the following chart from page 13 of the OECD report shows:

Our Unsustainable Immigration

They say a picture speaks a thousand words...Two thirds of arrivals come from outside the EU and more than half of those leaving are British. Since 1997, there has been a net inflow of 2,337,000 foreign nationals and a net outflow of 715,000 Britons.

Coming on top of news earlier this month that 1.1 million of the 2.7 million jobs created in the past decade were taken by immigrants and news last month that one in seven prisoners come from overseas, it is little wonder that social cohesion has become such a hot issue.

From Rhetoric To Democracy

"To counter public cynicism about political institutions and low levels of turnout in elections, we have to find new ways to engage citizens in the political process. More devolution of power and the active involvement of local communities in decision-making are essential if we are to rebuild confidence in our democracy locally and nationally."

So says former Labour local government minister Nick Raynsford following the publication of a report by an informal grouping of peers and MPs known as the Chamberlain Group calling for central government to give local authorities more freedom to respond to local needs.

Coming a day after the Local Government Association demanded an extra £250m a year for councils to deal with the impact of migration on public services, the cross-party report says local councils should be given more freedom to run their budgets, perhaps including the ability to issue their own bonds (just as Mayor Ken Livingstone has been allowed to do in London to help fund investment in the city's transport network) or to take a share of national taxes such as income tax or vehicle excise duty.

Given that all three major political parties claim to believe in more localism, as one of the most centralised states in Europe, perhaps it is not unreasonable to hope that some of their rhetoric will now be translated into a genuine restoration of local democracy.

Immigration: Not A Racial Problem

Once again, Simon Heffer does not mince his words in today's Telegraph:

This week, we were told there were 11,000 foreigners in our prisons – one in seven of those inside – and the Government, with typical incompetence, is struggling to negotiate deals to have these people serve their sentences back home.

Yesterday, an independent body called the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit said that the Government's plans to build three million new homes by 2020 were not nearly adequate.

Of course they are not, because of the state's determination to allow unlimited immigration and, with it, the end of the indigenous cultural identity. The tensions of what used to be called "multi-culturalism" are dangerous enough: but so are the practical issues.

Large parts of England will be concreted over to accommodate all these new people. There will have to be new roads, railways and airports. And since we are already full up, and our public services buckling, where are we going to put everyone?

Labour has covered up its failure to control our borders by saying that our economy needs immigrants.

Well, if you are determined to have a welfare state that tolerates about eight million economically unproductive people of working age – the unemployed, those in "training" and those on various benefits because they believe they are unfit for work – then of course you will. It is time someone got serious.

Shibboleth: Political Art

Colombian artist Doris Salcedo's 500-foot crack, Shibboleth, in the floor of Tate Modern is supposed to be a statement about racism, representing "borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred, the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe."

Clearly intended to be a more serious installation than Carsten Höller's Test Site, let us know if you think the artist has been successful ... or is this just another expensive piece of modern art whose sole function is to separate the liberals from the traditionalists?

Diversity of Faith in Schools

The Government has today pledged its support for faith schools, unveiling a joint declaration with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh leaders called Faith in the System. Despite objections from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, who believe religious groups should keep out of education, at least Children, Schools and Families Secretary Ed Balls says he recognises that "faith schools are popular with many parents and make a valuable contribution to the way in which this country educates its children."

As I noted some months ago, Church schools are clearly providing something that parents are seeking and it is right that parents should be allowed a continued choice of schools. However, with reports that today's statement offers the prospect of "many more Muslim schools within the state sector," I wonder whether we'll be hearing a repeat of concerns expressed earlier this year when the Muslim Council of Britain's published Towards Greater Understanding – Meeting the Needs of Muslim Pupils in State Schools, its "guidance document" calling for schools to make concessions to Islamic cultural norms. For instance, considering the wider debate over the cultural integration of immigrants and warnings that most of our educational institutions have been infiltrated by Islamist groups, would the prospect of more Muslim schools really help "build bridges to greater mutual trust and understanding" and "contribute to a just and cohesive society"?

Brown's Lurch to the Right

Nick Robinson and Matthew d'Ancona, among others, have commented on Gordon Brown's TUC pledge to deliver "British jobs for British workers," speculating on how such a phrase would have been portrayed by the media had David Cameron delivered it.

Looking beyond such "harsh realities of political life," the truth is that our European masters would never permit such employment protection rights. Moreover, given that employers are usually going to take on the best person for the job, then presumably the immigrants accused of "stealing our jobs" are better qualified and/or better experienced than the natives whom they are supplanting — which would seem to imply that there is something wrong with British education and training, requiring a more direct and substantial remedy than any diversionary "British jobs for British workers" sticking plaster.

"Mend Our Broken Society"

Well, much has already been written about Cameron's Newsnight interview last night, both in the dead tree press and across the blogosphere. If I were to recommend one opinion, it would be Dizzy's, who describes David's tack on immigration as "a brilliant piece of triangulation against Labour and the traditional Left":

Cameron's decision to frame the question of immigration around the idea of its potential impact on the public services makes the possibility of the instant knee-jerk charge of racism very difficult for Left to do. After all, if they just reject his comments out of hand they are effectively saying they don't care about the quality of the public services, and they're not going to do that now are they?

Personally, besides the overall strength of his performance (despite the distracting shadows caused by the vertical lighting), I came away with two main impressions. Firstly, his opening emphasis on his vision statement for a Conservative government, to mend our broken society. Secondly, his responses to questions about the European Union, which I thought probably wouldn't go down particularly well the EU-sceptics (let alone the eurosceptics) in the Party, but which surely serve as a rebuttal to anyone claiming that he is "lurching to the right."

Earned Legalisation for Illegal Immigrants

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, has taken up the call of human rights organisations for some kind of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Writing in Sunday's Observer, the MP widely expected to succeed Sir Menzies Campbell as party leader proposes an 'earned' amnesty for illegal immigrants who have 'lived in the UK for many years.'

Although Clegg is at least partially right in opposing Government plans to grant residence to tens of thousands of long-term asylum applicants, Shadow home secretary David Davis is even more correct when he says the Lib Dem's alternative ideas are "irresponsible" and "unfair":

"This is irresponsible because on the one hand it will encourage people to come here illegally as well as being unfair to those who have obeyed the law and tried to enter the UK legally. It will act as a green light to a new future wave of illegal immigrants who will be told by their criminal handlers that if they remain in the UK long enough they will be allowed to stay permanently."

As I noted back in April, precedents elsewhere in Europe make clear that amnesties do nothing to reduce the problem of illegal immigration and may in fact exacerbate it. Just this week, publication of the annual immigration and quarterly asylum statistics revealed that the Government continues to remove fewer failed asylum seekers than arrive and the number of migrants from accession countries claiming benefit has trebled in the last quarter alone.

We do not need an amnesty to solve this crisis. Neither do we need a common asylum policy to ensure further "harmonisation" across Europe on this issue. What we need is for tighter control of our borders and stricter enforcement of existing legislation, for instance to tackle illegal employment.

Brown Embraces Cameronism

Just last November, Home Office minister Liam Byrne declared of the Conservatives, "All that they offer in place of ID cards is the chaos of a damaging, distracting and disruptive reorganisation of three agencies on the front line into a single border force. That idea is outdated and is rooted in a concept of a frontier that is long past. It is simplistic and dangerous in the disruption that it poses."

Today his new leader, Gordon Brown, announced, "To strengthen the powers and surveillance capability of our border guards and security officers, we will now integrate the vital work of the Border and Immigration Agency, Customs and UK Visas overseas and at the main points of entry to the UK and establish a unified border force."

Now all we need is for the new "Conservative" Prime Minister to ditch his misguided obsession with ID cards...

...Oh yes, and to give us the referendum we were promised on the Constitutional Treaty that Open Europe's analysis shows is 96% of the original European Constitution, already rejected by the French and the Dutch...

Sources: Hansard and BBC

Human Rights Act Attracts Terrorists

In addition to Interpol's damning criticisms about British immigration procedures, The Times has an article on yet another immigration story that the BBC has failed to make any mention of at all. The paper quotes a report from Migrationwatch warning that unless we pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, terrorist suspects will be able to remain in Britain indefinitely and at public expense, whether or not they are arrested or found guilty. The briefing paper begins:

"The UK’s continued adherence to the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) is an attraction for terrorists to operate in and from Britain, secure in the knowledge that, even if convicted, they can never be deported and that, if they come under suspicion, they cannot be effectively detained. We should therefore give six months notice to withdraw from the Convention and write our own Human Rights law with the same guarantees, except for terrorist offences.

Britain is now facing a security threat unparalleled in our history. Accordingly, we must amend our laws without delay. Suicidal terrorists (some from overseas and some born in Britain) do not operate alone; others encourage, finance and organise them. It is now essential that the latter be deterred by the certain prospect of immediate expulsion on completion of a sentence for a terrorist offence."

I wonder if Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith agree with their predecessors that the Government has struck the wrong balance between protecting the safety of the public and the rights of individuals suspected of being involved with terrorism and we should opt out of the ECHR.

If he can put down The Blair Years, maybe John Humphrys can find out for us in the next day or two...

Misplaced Priorities

Why on earth did the Today programme give Alistair Campbell a full half-hour to promote his book and spin for Tony Blair this morning, when we have the head of Interpol criticising our immigration procedures and claiming "The UK's anti-terrorist effort is in the wrong century"? The day's top story was tomorrow's security, not yesterday's spin!

Noting that The UK currently makes only 50 checks a month on the Interpol database, compared with 700,000 by France and 300,000 by Switzerland, the head of the 186-nation international police agency accused the UK of failing to share information on terrorism investigations and not carrying out adequate checks on people crossing its borders. He also told the BBC that "We have received not one name, not one fingerprint, not one telephone number, not one address, nothing from the UK about the recent thwarted terrorist attacks."

With the new security minister, former navy chief Admiral Sir Alan West, suggesting the battle to deal with radicalisation in the fight against terrorism could take at least 15 years, the Government has some serious explaining to do. Two years after the so-called 7/7 attacks and nearly six years after the Al-Qaeda threat first struck so successfully against the West, why are we so far behind where we should be with securing our borders and international cooperation? I fully expect John Humphrys to take Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to task tomorrow — it is inexcusable that he did not do so today.

Labour's Poverty Legacy

Once again we have another report highlighting the scandal of poverty in Britain after ten years of Labour mismanagement, this time from the social policy research and development charity Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The charity's research shows that the rate of poverty among minority ethnic groups is double that found for the white majority (40% compared with 20%) and that minority ethnic groups are still being overlooked for jobs and being paid lower wages, despite improvements in education and qualifications.

On the Today programme this morning, Iain Duncan Smith highlighted the role that language and culture plays in preventing first generation immigrants from being able to integrate into society and noted that Government figures claiming success in getting these immigrants into jobs when they first arrive overlooks the facts that a great proportion of them are unable to hold down those jobs and find themselves unemployed within thirteen weeks. Although this clearly is a factor, the JRF research also shows that the poverty problem is not confined simply to first generation immigrants.

While there are clearly issues that need to be addressed if we are to tackle worklessness amongst ethnic minority communities, the wider scandal is that the number of people of any ethnic background living on less than 40% of average income has increased under Labour, and that fewer people are able to escape the poverty trap now than were able to a decade ago – that is, anyone born into poverty now is more likely to find themselves struggling with poverty as an adult than they would have done a decade ago.

Linguistic Time-Bomb

As a one-time teacher of English as a foreign language, who established a language school for adults in the developing world, I feel a crucial factor has been missed in today's reporting of the sharp increase in children who do not speak English as their first language.

Take the recently-arrived child in the class where my wife works as a teaching assistant – Fresh off the plane from the other side of the world, barely able to read or write in any language, and not speaking a word of English, he was thrown into a class of nine-year-olds, albeit with full-time one-on-one support. Even though he was no further forward academically than the pre-schoolers soon to move up to reception, he was expected to gain something from the exercise and, presumably, catch up with the rest of the class at some point.

That one in ten secondary school-aged children and one in seven primary school-aged children speak a language other than English at home should worry us profoundly. Not simply because of what it reveals about the transformation that unlimited immigration from Eastern Europe is having on our communities or the pressure that it is placing on housing, the health service, or jobs. Neither should we simply be concerned, as the Commission for Racial Equality policy director warned today, that growing racial segregation in our schools represents a racial "time bomb," that risks exacerbating issues such as the recent wave of violent crime.

When China was first opening up to the West, it issued visas to teachers of English as a foreign language but warned them only to teach English. They did not want any new cultural, political, or economic ideas brought in. What they failed to understand is that a language comes as part of and is inseparable from a whole cultural package. The teaching of a foreign language is one of the most politically subversive actions a person can engage in.

The increasing proportion of children in this country who do not have English as their first language are therefore not simply a significant drain on teaching resources. More than that, it is the cultural divide that we should be most concerned about. Not sharing the language, they will not share the same worldview and will be exposed to a different set of ideas and ideology. If we do not understand the significance of this now, then, like the Communist Chinese authorities, we will one day wake up and discover that we are living in a different country.

A Nation of Immigrants?

Just a couple of days since the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne, admitted that large-scale immigration has damaged our poorest communities, has deeply unsettled the country, and has resulted in inequality and child poverty, a new Civitas report reveals that immigration into Britain is now running at a level that is without precedent in our history and which threatens our cohesion as a nation.

Maintaining that immigration had never previously risen above very low levels or had any serious demographic impact prior to the last part of the twentieth century, the report's author, David Conway, claims that Labour's policies since 1997 have amounted to a virtual abandonment of the control of our borders, with net foreign immigration now representing an increase in Britain's population of one per cent every two years. He suggests:

"The country may possibly have already reached a tipping point beyond which it can no longer be said to contain a single nation. Should that point have been reached, then ironically, in the course of Britain having become a nation of immigrants, it would have ceased to be a nation. Once such a point is reached, political disintegration may be predicted to be not long in following."

Speaking earlier this week, the Immigration Minister cited the case of a school in his constituency where non-English speakers have soared from 1-in-20 to 1-in-5 in just a year and admitted, "It is true that a small number of schools have struggled to cope, that some local authorities have reported problems of overcrowding in private housing and that there have been cost pressures on English language training."

The new Australia-style points-based system that he revealed, restricting immigration to skilled workers (a policy adopted from the Conservatives' 2005 election manifesto) and to be introduced next year, is long overdue. However, this will have no impact on illegal immigrants or people coming from the European Union. Moreover, the Government still does not accept the need for a cap on how many migrants it allows into the country, so there is no reason to suppose that the new system will make any noticeable difference to our present laissez-faire migration.

If Britain is to remain a stable, free, and tolerant country, we need to recognise the extent to which Tony Blair's leadership of this country has radically and irreversibly transformed the face of our communities. Further, if we are to hold society together, we need to realise that the dialogue of civilisations is not merely an exercise to be carried out between nations but is now a requirement within our nation. Lastly, if we are truly to get a grip on this issue, we also need to reclaim full control of our borders from Europe – something that Blair's commitment yesterday to finalise a "basic outline agreement for a treaty" at June's European summit will not facilitate.

"Model Immigrant" To Stay

Tonight's local news celebrated the release of 23-year-old Mohammed Samad, who had been awaiting deportation since being detained without warning during a regular visit to immigration officials in Croydon last Tuesday.

Mr Samad fled Sri Lanka after being badly beaten by Tamil Tiger rebels in 1999 but had failed to gain asylum status as it was deemed safe for him to return. Despite not being authorised to stay in the UK, he had secured long-term employment as a groundsman at Hurstpierpoint College, got married, and now has a two-year-old son here.

However, human rights organisations had championed Mr Samad's cause, calling for a full amnesty for asylum seekers who have been resident here for seven years and a partial amnesty for those here more than two years.

And yet, however much one might sympathise with the plight that Mr Samad's wife would have faced, one can but wonder what signal this latest Home Office decision will send to other illegal immigrants – both those already resident and those still hopeful of finding a way in.

As I wrote in the Telegraph last summer, over the past 20 years, there have been five amnesties for illegal immigrants in Italy and six in Spain. In both cases, the most recent amnesties resulted in 700,000 applicants – more than double those seen in their previous ones, which, in turn, saw more applicants than in any of their earlier amnesties. Amnesties plainly do nothing to reduce the problem of illegal immigration and may in fact exacerbate it.

Before our compassion moves us to introduce any such amnesty in the UK, the Government must make clear both why an amnesty here would be any more successful and what effective measures, not already being taken, they would take in order to crack down on Britain's shadow economy.

Asylum For AIDS Victims

Twenty suspected HIV-positive children of failed asylum seekers are due to be deported, according to Martin Narey, the chief executive of the leading children's charity Barnardo’s.

While Mr Narey claims deporting the children would be to send them to their deaths, the Home Office says that "We are not convinced that a special dispensation should be made for victims of HIV. It could create inconsistencies in how we treat people with other serious illnesses."

Do readers think compassion should outweigh other criteria used to determine such cases, or would it merely risk opening the floodgates for others who are sick to attempt to gain entry to this country and, once here, to be supported by our tax-payer-funded health service?