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30 April, 2010

Fact Sheet on New Arizona Immigration Law

From the Center for Immigration Studies

The new law recently signed by the governor of Arizona, SB 1070, makes it a state crime to violate some federal immigration statutes. While the law is extremely popular in the state, with 70 percent of Arizona voters approving of it and just 23 percent opposed, it has raised controversy. Below is a brief summary of the relevant information on illegal immigration in Arizona, followed by a short analysis of SB 1070’s major provisions.

* The federal government estimated that Arizona had one of the fastest growing illegal immigrant populations in the country, increasing from 330,000 in 2000 to 560,000 by 2008.1

* Arizona has adopted other laws to deter the settlement of illegal immigrants in the state in recent years. The federal government estimates that the illegal immigrant population dropped by 18 percent in the state from 2008 to 2009, compared to a 7 percent drop for the nation as a whole.2 This may be evidence that the state enforcement efforts are having an impact.

* The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office has found that 22 percent of felonies in the county are committed by illegal immigrants.3 Illegal immigrants are estimated to be 10 percent of the county’s adult population.4

* Analysis of data from State Criminal Alien Assistance Program showed that illegal immigrants were 11 percent of the state’s prison population. Illegal immigrants were estimated to be 8 percent of state’s adult population at the time of the analysis.5

* Approximately 17 percent of those arrested by the Border Patrol in its Tucson Sector have criminal records in the United States.6

* The issue of illegal immigration and crime is very difficult to measure, and while in Arizona there is evidence that illegal immigrants are committing a disproportionate share of crime, it is not clear this is the case nationally.7

* In 2007, the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that 12 percent of workers in the Arizona are illegal immigrants.8

* In 2007, the Center estimated that illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born children (under 18) comprise one-fifth of those in the state living in poverty, one-third of those without health insurance, and one out of six students in the state’s schools.9

* In 2007, the Center estimated that one-third of households headed by illegal immigrants in Arizona used at least one major welfare program, primarily food-assistance programs or Medicaid. Benefits were typically received on behalf of U.S.-born children.10

* The new law (SB 1070) is extremely popular among Arizona voters. A Rasmussen poll found that 70 percent of voters approve of the new bill, and just 23 percent oppose it.11

Among the new law’s provisions:

* The new Arizona law mirrors federal law, which already requires aliens (non-citizens) to register and carry their documents with them (8 USC 1304(e) and 8 USC 1306(a)). The new Arizona law simply states that violating federal immigration law is now a state crime as well. Because illegal immigrants are by definition in violation of federal immigration laws, they can now be arrested by local law enforcement in Arizona.

* The law is designed to avoid the legal pitfall of “pre-emption,” which means a state can’t adopt laws that conflict with federal laws. By making what is a federal violation also a state violation, the Arizona law avoids this problem.

* The law only allows police to ask about immigration status in the normal course of “lawful contact” with a person, such as a traffic stop or if they have committed a crime.

* Estimates from the federal government indicate that more than 80 percent of illegal immigrants come from Latin America.12 Thus, there is concern that police may target only Hispanics for enforcement.

* Before asking a person about immigration status, law enforcement officials are required by the law to have “reasonable suspicion” that a person is an illegal immigrant. The concept of “reasonable suspicion” is well established by court rulings. Since Arizona does not issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, having a valid license creates a presumption of legal status. Examples of reasonable suspicion include:

o A driver stopped for a traffic violation has no license, or record of a driver's license or other form of federal or state identification.
o A police officer observes someone buying fraudulent identity documents or crossing the border illegally.
o A police officer recognizes a gang member back on the street who he knows has been previously deported by the federal government.

* The law specifically states that police, “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” when implementing SB 1070.

* When Arizona’s governor signed the new law, she also issued an executive order requiring the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board to provide local police with additional training on what does and what does not constitute “reasonable suspicion.”13

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076. Email: center@cis.org. The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution which examines the impact of immigration on the United States.



Arizona's Immigration Frustration

The new state law is the result of a failed national policy

Arizona's new immigration law shows what happens when a state on the front lines of a failed immigration policy reaches the bursting point. What you get is a blunt instrument that produces lawsuits, more political polarization (if that's possible) and the risk of hostility between the local police and the public.

The law makes it a state crime to be in the U.S. without proper documents. It allows the police to stop anyone on "reasonable suspicion" that they may be in the country unlawfully and arrest them on the spot if they can't produce identity papers. The police aren't required to have a search warrant or even to suspect some illegal action has occurred before questioning a person. Traditionally the federal government has enforced immigration laws, so this is an extraordinary state criminalization of a heretofore federal authority.

Not every undocumented U.S. resident is Latino, but most are. Given that about one-third of Arizona residents are Latino, opponents of the measure fear it will raise charges of "racial profiling." The ever-helpful Al Sharpton has already announced that he's headed to Phoenix. More legal challenges are expected before the law takes effect later this summer.

The loud voices denouncing "Arizona" should understand that the results of the nation's failed immigration policies have come down on this state. Hundreds of local immigration measures have been enacted nationwide with the goal of restricting access to everything from housing to jobs to drivers' licenses. As these efforts squeezed the border in the 1990s via three-tier fencing, remote-control cameras and motion-detection devices in Texas and California, Arizona became the major, often violent, entry corridor.

Arizona's police chiefs association opposed the new law. Local enforcement agencies don't want responsibility for enforcing national immigration laws because they say it makes them less effective at their day jobs. When people in immigrant communities see the local police as deportation agents, they become less likely to report crimes and help in investigations. Conditions worsen.

Restrictionists insist, with some justification, that these laws are shrinking the illegal population. The larger reality is that border crossings track the economy. The recent downturn has meant fewer illegal entries and more immigrants going home. Before the law, Arizona's illegal population had fallen 18% in the past year.

Congressional Democrats have no intention of enacting serious immigration reform before November. President Obama is surely playing politics with the situation in Arizona for gain in the fall. He'd like to pick a fight and define Republicans as anti-Hispanic going into the election, without having to propose anything substantive.

We'd support a national immigration reform that was realistic about the fact that most of these are economic migrants who will find a way to come here in any case if this is where the jobs are. The most effective way to reduce illegal entries and defuse these tensions is to expand legal channels, including guest worker programs. This would reduce illegal immigration and free up security resources to threats from drug gangs and the like.

But so long as Republicans, Democrats and Mr. Obama mainly view immigration as an electoral weapon, the nation can expect more desperate laws like Arizona's.

SOURCE





29 April, 2010

In their own words

























SOURCE



'Lenient Australian asylum' policies pull Sri Lankan illegals

AUSTRALIA'S "lenient" asylum policy, easy access to citizenship and generous welfare benefits are the main pull factors attracting Sri Lankan asylum-seekers, says the head of Colombo's anti-human-trafficking operation.

Prabath Aluthge, chief of Sri Lanka's National Counter Human Trafficking Resource Centre, told The Australian the recent wave of boat arrivals was driven by success stories spread by Sri Lankans who had travelled to Australia.

But as authorities intercepted another boat carrying 41 asylum-seekers near Ashmore Reef on Monday, Mr Aluthge said a crackdown by the Sri Lankan authorities and the toughening of Australia's asylum regime had led to a decline in the number of boats leaving Sri Lanka.

And Malaysian authorities announced they had stopped an Australia-bound boat carrying 75 Sri Lankans from leaving Malaysia on Friday.

In an exclusive interview, Mr Aluthge said he expected the changes in procedure, which include the suspension of processing of all new Sri Lankan asylum claims for three months, would have a deterrent effect, as would the deportation of people whose claims had been unsuccessful, a move foreshadowed by the Rudd government.

Australia was considered to be a soft option by prospective Sri Lankan boatpeople, Mr Aluthge said. "I think you have a very lenient asylum policy," he said. "These people, they want to go to a country where asylum policy is very lenient, where it is easy (to obtain) citizenship, easy to get welfare benefits from the host government," the Sri Lankan official said.

Mr Aluthge said neither Tamil nor Sinhalese Sri Lankans had any grounds for claiming asylum in Australia now the country's bloody civil war had ended.

Since 2009, almost 1000 Sri Lankans, mostly minority Tamils, have arrived in Australia by boat.

All told, they comprised about 20 per cent of the total number of boatpeople to arrive as part of the present surge.

"The successful people informed their friends about Australia - to come there and you can earn something and you can get political asylum very easily," Mr Aluthge said. "They motivate with this information."

However, Mr Aluthge said there had been a decline in boats leaving Sri Lanka for Australia. "We have an awareness campaign. There are police very alert. We have established a coast guard department," he said. "And . . . now the war is over, the entire navy can work with the coast guard."

Most smuggling rings in Sri Lanka were organised out of Colombo or the Negombo region north of the capital, he said. But the market is mostly Tamils in the northern part of the country.

Mr Aluthge said the organisers paid agents across the country to recruit passengers, sometimes even guaranteeing their debt for the journey, which could run from $5000 to $10,000. "They sometimes mortgage their properties, sometimes they get bank guarantees," he said.

SOURCE





28 April, 2010

Five Arguments Republicans Should Use Against Obama's Immigration Bill

As you may have heard, after more than a year of giving little more than lip service to illegal immigration, the Democrats have suddenly become extremely interested in pushing comprehensive immigration reform. This is quite curious in that the bill almost assuredly cannot pass.

A year ago, when I interviewed Roy Beck, head of Numbers USA, he didn't think that they had the votes:

Just look at the Senate. It looks like there's going to be a good chance that the Senate is going to have 59 Democrats. ...There were about 15 Democrats who voted against the amnesty in 2007. I think we ought to get about half of those and maybe more. If you got 8 Democrats to vote against it, that means you'd need 9 Republicans. I don't see it. At most, I see 6 and they might not get but 2 or 3 -- especially if they offend McCain.

...I don't think Pelosi thinks she has the votes. ...She goes out and makes statements that get all of us all upset and gets her applause from the Hispanic caucus. But ...there were right around 50 Democrats who co-sponsored the SAVE ACT last year, which was a very, very strong enforcement bill. This amnesty will not have nearly the strength of that. I think one of the reasons that those Democrats signed that bill is that they're from districts whose constituents are pushing them hard on this. So, I think we'd have a good chance to get 60-70 Democrats in the House to vote against that and I don't think we ought to lose more than a half dozen Republicans. If we did that well, then we'd beat it in the House.

Keep in mind that since then, in large part because of health care and deficit spending, the political environment has become absolutely poisonous for Democrats. There are plenty of predictions that the Democrats will lose the House, only Democrats in bluest districts can feel completely safe, and make no mistake about it: comprehensive immigration reform would be about as popular as Barack Obama at a Tea Party.

So, why would the Democrats consider pushing the bill at all if it won't pass? There are probably two reasons for it.

One, they're hoping that it'll fire up the Democrats' Hispanic base, which is an iffy proposition to begin with. Although Hispanic Americans do tend to be pro-illegal immigration, polls show that for the most part, it's not one of their biggest issues. Still, the Democrats have made a lot of promises and some Hispanic liberals are starting to get antsy. For example, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (Ill.) has been threatening to encourage Hispanic Americans to "stay home" on election day to punish Democrats for not pushing amnesty.

Plus, as an extra added bonus, Republicans fought each other like rabid wolverines over the issue last time and the Democrats will be hoping for a repeat while they scream "racist," "nativist," and "bigot" from the sidelines. In other words, this probably has a lot more to do with politics than policy.

So, since that's the case, how do we fight this bill? We fight it by playing it smart, not tearing each other to shreds, and by sticking with the arguments that will have the most resonance in the 2010 election.

#1) We need "security first." Even John McCain, the man who led the fight for comprehensive immigration reform last time around, has since admitted that the American people don't believe we'll secure the border.

Incidentally, there's good reason for that. For example, the Obama Administration has announced that the border fence which was begun by the Bush Administration won't be "finished until at least 2016." So, if we're lucky, in 2016, 15 years after 9/11, we may for the first time have a secure border that terrorists can't just walk over with a nuclear bomb. That'll be great, won't it?

Tell you what: let's stop putting the cart before the horse. Let's finish the fence, adequately staff the border patrol, get a proven system in place to prevent illegal aliens from being able to get jobs with fake Social Security numbers and then and only then, we can come back and discuss the whole "path to citizenship" issue. If that's too long to wait for the illegal immigrants, then they can always just go home.

#2) Jobs, jobs, jobs. Amnesty for illegals: It's for those times when you have a 9.7% unemployment rate & want to take even more jobs from Americans. When so many people are out of work and having trouble taking care of their families, why in the world would anyone want to give away American jobs and drive down American wages? How out of touch with what's going on in this country do you have to be to want to hand American jobs to foreigners via amnesty when so many people are hurting?

#3) We're too broke for an amnesty. As is, 47 percent of Americans are paying no income taxes. Do we really need to add to their ranks -- and let's not kid ourselves because that's what we're talking about.

Point being, if 47 percent of Americans aren't paying income taxes, how many illegals, most of whom have low paying jobs, would be paying income taxes if they became citizens? 10%? 20%? In other words, when the country is broke, why do we want to bring in millions more people to collect food stamps, welfare, and earned income tax credits even though they don't pay income tax? Are we so short of Americans who do that sort of thing that we actually need to bring in poor people from other parts of the globe to take advantage of our social safety net?

#4) Amnesty is unfair to immigrants. Nobody has been treated worse in the whole amnesty debate than legal immigrants. They love and respect this country enough to obey the rules -- and what do they get in return? Oftentimes, they have to wait in their home country. They fill out reams of paperwork. They pay thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Then what happens? They're spoken of in the same breath as some guy who snuck into our country in the middle of the night and stole somebody's Social Security number. Furthermore, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, illegals are going to be rewarded for breaking American laws while legal immigrants have to put up with the same old hassles. What's the message to legal immigrants? The message is, "You're stupid for loving and respecting this country enough to obey our laws." Legal immigrants to this country deserve to be treated better than that.

#5) We've already tried this once before. It didn't work then and it won't work now. As former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese has noted, we've already tried this once during the Reagan Administration.

They allowed roughly 2.7 million illegal aliens to become citizens and in exchange, we were supposed to implement security measures to fix the system. Guess what? We never fixed the security problem and today, we're talking about giving citizenship to roughly 4 times as many illegals.

So, why would anyone who actually wants to solve the problem suggest implementing a government policy that's already a proven failure? Of course, that's just it: What politicians want is more illegal workers to pad the bottom lines of businesses that give them campaign contributions and more potential voters for the Democratic Party. What they don't want is to fix the problem because they're worried about what's good for them personally, not what's good for the country.

SOURCE



Australian conservatives claim cost of housing 4200 asylum seekers has topped $344m

THE arrival of another boat carrying of asylum seekers has set a record for the number of arrivals in one financial year - and the Federal Opposition is demanding to know how much it's costing taxpayers.

A boat with 49 suspected asylum seekers and two crew was intercepted north-north-west of Ashmore Islands on Sunday night, the 114th to arrive since the Rudd Government softened John Howard's border regime. This took the number of people in 2009-10 to 4210, the highest in a financial year, with two months to go.

Opposition immigration and citizenship spokesman Scott Morrison said the number eclipsed the 4175 in 1999-2000 and the 4137 in 2000-01. "To paraphrase Kevin Rudd, he had a gold medal year on boat arrivals in 2009-10," Mr Morrison said.

Mr Howard still holds the record for the most number of boat arrivals in a calendar year - 5516 in 2001. That may be broken, with the rate of boat arrivals this year exceeding the pre-Tampa Howard era.

A spokesman for the Immigration Department yesterday said 2063 asylum seekers were housed on Christmas Island, which will rise to 2114. Christmas Island's capacity is 2040, with 400 extra beds still weeks from being ready after bad weather stalled work.

The Federal Opposition is demanding Mr Rudd and Immigration and Citizenship Minister Chris Evans admit what it's costing the Government to house the influx. "Figures obtained from Senate Estimates earlier this year revealed when the Rudd Government prepared the 2009-10 budget they believed only 200 people would arrive," Mr Morrison said.

"In November last year Senator Evans asked for an [extra] $134 million to cover 1400 arrivals, with each arrival costing $81,900. "With this year's arrivals now at 4210 we can expect an additional bill of more than $200 million, based on the figures previously provided by the Immigration Department."

He said Senator Evans should release a statement of the increased costs of flights between Christmas Island and the mainland. "The Minister must also detail new costs such as reopening the Curtin detention centre and increased operational costs at the other detention centres around Australia . . . taking the spillover from Christmas Island."

On Friday another boat en route to Australia, containing 75 Sri Lankans, was stopped by Malaysian police.

SOURCE





27 April, 2010

New from the Center for Immigration Studies

1. How Obama is Transforming America Through Immigration

Excerpt: President Obama and his allies have made no secret about their immigration goals: easy amnesty, loose enforcement, and ever-higher levels of legal immigration. One prominent labor leader has boasted that continued mass immigration 'will solidify and expand the progressive coalition for the future.'

********

2. New Arizona Law Puts Pressure on Utah

Excerpt: When Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed the toughest state illegal immigration law in the nation on April 23, 2010, it made it imperative that Utah's newly enacted child identity theft protection law (SB251) take effect as scheduled on July 1, 2010, without any changes.

If the Utah law isn't implemented as scheduled, Utah's widely perceived sanctuary state status, complete with driving privilege cards and an in-state college tuition program for illegal aliens, will make it a prime destination for illegal aliens currently living in Arizona and for those who continue to unlawfully enter the United States.

********

3. USCIS, Interpreter Releases Rally Around Shrunken H-1B Program

Excerpt: The once unstoppable H-1B program that used to bring more than 100,000 new temporary alien workers every year to the U.S. appears to be in trouble, and its friends are rallying around.

USCIS is currently running what looks very much like an advertisement for the program, included in the flashing photo-montage of highlights on its website, and the Grand Old Man of Immigration Law has written somberly about the program and its problems.

********

4. Activists Amplify Arizona Act, Accelerating Attrition Aftermath

Excerpt: Arizona Gov. Brewer dealt with the immigration bill very neatly this afternoon — she signed the bill, supporting it unapologetically, but at the same time issued an executive order directing the development of a training program on how to implement the law without racial profiling. The lefties outraged by the bill aren't going to be placated by the executive order (which is kind of redundant, since cops everywhere a awash in sensitivity training), but it will be helpful for lots of Arizonans who support the bill but don't want to feel guilty about it.

********

5. Poetry vs. Prose

Excerpt: The president's comments today criticizing the Arizona bill were pretty anodyne. He described it as an example of 'irresponsibility' (at least he didn't say they 'acted stupidly'), but implicitly justified it in a clinging-to-their-guns-and-religion fashion by saying it was the kind of thing that would happen in the absence of amnesty. Also: 'I've instructed members of my administration to closely monitor the situation and examine the civil rights and other implications of this legislation.' The ACLU's going to make sure that the Ninth Circuit does that, so the administration is off the hook for now.

********

6. Will They or Won't They?

Excerpt: As I've written before, there isn't going to be a 'comprehensive immigration reform' bill reaching the president's desk this year; it's just not going to happen. But there is going to be a lot of sturm und drang about it, as the president signaled in his comments today on the subject.

Byron York has a piece today where he asks 'So why are Obama, Pelosi and Reid going forward?' He opts for the fifth of his five possible explanations: 'They're fully aware that the public doesn't want 'comprehensive' reform but are racing to do as much as they can before the elections take away their power to defy the public's wishes.'

********

7. VOA Interviews Kephart on Amnesty

Excerpt: Voice of America in Washington DC did an un-biased piece on the prospect for amnesty that aired worldwide on beginning April 12, 2010. It concludes that, despite demonstrations by those supporting “immigration reform” in Washington D.C. in March 2010, the prospect for such legislation, at least for now, is not good. Chris Simkins reported for VOA in the video below and in the linked article above.

********

8. Within Reason: Officers Checking Status

Excerpt: This week the Arizona state legislature passed a bill that, among other things, says that if local law enforcement officers encounter someone they suspect is an illegal alien, they should take 'reasonable' steps to try to determine the alien's immigration status. A new web program sheds light on issues such as these.

********

9. Senate Hearing: Terrorism Policy 7, Immigration Policy 1

Excerpt: There was an interesting and unconscious test of the attractions of immigration and terrorism policy yesterday on Capitol Hill.

Eight speakers attended a Senate hearing on 'visa security'; seven of them spoke only, or almost only, on airports and terrorism; one (John McCain) spoke about illegal immigration. Given the duties of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, any of the eight could have spoken about either subject.

********

10. More than 1.1 Million Secured Immigrant Status in FY 2009

Excerpt: A total of 1,130,818 persons obtained permanent resident alien status in fiscal year 2009; it was the first time in U.S. history that this number topped one million for the fifth year in a row.

Department of Homeland Security data on the year was released a few days ago.

********

11. American Common Sense and Legal Immigration

Excerpt: An item on the political website RealClearPolitics argues that Americans are just fine with high legal immigration – rather, it's just illegal immigration they have a problem with and are exercised about. But that argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

********

12. The Migration Problems of the Rich and Famous are USCIS's Concern

Excerpt: The USCIS has begun a comprehensive review of one aspect of its decision-making, and it starts in an interesting place – the migration problems of the rich and famous.

The agency has released a summary of the April 12, 2010, 'listening session' which dealt with the 'Request for Evidence Project,' an examination of the agency's requests for information in connection with the three nonimmigrant visa classes, O, P, and Q, and one immigrant category, E 11.

********

13. Attrition Through Enforcement Marches On

Excerpt: The Arizona Senate yesterday approved the final House version of an immigration bill, sending it to the governor for her signature (which is expected, though she hasn't committed to it yet). The bill describes its intent this way

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076. Email: center@cis.org. The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution which examines the impact of immigration on the United States.





26 April, 2010

Obama: Making Illegal Immigration Illegal is a 'Misguided Effort'

President Obama slammed Arizona's attempts to take back control of America's southern border with stringent enforcement of immigration laws. After a naturalization ceremony this morning, the president chided the state's efforts, calling them "irresponsible" and "misguided."

Indeed our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others. And that includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona which threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe. In fact, I've instructed members of my administration to closely monitor the situation and examine the civil rights and other implications of this legislation, but if we continue to fail to act at the federal level we will continue to see misguided efforts opening up around the country.

SOURCE



Britain surrenders to illegal immigrants

UK home to 1 million illegal immigrants

THE government is allowing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to stay in the country because it fails to send staff to one in five appeal hearings.

Figures obtained under freedom of information (FoI) laws show that Home Office officials, who are supposed to defend decisions on asylum and immigration, failed to show up for 34,627 appeals last year, more than double the 2006 figure of 15,272.

Half of these hearings resulted in a victory for the appellant, up from just over a third two years ago. Many led to people staying who had been refused the right to remain.

The failure of the Home Office to send officials to fight its case was described as “inexcusable” by Chris Grayling, the Conservative shadow home secretary.

Grayling said: “It’s absolutely inexcusable for people who are in Britain illegally to avoid deportation simply because of Home Office incompetence. This has really got to be sorted out.”

It undermines claims by ministers that they have secured Britain’s borders. This month Alan Johnson, the home secretary, defended the government’s record and accused the Liberal Democrats of being inept on the issue.

Last week reporters spent two days at Taylor House in Islington, north London, one of the country’s busiest asylum centres.

On one day, 24 out of the 26 hearings went ahead without a Home Office presenting officer. On a second day the figures were 21 out of 26 unattended. Last year there were 171,000 such hearings nationwide.

A judge who was hearing the case at Taylor House of a Nigerian student fighting for the right to stay told her: “It is not my job to step into the shoes of the secretary of state and cross-examine you, but I may now be forced to do that.”

The Home Office also failed to attend an asylum appeal at the tribunal in London brought by the 19-year-old son of a former Iraqi intelligence officer who had worked for Saddam Hussein.

The teenager, who had been in Britain since 2007, claimed his life would be in danger if he had to return to Iraq. This is despite a previous Home Office decision that the children of former Ba’ath party officials were not at risk.

Last week the case of Zulfar Hussain, a paedophile who won the right to stay in Britain after claiming his human rights would be breached if he was deported to his native Pakistan, drew criticism of the immigration appeal system.

The 48-year-old is soon to be freed after completing half of a five-year jail sentence for abducting and sexually exploiting two 15-year-old girls. Hussain plied his victims, who were living in care and described as vulnerable, with drugs and alcohol. The Home Office admitted in a letter accompanying the FoI request that staff shortages meant it could not supply officers for all cases.

Immigration lawyers say the “farcical” non-appearance by Home Office staff significantly improves their clients’ chances of victory and judges say it undermines justice.

Simon Harding, a barrister with the London chambers of 36 Bedford Row, said: “These are Alice in Wonderland courts and you will rarely see a Home Office officer. In practice what it means is that fewer people are getting deported.”

Adam Pipe, a barrister in Birmingham, said: “Yes, there are times when you think, great, there is no one here from the other side.”

In the absence of a Home Office representative the judge has to rely on a written bundle of evidence provided by the Home Office. Some judges have been forced to ask lawyers bringing the appeal effectively to cross-examine their own clients by raising points of clarification.

Fokrul Islam, of the Oldham law firm Lawmans, said: “It is a farce because I am clearly not going to ask a client a question which will harm their case.”

Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, accepted that the government was not able to staff all the hearings. “As far as staffing goes, you do get peaks and troughs and sometimes there are shortages,” he said. “At the same time we are working through a huge backlog of cases. We always staff those cases where an individual is considered a threat to the public in some way.”

He added: “Often we choose not to fight a case because the circumstances of the appellant change.”

SOURCE





25 April, 2010

In Britain, Immigration is an Issue Fit for Whispers

In a general election where the unexpected surge of the Liberal Democrats has put all the usual calculations about the contest between Labour and the Conservatives in flux, there has been a morbid familiarity to the campaign of one party that cannot hope to be part of the jockeying for power many pundits foresee after the ballots are cast on May 6.

The British National Party, inheritor of the ideological mantle of Oswald Mosley’s Union of Fascists in the 1930s, can realistically hope to win only one London-area constituency among the 650 House of Commons seats — if even that. But opinion polls suggest that the party will attract significantly more of the popular vote than the seven-tenths of 1 percent it won in 2005.

The party’s rise, such as it may be, can be traced to the same issue — the rapid increase in nonwhite immigration, particularly from the Muslim world — that has recently empowered far-right parties across Europe, notably in France. Britain’s counterpart to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the demagogic French politician who reached a runoff for the presidency in 2002, is Nick Griffin, a soberly suited, 51-year-old Cambridge-educated graduate in history and law.

Mr. Griffin is a fringe politician. But in this election, more than in any other in memory, popular anxiety about the rapid rise in immigration in the 13 years of Labour rule is the ghost at the banquet. It is a political reality strong enough, according to opinion polls, to influence votes in dozens of constituencies, but one that the major parties can afford to address only in the most modulated of keys, and then, usually, only when others raise it on the campaign trail.

To understand that, it is enough to recall Enoch Powell. Forty-two years ago, Mr. Powell, a prominent Conservative, made a speech saying Britain “had to be mad” to admit 50,000 immigrants a year, mostly then from British islands in the Caribbean. He likened the consequences to the “tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic,” the 1968 race riots in America. A classicist, he indulged his passion for ancient history. “I am filled with foreboding,” he said. “Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ ”

Mr. Powell was promptly sacked from the Conservatives’ shadow cabinet; he left the party and wandered in the political shadows until his death in 1998. His “rivers of blood” speech has stood ever since as a warning to mainstream politicians of the fate of those who raise the immigration issue with overwrought language, particularly with a racist tinge. In 2005, many people thought Michael Howard, then the Conservative leader, crossed the line with his tough language on immigration, further dooming his party to its third straight loss to Labour.

Small wonder, then, that the prime ministerial contenders trod warily when a nonwhite woman in the audience raised the issue at the second of three televised election debates on Thursday.

To nobody’s surprise, each of the three emphasized the need to curb migrant inflows. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat, urged an amnesty for the million or so illegal immigrants estimated to have lived in Britain for 10 years or more, to “get them out of the hands of criminal gangs,” balanced by stricter border controls; Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for Labour, said new identity cards for foreign residents and a points system for immigration applicants had begun to cut the numbers; David Cameron, the Conservative, advocated a cap on entrants from outside the European Union, “to get it down radically.”

But their competing policies were less notable than the care the three took to avoid any shade of prejudice. “The first thing to say,” Mr. Cameron said, “is that we have benefited from immigration; and people who come here and live legally, we should be incredibly warm and welcoming and hospitable and build a strong and integrated country. I think it’s really important to say that, first up.”

One party leader not invited to the debates was Mr. Griffin, though he wrenched the debate back down to street level on Friday when he unveiled the B.N.P.’s election manifesto. It called for “absolutely no further immigration from any Muslim countries, as it presents one of the most deadly threats to the survival of our nation.” Mr. Griffin said Britain was “full up,” and it was time to “close the doors.”

What has given the issue new political weight is the scale of immigration during Labour rule. Extrapolations from government figures suggest that looser regulations adopted in Tony Blair’s early years as prime minister have led to a net inward migration of about two million people since 1997, with a peak of 330,000 in 2007. Many new arrivals have come legally from East European nations in the European Union, notably Poland. But by far the most non-Europeans have been Muslims, who historically have been slower to assimilate than other immigrants.

More HERE



Australian Feds beginning to face reality about "asylum seekers"

Disorder in home country not enough to warrant asylum says immigration spokesman -- very reminiscent of the skeptical policies of the previous conservative government

IMMIGRATION Minister Chris Evans has indicated the Rudd government is poised to issue further rejections for Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum-seekers who arrived before the government's April 9 suspension of claims from the two countries.

"I think the important point to make is that because a country is subject to civil disorder and great difficulty doesn't mean that everyone from that country is a refugee," he said yesterday during a visit to Christmas Island. "I think people comment on the situation in Afghanistan and say it is still fairly unsafe in certain regions, but that is not a convention-related reason for someone to be found a refugee."

The Rudd government earlier this month froze asylum applications from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, citing improved conditions in the two countries. While the freeze is in force, the government will review changes in the two nations to determine which applicants should be sent home.

Senator Evans was speaking as yet another asylum-seeker boat arrived in Australian waters yesterday - the 45th this year - with nine passengers and three crew aboard. The boat intercepted by the navy was also the ninth since the government announced the suspension of claims on April 9. Sixty-three Afghans who are subject to the new freeze have so far reached Christmas Island, a department spokeswoman said.

So far this year, 21 asylum-seekers have been sent home, including 19 Sri Lankans. Last year and in 2008, a total of 63 Sri Lankans were sent home.

No Afghan asylum-seeker has been returned in that period, although the government is believed to have issued rejections to a number of Afghans, who now have the option of an independent review. "There are indications that both cohorts are seeing increased rejections," Senator Evans said.

"We're waiting on the UNHCR review of country information as one source of information to use but already using the country information that we are getting, we are seeing a greater number of rejections based on other bits of information, saying things are safer for them."

Senator Evans yesterday inspected detention facilities on Christmas Island, which are operating under capacity for the first time in weeks following the transfer of almost 500 asylum-seekers to the mainland since last month.

Senator Evans did not expect the suspension of claims to have an immediate impact on arrivals, but it may do so in the long term.

He said asylum-seekers with small children were coming by boats in increasing numbers. Families cannot be held in the immigration detention centre for single men, and the government was struggling to find suitable places to house them on Christmas Island. Currently, they are in a former construction workers' camp but it is cramped and, according to the minister, not ideal.

SOURCE





24 April, 2010

Australia has only recently lost control of its borders

No issue in our national life produces more cant, hypocrisy, posturing and downright disregard for facts and history than that of illegal immigrants coming to Australia's northern shores by boat.

Two important recent developments are [conservative] Tony Abbott's announcement that no one who comes here illegally by boat will get permanent residency and the [Leftist] Rudd government's suspension of the assessment of asylum applications by Sri Lankans for three months, and Afghans for six months. The government also said the situation in both countries was improving and therefore more of those asylum-seekers could in due course probably be sent home.

The Rudd government is moving crab-wise towards a [conservative] Howard government position (effectively restoring indefinite mandatory detention), that they will be generous to refugees but the Australian government will choose which refugees come here.

This has virtually always been the Australian way.

John Howard's insight was to understand that it would be impossible to sustain support for a big immigration program if substantial numbers of illegal boats were coming.

No one is really qualified to express a view in this debate who has not read Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, which demonstrates categorically that asylum-seekers in Europe were not primarily refugees but extremely determined illegal immigrants.

That doesn't make them bad people, but it means the highly emotional response is misplaced.

Australia will always take refugees, but it is up to the government, representing the people, to determine how many and which ones. We might take all sorts of criteria into account, such as the degree of need, but also the prospects of such people settling well, whether they have relatives or other support here and so on.

Both sides of politics agree that we will take about 13,500 refugees a year, so any boatperson who is allowed in takes away the place of someone elsewhere in the program. No politician has argued that boatpeople be added to the total intake. There are really only two effective positions.

One is to deny the people smugglers the ability to deliver Australian permanent residency to their clients. They will then stop running the boats.

The other is to accept that whoever manages to physically get here gets to stay permanently. Life in Australia is a glittering and magnificent prize. A few months at a camp is unlikely to deter people who have that prize in sight. Sending them back home at the end of the detention period, as the government is foreshadowing, may well do so, though it would be better to do that quickly rather than slowly.

The Rudd government has lost control of the boats, with nearly 5000 people arriving since it came to office. Rudd should understand this plainly. That rate of arrivals will destroy support for the immigration program.

Previous governments have been much harsher than the Howard government was, but much less effective. The most anti-immigration modern prime minister was surely [Leftist] Gough Whitlam.

It is the fashion these days to be nice to Whitlam, because he is indeed a very nice old chap. But this should not obscure the central reality of his government, that it was a catastrophic failure in economic management and countless bad consequences flowed from that.

In 1975, under Whitlam, barely 50,000 immigrants came to Australia, and more Australians left permanently than immigrants came into the country, a stupendously shocking result.

Whitlam was extraordinarily cruel to Vietnamese who had worked for or associated closely with the Australian embassy and army in South Vietnam. By the fall of Saigon, two planeloads of orphans - 280 kids in all - and only 78 other Vietnamese had come to Australia. Hundreds associated with Australia were left to the tender mercies of the communists.

Malcolm Fraser [conservative] presents himself as a great saint on refugees, but no one participates in this debate more dishonestly than Fraser. In fact in opposition in 1975 Fraser had called for only a small number of Vietnamese to be brought to Australia. He was slow to allow any refugees to come to Australia after he became prime minister. In his seven years in office only 2000 Vietnamese came to Australia by boat.

I remember as a student campaigning hard to get Fraser to allow Vietnamese to come to Australia as refugees and this only happened towards the end of the 1970s and in the overwhelming context of a push led by the US for international resettlement. In that context it would have been inconceivable for an Australian government to do much less.

Fraser loves to laud his humanitarianism, but there is much less to it than meets the eye. The vast majority of Vietnamese who came here under Fraser did so either after being selected by Australian officials in UNHCR camps, just exactly as happens today with the majority of our quota of 13,500 refugees, or as a normal part of the family reunion migration program after other family members had been settled here. Fraser's record on eventually accepting substantial numbers of Vietnamese is good.

The Vietnamese have been a wonderful success in Australia. But exactly like Howard, Fraser was determined to stop people coming here directly by boat. Australians have a long history of being generous to refugees and to migrants generally provided they come to Australia in an orderly process supervised by the Australian government.

Many Afghans who come to Australia go through Pakistan, catch a flight to Malaysia, get another flight or boat to Indonesia, then join a boat to Australia and on the journey get rid of their documents. It is perfectly understandable that they want to live in Australia. It is not, however, a refugee situation.

Other nationalities who come on tourist visas and then claim refugee status have entered legally, they have documentation and they can be sent home if their claims are unsuccessful, which gives assessors more of an incentive to turn them down.

The assessment process on Christmas Island, in the absence of documents, is extremely subjective. The Rudd government's latest moves are not likely to stop the flow of boats. Nonetheless they are a move in the right direction.

SOURCE



Rasmussen Poll Says 70% of Arizona Residents Support Illegal Immigration Bill

UPDATE: At 3:30 p.m. April 23, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070 into law during a press conference

A new Rasmussen poll reveals that 70% of likely voters in Arizona support the new illegal immigration bill passed by the State Legislature. Only 23% oppose the bill. If signed into law, the bill would make it a crime to be in the state of Arizona illegally.

A majority of Arizona likely voters (53%), however, did express concern about if the bill will cause racial profiling. Forty-six percent expressed no concern.

The poll also asked likely voters how immigration will impact their decision at the polls, and 83% of Arizona residents said a candidate's position on immigration issues is important. Seventy-three percent of respondents also said that it's more important that Congress secure the border than offer an amnesty for the nation's 12 million illegal aliens.

The majority of Republicans, Independents and Democrats all support the bill. Although, Democrats were more concerned than the other two groups on potential civil rights violations the bill may have.

The bill awaits signature by Gov. Jan Brewer, but reports show signs that the Governor will sign the bill into law.

SOURCE





23 April, 2010

British PM savaged by young Radio One listeners over Labour's record on immigration

In one of his first campaign encounters with ordinary people, Gordon Brown came off worst yesterday when he was questioned by young first-time voters. The Prime Minister lost his temper and stumbled over his answers as he came under withering attack about immigration and his expenses.

After weeks of being transported from one photo opportunity with Labour party members to another, faced with real voters on Radio 1's Newsbeat Mr Brown was repeatedly interrupted and urged to admit his mistakes.

He was forced on to the back foot over his claim for thousands of pounds to pay his brother to hire a cleaner for his second home.

Gordon Brown being interviewed by BBC Radio 1's Tulip Mazumdar today where he became increasingly defensive as he took questions from first time voters

One questioner in the programme presented by Tulip Mazumdar was Rachel Barr, 18, a student at Edinburgh University. Barr: Young people aren't voting at the moment. I think that's partly due to the MPs expenses scandal. They don't have much trust in politicians or in politics any more. How do you plan to engage young people in politics again?

Brown: I'm shocked what some MPs did. It was a scandal. My father was a minister of the church. I was taught that honesty was the most important thing . . . I'm not in politics for what I can get out of it.

Mazumdar: What about your expenses because you claimed thousands of pounds for cleaning? What was going through your head when you thought it was OK for the taxpayer to pay for that?

Brown [irritated]: I've got to stay in two places at once. Right. And I've got my wife and my children. Mazumdar: But for your cleaning?

Brown: I had a cleaner and paid her a decent wage and at that time people thought it was acceptable if you had someone to clean your house, it was an acceptable expense.

Barr: [It's] insulting that we pay for your cleaning.

Mr Brown then faced a young voter who said her builder uncle was out of a job because immigration had got 'out of control'.

Siobhan Randles, 25, demanded on nine separate occasions that Mr Brown explain why Labour had failed to introduce tougher immigration controls before he set up a points system in 2007.

The Prime Minister appeared to patronise his questioner by explaining: 'It's called the Australian style points system because it's used in Australia.'

A succession of questions called on him to admit that Labour 'got it wrong' when it estimated that only 13,000 Eastern Europeans would arrive after joining the EU. In fact more than a million migrants from new EU states have come since 2004.

The Prime Minister replied: 'I don't think [we got it] wrong. We didn't misjudge it.'

Miss Randles hit back: 'How do you expect us to restore our faith and trust in you when you can't admit that there's a problem?'

Mr Brown conceded: 'I said there has been a problem and we're dealing with it by tightening up the controls on immigration.'

Source



Local Law Enforcement Authority to Check Immigration Status

A new CIS-LEAPS.TV web program discusses a recent court decision affirming that local law enforcement officers may question suspected illegal aliens encounter about their immigration status and then contact immigration authorities (ICE). Known as Estrada v. Rhode Island, this important decision should reassure local officers that they are not obliged to look the other way when they discover immigration law violations and provides guidance on reasonable actions officers may take in questioning foreign nationals.

The web program is moderated by Jessica Vaughan, CIS Director of Policy Studies, and features Michael Hethmon, General Counsel of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), and Garrett Roe, Staff Attorney at IRLI. Hethmon and Roe prepared an amicus curiae brief on behalf of the National Fraternal Order of Police in support of the Rhode Island state trooper. Hethmon and Roe point out how LEA best practices such as 1) knowledge of acceptable ID documents, 2) using ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center to verify status and 3) understanding federal laws that require foreign nationals to carry evidence of their lawful status will help avoid racial profiling or discrimination.

The case was heard by the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. and involved a traffic stop in which a Rhode Island state trooper discovered a van-load of illegal aliens being transported to illegal employment. The unsuccessful lawsuit was brought by the Rhode Island chapter of the ACLU. For more information on the case see Ms. Vaughan’s blog article, “Appeals Court Rules Favorably on State Trooper Questioning of Illegal Aliens.”

This CIS web program is available online on demand 24x7. See here An audio MP3 podcast and complete, editable, PowerPoint version of the program are also available.

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076. Email: center@cis.org. Contact: Jessica Vaughan (508) 346-3380 and jmv@cis.org. The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution which examines the impact of immigration on the United States.





22 April, 2010

New from the Center for Immigration Studies

1. Steven Camarota Debates on Arizona Trespassing Law

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2. Jessica Vaughan Discusses Population Issues on 'To the Contrary'

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3. Local Law Enforcement Authority to Check Immigration Status

Excerpt: A new CIS-LEAPS.TV webinar discusses a recent court decision affirming that local law enforcement officers may question suspected illegal aliens encounter about their immigration status and then contact immigration authorities (ICE). Known as Estrada v. Rhode Island, this important decision should reassure local officers that they are not obliged to look the other way when they discover immigration law violations and provides guidance on reasonable actions officers may take in questioning foreign nationals.

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4. Unmanageable and Unsustainable: A Review Essay on 'The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies'

Excerpt: In their book The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies, Professors of Education Patricia Gandara and Frances Contreras provide a rare and candid look at how Hispanic students — both immigrant and native-born — are faring in the United States. Their assessment is a warning to those concerned with the most vulnerable among us or to those simply concerned about the future prospects of our country.

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5. Illegal Immigration and Immigration Reform: Protecting the Employment Rights of the American Labor Force (Native-Born and Foreign-Born) Who Are Eligible To Be Employed

Excerpt: Ever since the latter half of the 19th century when the United States began to use its legal system as a means to regulate both the size and the composition of the flow of foreign-born persons into its population and labor force, policymakers have had to confront the issue of what to do about those who defy the ensuing limitations, restrictions, and exclusions (Briggs, 2003, chaps. 5-12). As a consequence, the subject of illegal immigration has made frequent appearances on the nation’s political reform agenda.

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6. Telemundo Launches New Program with Look at Immigration

Excerpt: Telemundo, a Spanish-language TV network, had a big day on Sunday. Not only did it introduce a new Sunday public-affairs program with a spirited discussion of immigration, but the program's anchor was also a participant in the roundtable discussion of NBC's Meet the Press. Both Telemundo and NBC are owned by General Electric.

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7. Goldman Sachs, Charged with Fraud, Is also an H-1B Employer

Excerpt: Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street powerhouse charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with fraud, is also a substantial user of H-1B workers.

The fraud charge was the lead story Saturday in both the Washington Post and the New York Times as presumably it was in other papers across the nation. The firm is charged by the SEC, not always a vigorous watchdog, with creating complex financial instruments, selling them to investors, and then betting (via short selling) against the very same instruments.

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8. USCIS Asks for E-Comments – Let's Tell 'em What We Think!

Excerpt: The USCIS Office of Public Engagement has issued an invitation for comments on its various programs, and it behooves one and all to respond.

The survey is online here and is open to the public.

As one might imagine, the questions do not deal with illegal immigration, or the massive current levels of arriving immigrants and nonimmigrants, or the impact of millions of newcomers on the demography or on the environment of the nation.

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9. Tax Reckoning for Illegal Immigrants?

Excerpt: Illegal immigrants are standing at the ready to solve America's public deficit crisis – or so you might conclude upon reading the Schumer-Graham immigration reform/amnesty proposal. One of the least plausible elements of the bill is the notion that providing legal status to illegal immigrants will be a boon to the U.S. Treasury.

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10. Do 90% of Illegals Pay Federal Taxes? Examining an Academic Illusion

Excerpt: A significant think tank has just issued a study on the effects of the proposed legalization of currently illegal alien residents.

It states (on p. 18) that 'Our estimates suggest that 87 percent of former crossers and 91 percent of overstayers filed federal tax returns in 2002.'

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11. Federalism Lives!

Excerpt: The Arizona legislature is showing that federalism still lives. State lawmakers have passed a bill to make it a state crime to reside in the state without proof of lawful U.S. residence. The legislation also empowers police officers to check a suspect's immigration status.

The legislation still needs the governor's signature to be enacted. And open-borders advocates are sure to obstruct the law in court. But the significance of Arizona's state legislation should not be missed. Further, such activity at the state and local level is healthy.

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12. Mexico's Legislature Hits Oklahoma for Tax-Withholding Scheme

Excerpt: The Mexican House of Representatives has called for that nation's government to boycott all goods made in Oklahoma because it is upset by that state's unique tax-withholding scheme, according to an AP dispatch.

You would think that how an American state handles its tax-collecting would be of little interest to the Mexican pols, but this is a slightly different system. If you send money by wire transfer out of state, no matter who you are, Oklahoma imposes a 1 percent state income tax withholding on the transaction. If you pay your state taxes, it does not cost you a cent.

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13. Legalization Research: Asking Mild Questions Produces Soothing Answers

Excerpt: A well-attended session at a Washington think tank yesterday provided some nuanced clues as to the intellectual rhetoric that will accompany the upcoming legalization debate.

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14. Armenian VOA Interview on Illegal Immigration Issues

Excerpt: An interview on illegal immigration with Mark Krikorian.

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15. Poverty Palace

Millionaire huckster Morris Dees, whose venomous and malevolent Southern Poverty Law Center exists almost exclusively 'to separate wealthy liberals from their money,' in the words of Harper's Ken Silverstein, has done remarkably well for himself. (See a CIS profile of Dees' foray into the immigration business here.) You can see for yourself just how well he's done in this slide show of his Montgomery, Ala. estate. I'm not sure which I like better — the pool house, the guest house, the studio building, or the main mansion.

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076. Email: center@cis.org. The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution which examines the impact of immigration on the United States.



People smugglers take no notice of the Australian government's "tough" new rules

Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott today renewed his attack on the Federal Government's border protection policy as another boat carrying asylum seekers arrived in Australian waters.

Mr Abbott and his deputy leader Julie Bishop have unveiled a mobile billboard in Perth which displays the number of boats which have arrived since the last federal election.

Mr Abbott revealed the massive billboard as news spread of another boat being intercepted on Tuesday night. The Navy intercepted the boat carrying 46 asylum seekers and two crew off the West Australian coast. They will be taken to Christmas Island for health, identity and security checks.

Mr Abbott says the Federal Government has lost control of the country's borders. "When I left my hotel this morning we had had 111 unauthorised boats. By the time I got here half an hour later we had confirmation of a 112th boat," he said.

SOURCE





21 April, 2010

Australian population debate ignores the dire social fallout

When the federal government blithely sets the annual immigration rate, including in it a significant number of refugees, it clearly does so without giving a toss for either the needs of those who are brought in or the needs of the existing communities into which they are settled. Unless it starts to invest considerably in this number there is a very big risk that Australians will not only remain opposed to further immigration but that immigration will continue to contribute to a range of gut-wrenching social problems as well as Australia's economic growth.

This particularly applies to refugees. Refugees differ from other migrants in a number of ways; they often don't have local family connections and support or the skills that would guarantee employment. They also haven't planned to come to Australia in the way that others might have and are often severely traumatised by their experiences at home.

This means they need extensive government assistance, and so do the suburbs expected to take large numbers of them. Traumatised schoolchildren who are years behind in educational attainment do not make it easy for classmates and teachers, however sympathetic. The same goes for parents. With the exception of some limited assistance for counselling and trauma, it is very difficult to see where the federal government has contributed to meeting refugee needs. As usual the states get counted out of the population and immigration debate but are left picking up the pieces.

At a recent seminar I attended in South West Sydney for the African Family Safety Project, the irresponsibility of our refugee program was forcibly brought home. Domestic violence is rife in parts of this community and it and their leadership groups are struggling, almost unaided, to cope with it. The community's efforts to contain family violence are fought at every turn by their own demons and the NSW and federal government's refusal to recognise that it needs to be dealt with now before another ghetto of crime and disadvantage is established.

SydWest Multicultural Services, which ran the seminar, receives some funding from the Women's Policy Office but little else. The seminar's main focus was with mostly Sudanese refugees who came from Africa under Australia's Humanitarian program. In the four years from 2002-03 to 2006-07 escapees from the Sudanese civil war accounted for a quarter of our intake. They included boys who had been soldiers, girls and women who had been raped, men who had been tortured, men and boys who had fought for their lives and killed. Eighty-two per cent of these people have little or no English language. Why should we be surprised that there might be difficulties establishing them in metropolitan Blacktown, where they have been sent?

There was good and bad news from the seminar. The good news was the presence of men at the seminar and a general agreement that domestic violence was wrong and should be stopped.

The bad news was that this is going to be difficult. We are talking about intensely traumatised people. Some will be silent, others will act. But there is also the culture gap. Some male participants complained about the nature of the Australian welfare system and what they saw as its preferential treatment of women. In the space of a few days these families had been transported from violent and lawless refugee camps or traditional community life in rural villages to brick veneer homes and welfare incomes in Anglo-Celtic Sydney. In Australia, welfare income is mostly given to mothers rather than fathers. Refugee women are in frequent contact with community services where men are not included and many men felt community service providers were breaking up their families by telling their wives they had the right to walk away from a marriage that made them unhappy. It was the men who were isolated and powerless, they said, and domestic violence was retaliation.

Male frustration was compounded by the generous youth allowances provided to their children once they turned 16. It meant their children could defy them (I assured them they were not alone in this) and traditional family respect was broken.

As the meeting progressed it was clear that for this community, the dramatic transition to Australia, lack of work for men and the power of the welfare dollar had become a diabolical cocktail. Official letters and phone calls from polite Department of Community Services workers were clearly not cutting it with families desperate for some face-to-face contact with people prepared to listen to them. One young man pointed to a poster on the wall. "That poster is a lie. It says Australia is a multicultural country. It is not. We were not told our ways would not be respected, that there was only one rule and that was the Australian way," he said.

"My wife was encouraged to leave me when she should stay." Others agreed.

There are hundreds of changes we need to make if we are serious about averting a social disaster in Blacktown and anywhere else that has to deal with a very different group of newcomers, especially if they are traumatised, unable to find work and struggling to bridge cultural divides. If we do not we will spend the next 20 years digging our new citizens out of the ghettoes to which we have condemned them and addressing crime and social dislocation.

While a theoretical discourse about the most desirable population size rages in the remote political echelons of Canberra, a city with strikingly few refugees of Sudanese or Afghani extraction, real Australia has to get on with the job of dealing with it. A little less theory and a lot more practical assistance would make the intellectual vanity of the population debate easier to take.

SOURCE



Australian Labor Party whacked on boatpeople in poll

There has been a huge swing to the Tony Abbott-led [conservative] Coalition on who is best to handle the issue of asylum-seekers arriving in Australia, with the Liberals holding almost a two-to-one advantage over the Rudd government.

The swing to the opposition came despite the government's suspension of refugee applications from Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum-seekers and the reopening of the notorious Curtin detention centre in remote Western Australia.

The results, in a Newspoll taken exclusively for The Australian last weekend, came as a six-month asylum-seeker deadlock at the Indonesian port of Merak was finally broken yesterday, but at least 18 of the Sri Lankans involved have already reached Christmas Island.

During the past three weeks of political debate, dominated by Kevin Rudd's plan to take over 60 per cent of state health funding and the government's suspension of refugee applications from Sri Lankans and Afghans, Labor's primary vote has remained unchanged on 43 per cent while the Coalition's has gone from 38 to 40 per cent. Based on preference flows at the last election, Labor leads the Coalition with an election-winning two-party-preferred vote of 54 to 46 per cent.

Under the Opposition Leader, the Coalition's position on asylum-seekers is that the Howard government's policy of issuing temporary protection visas "stopped the boats". This has not only greatly attracted support among Coalition supporters but is also winning over Labor voters. Support for the Coalition on handling asylum-seekers has doubled from 23 per cent in November last year to 44 per cent last weekend.

Since Mr Abbott became Liberal leader last December, there have been more than 100 illegal boat arrivals and Christmas Island is filled to overflowing with refugees. During the same period, support for the Rudd government's ability to handle asylum-seekers has risen from 20 per cent to 26 per cent.

Voters who were undecided about which party to trust on border protection have shifted overwhelmingly in Mr Abbott's favour.

The Newspoll shows that Mr Abbott's demands for a tougher line on illegal boat arrivals have attracted stronger support among Coalition voters than when Malcolm Turnbull was Liberal leader. In November last year, 54 per cent of Coalition supporters said they preferred the Coalition to handle the issue but last weekend that jumped 27 percentage points to 81 per cent.

Mr Abbott also picked up a large number of Labor supporters, almost tripling his support among them. In November, 8 per cent of ALP supporters backed the Coalition but last weekend the figure jumped 15 points to 23 per cent.

SOURCE





20 April, 2010

CNN Poll Reveals 66% of Americans Don't Want to Make it Easier for Illegal Aliens to Gain Citizenship

A new CNN poll reveals that 66% of Americans don't want the federal government to make it easier for illegal aliens to earn a citizenship. Only 33% say that the United States should make it easier for illegal aliens to earn citizenship. the majority of both Democrats and Republicans say they oppose making citizenship easier.

"Virtually all major subgroups oppose making it easier for illegal immigrants to become citizens, at least in the abstract," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Specific legislation that puts limits on the ability to gain citizenship has sometimes met with favor in the past if it restricts the number who can apply and penalizes them for staying in the country illegally. But the overall principle remains unpopular."

Fifty-two percent of Americans, however, say they are at least somewhat sympathetic for illegal aliens and their families. But that number is down from 57% when the same question was asked in May 2006 and from 70% in April 2006.

SOURCE



India and immigrants: A small personal anecdote and some broad generalizations

Australia has always welcomed a LARGE influx of immigrants, initially from the British Isles (including all my ancestors) and later from all over Europe. In more recent times there has been a huge influx from Asia, mostly Han Chinese.

And ALL the arrivals have settled in very well to the Australian way of life -- if not the first generation but certainly their children. So Australia is a society with strong Anglo-Saxon traditions even though many Australians are not of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. America is much the same.

The assimilation is so marked that I have even noted Yugoslavs who argue in favour of the monarchy. For Yugoslavs -- who still reliably hate one another (Serb-Croat rivalry etc.) -- to favour Queen Elizabeth as Queen of Australia is a rather remarkable testimony to how well immigrants have accepted Australia's traditions and is, I think, impressive.

Needless to say, there is always a fly in the ointment and the two major flies are Muslims (Lebanese in particular) and Africans -- both of whom have high crime rates, high rates of welfare dependancy and an apparent inability to settle well into the Australian mainstream.

But all is not lost. Australia's Indian community are clear assets to the country. And I must admit that I speak from some prejudice. I like Indians and find their peaceable nature wholly admirable. I have been to India 3 times and to Fiji once (from whence many Indians have come to Australia) so I know Indians in their own context as well as in a local context.

I am always one to put my money where my mouth is, however, so I have filled up the spare bedrooms in my big house with Indians. I have not gone to India but India has come to me.

One indication of my Indophilia is that I have long flown the flag of the Republic of India from the flagpole at the front of my house. I did so both to indicate ny own affection for India and in order to make my Indian sharers feel at home.

Recently, however, two of my Indian residents took the oath of allegiance and became Australian citizens. One of them came to me and told me that. I of course shook his hand and congratulated him.

But he had one request: Now that both were Australians he asked me to fly the Australian flag rather than the Indian flag from my flagpole. I of course have obliged.

But isn't that just the sort of attitude that one would hope for from immigrants? I applaud it and see it as yet another demonstration of the desirability of Indian immigrants. If we could replace all our Muslim and African immigrants with Indians, I personally would be much pleased.

Mind you, I am also strongly in favour of Australia's major "minority" -- the restrained, peaceable and hard-working Han Chinese. And since Australia is probably about 10% Han these days, that is another great strength for Australia. Wherever I go I see Han people and they are never any bother to anyone -- but they are often important service providers -- restaurateurs, pharmacists, doctors etc. -- JR





19 April, 2010

Immigration – the subject no mainstream British politician wants to talk about

Outside Lincoln station a taxi driver improbably claiming his name is Richard Wobblegob says: “Honesty, that’s what we want. A bit of honesty.” He’s sick of politicians, the slippery, grasping lot of ’em. Wobblegob is clear about one thing, though: he won’t vote Labour any more. “They’re lying bastards. And I wouldn’t vote Conservative. Don’t trust them, they’re not for the working man. Think I might go for UKIP.”

After feckless MPs and economic shambles, Wobblegob’s concern is immigration — and UKIP’s stance on the subject is pretty clear. It doesn’t want any, at least not for five years. Nor do the English Democrats or the BNP, who also have candidates standing in Lincoln.

For the past two elections, immigration has been the issue that dare not speak its name. Anyone questioning the number of people coming to live in Britain was crudely accused by Labour of racism; the Tories, fearing rivers of electoral blood, ran scared.

Yet it is an issue the public wants debated. Today’s Sunday Times/YouGov poll shows that 53% of people believe there has not been enough discussion of immigration in the campaign so far. And 76% believe the number of immigrants coming to Britain is “far too high”.

In many ways Lincoln, which has mirrored the national result in elections since 1974, is an island within an island. Moated by fenland, it has a castle and cathedral on a hill, with attendant twee shops and ye olde Primark and Fat Face in a smart shopping centre. Further out lie tattered estates of Victorian terraces.

There isn’t an investment banker for miles. Instead, low-paid agricultural and processing work predominates, pulling in thousands of migrants from eastern Europe. Are they a boon or a problem? What do the locals think?

The first person I approach in the high street is a dark-haired young woman in sunglasses and black jeans, accessorised with an infant in an all-terrain buggy. Will you be voting in the election, I ask?

“Zorry. No spik Inglis. Rushan,” she says. She’s from Latvia. Nearby is Pete, supervisor of the local public conveniences. He’s worried about Gordon Brown spraying money all over the place, partly on migrants.

“I’m not opposed to people from abroad. If they come to work here, that’s all right,” he says. “It’s those that come across and sprout at taxpayers’ expense that are a problem. Why should they be allowed to do that?”

Others suspect the influx of eastern Europeans has depressed wages and snaffled jobs. The obvious person to ask is a young blonde woman hovering outside the Staffline employment agency. Are immigrants taking jobs from locals?

“I don’t know,” says Sandra, 19. “I’m from Lithuania.” Turns out she’s the receptionist in the employment agency. She works five days a week there, does two days waitressing and studies animation in her spare time. The British, largely unacquainted with pay rates in Vilnius, are not keen to compete.

At Richardson’s second-hand car lot, in the poorer end of town, a twentysomething called Simon is attending to a silver Vauxhall. He’s in little doubt about the impact of migrants: “It’s got to affect some people, some jobs. Supply and demand, innit.”

Is he going to vote? “Possibly. Possibly Tories. I’ve had enough of Labour.”

Then this Mr Ordinary Bloke, with no obvious tattoos or mental deficiencies, says without any prompting: “Or we could all vote BNP. I’d be happy to vote for them. Everyone’s so p***** off it makes the BNP worth voting for.”

Labour has itself to blame for the suppuration of such sentiments. Official figures show that it let immigration rip once it took power. In the early 1990s, long-term net immigration rarely rose above 50,000 a year but in 1998, after Labour’s first year in office, it leapt to 140,000 and hit 174,000 in 2001. It peaked at 245,000 a year before falling slightly. The latest figures show that 590,000 people arrived to live in Britain in 2008; net immigration only fell to 163,000 because 427,000 other people emigrated.

Since 1997 about 3m immigrants have arrived and the population is now 61m. The Office for National Statistics projects that the population will go on rising to 70m, with 70% of the increase caused by immigration.

Beneath the headline figures, the make-up of the country is rapidly changing. In 2008, for example, many more British citizens emigrated than returned to the UK, and many more EU, Commonwealth and other foreign nationals arrived than left. More than 500,000 arrivals in 2008 were non- British citizens.

The impacts are hotly disputed. For years Labour claimed migrants brought economic benefits. More people plus more work generally means the overall economy grows. But is anyone better off after taking into account the increase in population?

According to a recent study by Oxford Economics, GDP per capita did rise during Labour’s first two terms, but it fell in the third. GDP per capita is now lower in real terms than in 2005. Even The Economist, a fan of cheap and mobile labour, concluded last week that “there is little sign that wealth per person increased much” as a result of immigration.

The rise in the number of foreign-born people has almost matched the rise in the number of jobs, according to some calculations, leading to claims that 98% of new jobs have gone to migrants. Although this is disputed, the Trades Union Congress concedes that 50% of jobs created since 1997 have probably gone to non-UK nationals.

Services have also come under pressure in areas with large numbers of new arrivals. Council leaders in Slough, Peterborough and Boston have complained that local budgets and amenities are under “enormous strain” because official figures do not reflect their real populations.

Doctors, hospitals and schools all face challenges. In more than 300 primary schools, 70% of pupils have English as a second language, according to Migrationwatch UK, a group that campaigns for greater control of immigration.

In January two independent councillors from Peterborough wrote to Gordon Brown expressing their concerns over the pressure on schools in their area. They received no reply.

The election candidates in Lincoln gathered on Wednesday evening for a public debate at a hotel on the outskirts of town. After skirmishes over local measures, the meeting burst into life with a question on immigration. What should be done about it?

The UKIP candidate, Nick Smith, at least had the merit of honesty; at one point he likened himself to a “prat”. Nevertheless, he won applause from a minority for wanting to freeze immigration.

The English Democrats candidate, Ernest Charles, had a rum-barrel chest and Pugwash beard and, even before he announced it, you knew he had spent 36 years in the Royal Navy. When ill-informed on a topic (not uncommon) his policy was straightforward: repel immigrants. He’d scuttle the country rather than let it fall into enemy hands. More applause from the minority.

The Liberal Democrat, Reginald Shore, was a likeable man with good intentions and a policy spun from 100% pure new wool. He was very definitely for and against immigration, under certain circumstances, up to a point.

With the BNP absent, that left Gillian Merron, the sitting Labour MP, and her rival Karl McCartney of the Conservatives. Merron, an MP since 1997 and a minister since 2006, has been part of the government that presided over record immigration. All she could do was bluster about Labour’s belated attempts at control being “firm but fair”, as Brown himself did in Thursday’s television debate.

By contrast, McCartney was able to sound clear on this issue. “The Conservative party has said there will be a limit on immigrants,” he said. Not a ban, a limit. It seemed to get general approval.

In a seat the Tories should capture with a 4.8% swing, McCartney ought to be a winner, even though he has something of the 1980s night about him — a hint of estate agency, perhaps — that seems to make floating voters suspicious. Will the fringe parties detract from the Conservative vote, especially on immigration?

It’s not that simple, according to Colin Rallings of Portsmouth University. Yes, UKIP does tend to take votes from the Tories, but at the same time the BNP often takes votes from disaffected working-class Labour supporters. Both main parties are likely to be squeezed by fringe groups, with neither gaining a clear advantage.

Since both the Conservatives and Labour, it seems, are happy to avoid campaigning on immigration, Wobblegob may have to wait for his honesty. Once again immigration may end up the big issue the main parties would prefer to ignore.

Source



Australian-born families to be a minority in Australia by 2025

Australia today is a wonderfully cohesive yet permissive society. To throw away such a rare combination would be a tragedy

THE Australian-born family will be a minority social group in 15 years, according to new research by demographic consultants Macroplan Australia. Soaring immigration and an ageing population mean that migrant families will outnumber Australian-born residents by 2025.

According to 2006 census data, 40 per cent of Australia's population were born overseas, or have at least one parent who was born overseas. But if immigration continues at current levels, that will jump to more than 50 per cent by 2025.

The news comes days after Tony Burke's appointment as Australia's first population minister, tasked with managing the huge influx of migrants expected to help swell the population to 36 million by 2050, up from 22 million today.

A survey of 3000 people has revealed 70 per cent of Australians do not want a bigger population and less than a quarter favoured immigration as the main contributor.

However, experts say the migrant majority will be a healthy development for Australian culture and attitudes. "It is all adding to the cosmopolitan nature of modern Australia," said Bernard Salt, a demographic expert at KPMG. "It means our views become less blinkered and we become more tolerant, confident, engaged, opportunistic and optimistic because we are open to new ideas and not obsessed with keeping things the same."

Brian Haratsis, chief executive of Macroplan, said Australia's current population tends to "stare at our shoes and say we're the best in the world" instead of embracing new ideas.

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18 April, 2010

Voters’ Concerns on Immigration Influence British Electoral Campaign

The story below is from the NYT ("All the news that's fit to slant") but is mostly pretty fair. It says little of the deliberate policies of the Leftist government that have inflamed popular anger against immigrants but that's a story for another day

Few people in the working-class neighborhood of Barking seem willing to proclaim unalloyed enthusiasm for the ultra-right-wing, anti-immigration British Nationalist Party. But get past “hello” in any conversation and their feelings come spilling out.

“I’m not a racist, but they’re letting so many of them in,” complained Bill Greed, 66, speaking of foreigners. “They come and sign on for benefits. A lot of the children in schools don’t even speak English. There’s so many illegal ones that the government can’t even find all of them.” The B.N.P.? “I agree with what they’re saying, but not with how they go about it,” Mr. Greed said.

As they prepare for the national election on May 6, Britons everywhere identify immigration as one of their biggest concerns. But in few places is the issue so urgent, or the electoral choices so stark, as in the borough of Barking and Dagenham, on the eastern edge of London. With little support for the Tory or Liberal Democratic Parties here, the race is between the unpopular ruling Labour Party and an emboldened B.N.P. capitalizing on its rival’s weaknesses.

Once Barking and Dagenham were white, blue-collar bastions, with 40,000 people employed at a huge Ford factory. Now 35 percent of the residents are from ethnic minorities, up from 5 percent 10 years ago. The factory has given way to a diesel engine plant with one-tenth the work force. Unemployment stands at 8 percent.

The influx has put a serious strain on services, particularly housing. Mick W., a 20-year-old maintenance worker who did not want to give his last name because he is employed by the Borough Council, said his family waited a decade for decent public housing while immigrants with large families leapfrogged ahead.

“I don’t mind the ones who come and get a job,” he said, “but all they do is claim, claim, claim.” The B.N.P.? “I can’t see them running the country, but I support what they stand for.”

The B.N.P. says it stands for many things, but chief among them is an implacable belief that Britain belongs to indigenous white Britons. Until a judge struck down the provision last month, the party had a whites-only membership policy. It favors an immediate end to immigration and the repatriation of people of foreign descent.

In 2006, the party won 12 of the 51 seats on the Barking and Dagenham Council, its strongest showing anywhere in the country. This time, it hopes to secure 14 more seats, enough to take control of the council, its 300 million pound annual budget and its 9,300 employees. It is also working to unseat Margaret Hodge, the Labour stalwart who represents Barking in Parliament.

Ms. Hodge’s opponent is Nick Griffin, the B.N.P. leader. A well-dressed, well-spoken Cambridge law graduate, Mr. Griffin, 51, has denied that the Holocaust took place, and also said that Hitler “went a bit too far.” In 1998, he was convicted of distributing material likely to incite racial violence.

But in recent years Mr. Griffin has taken care to moderate his public statements as his party seeks mainstream electoral success. Last year, he was elected to the European Parliament from North West England.

In Barking, B.N.P. supporters are campaigning against Ms. Hodge by using her maiden name, Oppenheimer, apparently in a bid to court the anti-Semitic vote, and by falsely accusing her of supporting a fictitious plan that — the story goes — pays Africans to move in, presumably increasing Labour’s electoral base.

“It’s the most important election I’ve ever fought and the one I feel most passionate about,” Ms. Hodge said as she campaigned door to door last weekend. “I came into politics to fight racism, and the idea that these people could get a seat in Parliament or get control of a council is just against everything I stand for.”

In a place full of angry, disaffected voters, many of whom did not want to come to the door or who closed it upon discovering a politician was standing outside, her task was not easy.

Ms. Hodge tried to enumerate Labour’s achievements, but then changed tactics as she gauged the anti-government mood on the doorsteps. “It’s been a horrible time, but it’s a two-horse race here, I’m afraid,” she told one woman, who identified herself as a Tory sympathizer. “If you want to keep the B.N.P. out, you’re going to have to swallow hard and vote for us.”

Fears about immigration are echoed across Britain, where new arrivals have added to a leap in population in the last decade. In a country that is already among the most crowded in Europe, the prospect of even more growth inflames people’s fears at a time of financial crisis and worries about terrorism.

Concerns that immigrants are unfairly taking up public resources in such places as schools and hospitals have been aggravated by anti-government newspapers like the populist Daily Mail, which regularly publish articles that gnaw at public anxiety.

Earlier this month, for instance, The Mail reported on a hospital with employees from 70 countries who spoke such poor English, it said, that they had to take state-financed language classes. On Sunday, the paper reported that Muslim women who are hospital workers are being now allowed to cover their forearms because of religious modesty, in contravention of standard hygiene rules.

Perhaps belatedly, Labour is acknowledging how deeply voters feel about immigration. On Monday, it said it would require that all local government workers who deal with the public be able to speak English. In Dagenham, Meg Hillier, a fellow member of Parliament and a minister in the immigration office, was campaigning alongside Ms. Hodge, armed with a sheaf of information about Labour’s immigration policies.

“We deport someone every eight minutes,” Ms. Hillier said. “We fingerprint anyone who comes in for over six months. Foreigners now have to carry special national identity cards.”

Ms. Hillier said the government was not pandering to xenophobia, but responding to public concern. “People are allowed to have fears about immigration,” she said.

At the Barking Saturday market, where white faces mingle with brown and black ones, and where burka-shrouded forms glide past women in tank tops, 72-year-old Freda Shaw surveyed the scene last weekend and shook her head. “I don’t think the B.N.P. is the answer — they’re just racist,” she said. “But look — there’s not one white shop here. Where I live, you need a passport to get in.”

As it happened, Dominic Carman, the Liberal Democratic candidate for Parliament, was campaigning down the street. He has a single goal: to stop the B.N.P. “They’re the obvious beneficiary of the protest vote against the ineptitude and incompetence of Labour,” he said. “The B.N.P. are capitalizing on the problems here by blaming it all on immigration.”

Mr. Carman gestured at the market stalls, a cacophony of noises and odors and exotic goods from around the world. “The true spirit of multiculturalism is alive and well in this market,” he said. “This is what Nick Griffin wants to destroy.”

SOURCE



Current level of immigration to be a disaster for Australia

Australia's population to grow from 22 to 42 million by 2050, modelling shows

AUSTRALIA'S population will reach 42 million by 2050, six million more than the Federal Government's target, if migration, fertility and life expectancy continue at today's pace.

Modelling by Australia's Centre for Population and Urban Research warned of a doubling of the population in 40 years, which it also claimed would be unsustainable, and significantly outstrips Federal Government targets.

Cities such as Sydney and Melbourne would evolve into mega high rise metropolises on the scale of Hong Kong, with a drastic deterioration in quality of life for its inhabitants, it warned.

The research conducted by Professor Bob Birrell, one of the country's leading demographers at Monash University, said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's target of 36 million people would be overshot based on the current net migration rate of 298,000 a year.

Under a business as usual scenario, Sydney would have a population of more than 7.5 million and Melbourne upwards of 6.5 million and both would need to be redesigned to cope.

Treasury modelling contained in the third Intergenerational Report forecast a population of 35.9 million by 2050 but assumed returning to a net migration rate of 180,000 a year.

Professor Birrell's modelling based on Treasury figures showed a continued rate of 298,000 would produce a population of 42.3 million based on greater life expectancies and lower birth rate of 1.9, as well as immigration. The workforce would be 22 million.

A lower net migration rate of 125,000 - the average from 1996 to 2007 - would result in a national population of 32 million. Professor Birrell warned the Federal Government had to return to a figure of 180,000 a year from existing higher levels if it wanted to avoid overshooting its own target of 36 million.

But even at these lower rates, Professor Birrell warned that cities such as Sydney and Melbourne would need to be completely redesigned. "We have to get down to that figure quickly, in the next few years," he said yesterday. "It's to do with economies of scale - to refit a city is an enormous exercise."

Opposition Immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said it was time there was a rational debate about population growth.

"It is clear Rudd's idea of a big Australia seems to start at 36 million. Where it ends, we simply don't know," he said.

"By contrast the Coalition is keen to engage in what is a sustainable growth path for Australia and engage with business, the community and the environment lobby and plan our migration intakes appropriately."

While Mr Rudd had originally suggested that 36 million was a "target" population for Australia, his newly-appointed Population Minister Tony Burke has been keen to backtrack and claim it is merely a forecast.

"A figure of 36 million is a very high level and vastly higher than most people imagined until the [report] was released. Imagine 42 million," Professor Birrell said. "It would involve a serious deterioration in quality of life and a fundamental change to the way people live."

SOURCE





17 April, 2010

How to tweak America’s immigration policy

The StartUp Visa Act is a small step in the right direction

In the current issue of "BusinessWeek," Michelle Conlin writes that the percentage of top MBAs from U.S. universities who are taking jobs in Asia has more than doubled since 2005. It's now over 10 percent of the graduating class.

What's luring them to the East? More opportunities to make an impact, work in an emerging market, develop a global skill set, and earn international exposure.

Asian companies are now actively recruiting many of the top MBAs, beating out American companies.

It's not only the pool of Western talent that's being drained from the U.S. International students are also increasingly choosing to return to their home countries to work and start new businesses. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that over 40 percent of non-U.S. doctoral degree recipients intended to leave the U.S.

Even highly educated and skilled immigrants who have lived and worked in the U.S. for years are returning home. In China, these returnees are called hai gui, which means sea turtle, because sea turtles return to their place of birth after having migrated elsewhere.

It seems the American Dream is no longer confined to the borders of America. Opportunity now abounds globally, especially in Asia.

In order for the U.S. to maintain its competitive edge in the global economy, it needs to focus on attracting skilled professionals.

One of the best ways to do this is by allowing more skilled immigrants to become permanent residents. The U.S. needs to attract immigrants who are highly educated and have much to contribute to U.S. innovation, job growth, and economic growth.

While immigrants represent only 12 percent of the U.S. population, their economic and intellectual contributions have been significant. They've started more than half of the technology companies in Silicon Valley and contributed to over one quarter of U.S.-originated international patents.

Offering skilled immigrants permanent residence instead of temporary visas will increase the number who come to the U.S., the number who stay, and the number who start new businesses that create jobs for Americans.

U.S. Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) recently proposed the StartUp Visa Act, which would provide incentive for immigrant entrepreneurs to create jobs in the U.S. If passed, the act would create a two-year visa for any immigrant entrepreneur who can secure at least $250,000 from U.S. investors. At the end of the two years, an immigrant can become a legal resident if his or her business has created at least five full-time jobs in the U.S., attracted an additional $1 million in investment capital, or achieved $1 million in revenue.

The StartUp Visa Act is a step in the right direction. It will help keep innovation and jobs in the U.S. These jobs can't be outsourced or shipped overseas.

Immigrants who can create jobs for Americans and help build the U.S. economy deserve permanent U.S. residency.

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Australia: Tough stance on boatpeople all talk

Is anyone surprised?

JUST seven days ago three Rudd government ministers held a dramatic news conference to announce a policy volte face on illegal boat arrivals and applications for asylum.

Chris Evans, Stephen Smith and Brendan O'Connor, representing the departments of Immigration, Foreign Affairs and Home Affairs respectively, talked tough on asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, and even tougher on penalties for people-smugglers.

It was a calculated response to the Coalition's increasingly successful claims that the Rudd government had gone soft on illegal boat arrivals and its policy changes since the 2007 election had encouraged rather than deterred arrivals. Polling was showing that voters thought the government was not handling the issues well and were giving the Coalition the edge.

Despite the government's fervent wish to concentrate on the health reform package, the frequent arrival of boatloads of mostly Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum-seekers was capturing public attention and media time.

Evans started the press conference with the statement: "Look, today I want to announce that the government is implementing an immediate suspension on the processing of all new applications from asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

"Evolving country information from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan is likely to have a significant effect on the outcome of assessments as to whether asylum-seekers have a well-founded fear of persecution within the meaning of the Refugees Convention.

"The likelihood of people being refused visas and being returned safely to their homelands will increase."

Evans, Smith and O'Connor then proceeded to outline the policy and justifications for it that turned the government's rhetoric on asylum-seekers for the past six months on its head.

In the week since the announcement the policy and justifications have been shredded and exposed as a cynical and deceitful political exercise.

What's more, it's a policy that is unlikely to achieve what it is intended to achieve because the government continues to attempt to please everyone and put politics ahead of policy.

While the changes are a sham and built on illogical or false premises, even the government admits they're unlikely to have any effect on boat arrivals in the short term and will not stop moving detainees to the mainland.

The shift leaves those who want tougher action on asylum-seekers, such as Tony Abbott, with his no permanent visas "no ifs, no buts" approach, dissatisfied and those who want a greater degree of compassion outraged.

Last year, the initial reaction to the first "irregular maritime arrivals" was to deride the opposition's claims, discount projections as being fanciful and point to illegal boat arrivals during the Howard years.

This year, the central political argument has been that waves of asylum-seekers are a global problem and that they are being driven to Australia by so-called "push factors" - war and strife pushing them from their home countries - rather than by the so-called "pull factors" - guaranteed permanent visas and a better life.

Labor continued to demonise the Howard government's asylum policies and promote its own commitment to processing refugee claims within 90 days.

Evans continued to tell the Senate that people in detention for long periods faced mental trauma and Labor figures derided mandatory detention of boatpeople in remote centres.

But cracking a century of boat arrivals also cracked the government's nerve and the decision was made to dump all the compassionate rhetoric made before and after the election.

Not only was 90 days no longer the maximum period for processing on Christmas Island, as Evans had aimed for, it was now the minium time in detention for Sri Lankans - 180 days for Afghans.

Also, the detention is effectively indefinite because there is no guarantee the suspension will end when reviewed.

The government's justification for these actions is risible. Why doesn't the Rudd government just live up to the Prime Minister's election promise to "turn back the boats", buy a fight with the human rights and refugee groups and appeal to voters who want some real action?

Part of the answer to that question is that the government thinks it can escape concerted criticism from the harshest critics of the Howard government as long as it performs a pea and thimble trick to satisfy appearances.

That assumption appears to be correct if the muted response to the government's decision is any guide.

After claiming the increase in asylum-seekers was all push factors because of the bad conditions in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, the Australian government is now arguing the situation is getting so much better in those countries the asylum-seekers should be encouraged to return of their own volition and the number of refugee visas will drop.

The grounds for this claim are based on US State Department advice, a proposed review by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the suggestion that a "number of countries" had suspended refugee applications from Sri Lankans.

The US State Department's advice on Afghanistan is that it's getting worse, the UNHCR's review is a regular update unlikely to change dramatically and the citing of other countries is misleading. The ministers have still been unable to name other countries that acted before Australia and there have been reports since the press conference last week that Denmark had suspended its refugee applications.

What the Danish Refugee Appeals Board did almost exactly a year ago was to suspend the appeal of six Tamil families who had lost their refugee application and had been ordered to be repatriated so that those six families would not be sent back. The suspension was extended in June last year to cover all Sri Lankan refugee appeals, not applications, until the Danish Foreign Office provided more information about how dangerous Sri Lanka was.

The suspension of appeals was lifted in December last year, after the advice was given, and applications for refugee status from Sri Lankans were not suspended. Whatever the politics of all of this, it's not good policy, either way.

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16 April, 2010

Flood of illegals coming to Australia in boats shuts down all other immigrant checking

Immigration Department officials have been ordered to back off all non-essential visa checking, such as raids on brothels and illegal fruit pickers, as mainland detention centres are at risk of overflowing because of the constant transfer of asylum-seekers from Christmas Island. The Australian has learnt that Immigration Department compliance officers were told late last week to detain people only where necessary, because of the space pressure inside detention centres.

The instructions, which were issued verbally, not in writing, are understood to have been handed down last Thursday and Friday.

It is believed compliance officers were told to ease off all non-essential work and to detain people at airports only when absolutely necessary. Yesterday, a spokesman for the department conceded there was "some pressure" on detention centres onshore.

"Compliance officers have been asked to consider the impact of current detention capacity when planning their field operations, including looking at alternatives to detention," the spokesman said.

Pressure on mainland detention centres stems largely from a refusal by the government to authorise a spill to the mainland.

The comments came as authorities on Christmas Island yesterday unloaded a total of 135 people at Flying Fish Cove in nine barge trips - passengers from three boats intercepted last week.

The Australian understands that most had travelled from Afghanistan but that they had been intercepted before the government announced a suspension of all new Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum claims.

The latest arrivals came as the Danish government began investigating reports in Australia that claimed it had suspended refugee applications. Denmark is concerned that its position on asylum-seekers was misrepresented in Fairfax newspapers after statements by Foreign Minister Stephen Smith and Immigration Minister Chris Evans last Friday said that Australia was not the only country to suspend Sri Lankan refugee applications.

And yesterday, the head of Indonesia's people-smuggling taskforce at the National Police, Commander Hermawan, was quoted in local media, warning that as many as 5000 illegal Middle Eastern immigrants were preparing to cross from Malaysia to Indonesia, where they would be stranded by the Australian government's policy change.

As the latest asylum-seekers landed on Christmas Island, the Coalition moved to toughen its stance on border protection by ruling out family reunion rights for boatpeople. Less than one week after unilaterally committing a Coalition government to a lower migrant intake, the opposition's immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison, has again provoked the ire of party moderates, this time by barring boatpeople from access to the family reunion scheme.

Mr Morrison yesterday told The Australian that a Coalition proposal to reintroduce controversial temporary protection visas would prohibit visa-holders from bringing family members to Australia. "We won't be offering family reunion under the TPVs," Mr Morrison said. "Then you'd be effectively offering the same rights and entitlements as permanent visas, and this is not a permanent visa."

The proposal has prompted outrage from refugee groups, who say TPVs forced asylum-seekers to bring their families on the boats with them, sometimes at the cost of their lives. Refugee Council president John Gibson yesterday condemned the proposal as reckless and inhumane. "If you want to talk about causation, there is absolutely no doubt in the world about that factor, because the number of women and children increased four-fold," Mr Gibson said.

Mr Morrison's proposal was also attacked by Liberal moderates Petro Georgiou and Russell Broadbent. Mr Georgiou, perhaps the most outspoken Liberal critic of Howard-era refugee policies, described TPVs as "pernicious instruments".

"History shows that a number of women and children on SIEV X were drowned seeking to be reunited with people in Australia who had been found to be refugees and who were on temporary protection visas," Mr Georgiou said. "Under the Howard government, almost all people on TPVs were converted to permanent protection visas."

Last night there were 2212 boat people on Christmas Island, which was originally designed to hold just 400.

The overcrowding has forced the Immigration Department to put mattresses on the floor of small rooms that held just one bed a year ago but now sleep up to five men. An education facility inside the centre has been converted to a dormitory, and people sleep where they used to take Australian studies classes.

"It's tight, but we're managing," a spokesman for the department said yesterday.

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'Labor party elite out of touch' on population growth

A new survey has shed more light on how Australian voters would respond if population growth became a big election issue.

The survey by the Australian National University is the largest recent study of social attitudes to population growth and shows that nearly 70 per cent of respondents do not believe Australia needs more people.

The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes was restricted to voters, and 3,124 people completed the mail-out questionnaire.

They were asked "Do you think Australia needs more people?" and 69 per cent said no.

Dr Katharine Betts, Adjunct Associate Professor of Sociology at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, has written a report on the findings. She says those who voted 'no' were worried about local jobs, urban congestion and the environment.

"I think it's clear from this data that the growth train steaming ahead has a lot of unhappy passengers, and I think it's pretty clear that there's a large swathe of voters out here who would really like the train driver to put on the brakes," she said.

"We were rather surprised that the top pick there was the reason 'We should train our own skilled people not take them from other countries'. Twenty-four per cent of people chose that as either their first or second reason."

The 31 per cent of respondents happy with population growth were asked what sort of growth they would prefer, and 23 per cent chose immigration.

"With the people who favoured growth, they tended to pick economic reasons, having more babies and more migrants could counteract the ageing of the population, we need skilled migrants for the workforce - that accounted for nearly three-quarters of the responses amongst the pro-growth people," Dr Betts said.

The survey was completed in the three months to February. Its findings are in contrast to the much smaller Lowy Poll released last week which found most people want a bigger Australia but do not want the population to reach the predicted 36 million by 2050.

Dr Betts says in this latest study, the state most unhappy about population growth was Queensland.

"Seventy-three per cent of Queenslanders thought Australia didn't need more people but the ACT was quite unlike the other states, and 50 per cent of people in the ACT wanted more people," she said.

Dr Betts says she thinks the results show there is widespread opposition to the idea of a "big Australia", but that opposition does not yet have a political focus.

"There is this new party being formed, the Stable Population Party of Australia; we don't know what the Opposition is going to do, they've been talking about a rather smaller migrant intake and perhaps they'll pursue that line," she said.

"But I think it does show that [Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd and the Labor political elite are very much out of touch with Australian voters on this particular question."

The survey results will be published in the quarterly journal People and Place.

SOURCE





15 April, 2010

CIS roundup

1. Looking at the H-1B Process Through the Eyes of the Participants

Excerpt: It is often useful to look at an immigration program, step-by-step, through the eyes of the participants; in earlier years I did this with people seeking naturalization, legalization applicants, and green-card holders who lived in Mexico and worked in the United States.

Recently, I started doing this vis-à-vis the H-1B program; one gets a more nuanced view of the program that supplements reading studies, statistics, and statements made by supporters and opponents of the program.

********

2. After Health Care, Amnesty?

Excerpt: Many on the left are demanding that the president take up amnesty for illegal immigrants as his next major goal. But it’s just not going to happen.

There has certainly been a lot of talk about moving on to immigration reform. Some 60,000 illegal aliens and their supporters staged a protest in Washington in March demanding amnesty. President Obama reiterated his “unwavering” commitment to legalizing the country’s 11 million illegal aliens. And a great fuss was made over a “blueprint” for an amnesty bill outlined in a Washington Post op-ed by Sens. Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham.

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3. Steven Camarota Discusses Border Security

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4. Jon Feere Discusses Mexican Violence, Asylum

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5. Spinning the News

Excerpt: One way to spin the news is by selecting stories that together create a single message. With immigration looming as a national issue the editors of my local paper, The Contra Costa Times, are doing their part to move amnesty forward by diffusing public misgivings about it and about Mexico as a neighbor through the selection of articles in their news coverage.

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6. USCIS Robs Social Security Fund of $1 Billion a Year

Excerpt: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, late in the Bush administration, issued an emergency ruling that silently robs the Social Security Trust Fund of nearly a billion dollars a year, every year.

This stealth attack may have been reported in the press somewhere, but I doubt it.

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7. H-1B Filings Fall Sharply, Apparently Due to the Economy

Excerpt: This morning USCIS announced that the number of H-1B petitions filed in the first week of the month fell sharply from last year's comparable period, and even more dramatically vis-a-vis earlier years. One of the impacts of this is a major blow to the agency's budget.

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8. Would Legalization Backlogs Delay Other USCIS Applications? Probably

Excerpt: An interesting question has arisen as a result of a congressional hearing: would a massive legalization program, as many advocates want, slow the processing of applications filed routinely by citizens and legal aliens wanting immigration benefits?

The numbers are daunting. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) currently faces six million applications a year according to one news story. The estimates of the number of illegal aliens in the nation runs to 11 or 12 million.

********

9. Guilt by Invented Association

Excerpt: Imagine 2050, a web site devoted to smearing those who do not share their support of high immigration, claimed last year that I wrote an article for the American Free Press (AFP). First, I did not give permission to AFP to publish anything I have written. I was unaware that AFP even existed until this issue came up. AFP simply lifted from the internet parts of something I wrote for the Center for Immigration Studies. A simple Google search would have revealed this fact.

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076. Email: center@cis.org. The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution which examines the impact of immigration on the United States.





14 April, 2010

Arizona passes strict illegal immigration act

The bill directs police to determine the immigration status of noncriminals if there is a 'reasonable suspicion' they are undocumented. Immigrant rights groups say it amounts to a police state. But with the grief that illegals give to Arizona (ask the family of Rob Krentz about that), this is understandable

Arizona lawmakers on Tuesday approved what foes and supporters agree is the toughest measure in the country against illegal immigrants, directing local police to determine whether people are in the country legally.

The measure, long sought by opponents of illegal immigration, passed 35 to 21 in the state House of Representatives. The state Senate passed a similar measure earlier this year, and Republican Gov. Jan Brewer is expected to sign the bill. The bill's author, State Sen. Russell Pearce, said it simply "takes the handcuffs off of law enforcement and lets them do their job."

But police were deeply divided on the matter, with police unions backing it but the state police chief's association opposing the bill, contending it could erode trust with immigrants who could be potential witnesses.

Immigrant rights groups were horrified, and contended that Arizona would be transformed into a police state. "It's beyond the pale," said Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. "It appears to mandate racial profiling."

The bill, known as SB 1070, makes it a misdemeanor to lack proper immigration paperwork in Arizona. It also requires police officers, if they form a "reasonable suspicion" that someone is an illegal immigrant, to determine the person's immigration status.

Currently, officers can inquire about someone's immigration status only if the person is a suspect in another crime. The bill allows officers to avoid the immigration issue if it would be impractical or hinder another investigation.

Citizens can sue to compel police agencies to comply with the law, and no city or agency can formulate a policy directing its workers to ignore the law -- a provision that advocates say prevents so-called sanctuary orders that police not inquire about people's immigration status.

The bill cements the position of Arizona, whose border with Mexico is the most popular point of entry for illegal immigrants into this country, as the state most aggressively using its own laws to fight illegal immigration. In 2006 the state passed a law that would dissolve companies with a pattern of hiring illegal immigrants. Last year it made it a crime for a government worker to give improper benefits to an illegal immigrant.

Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank that advocates tougher immigration enforcement, said the legislation was a logical extension of the state's previous enforcement efforts. "It makes sense that they would be the first to do it since they're ground zero for illegal immigration," he said.

Krikorian added that he doubted the law would be used much. "Obviously, their prosecutors aren't going to go out and prosecute every illegal alien," he said. "It gives police and prosecutors another tool should they need it."

Opponents, however, raised the specter of officers untrained in immigration law being required to determine who is in the country legally. They noted that though the bill says race cannot solely be used to form a suspicion about a person's legality, it implicitly allows it to be a factor.

"A lot of U.S. citizens are going to be swept up in the application of this law for something as simple as having an accent and leaving their wallet at home," said Alessandra Soler Meetze, president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

The ACLU and other groups have vowed to sue to block the bill from taking effect should Brewer sign it. They note that a federal court struck down a New Hampshire law in 2005 that said illegal immigrants were trespassing, declaring that only the federal government has the authority to enforce immigration. Another provision of the Arizona law, which makes day laborers illegal, violates the 1st Amendment, critics contend.

The issue of local enforcement of immigration laws has been especially heated in Arizona, where Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has taken an aggressive stance, conducting sweeps in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods to round up illegal immigrants.

His actions have drawn a civil rights investigation from the Department of Justice but strong praise from Arizonans. Other agencies have argued against Arpaio's stance, saying that they need illegal immigrants to trust them enough to report crimes.

Brewer, a Republican, has not taken a public stance on the bill. She replaced Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who became President Obama's Homeland Security chief last year. Napolitano had vetoed similar bills in the past. Brewer faces a primary challenge next month; most observers expect her to sign the measure.

Some Republicans have privately complained about the bill, which Pearce has been pushing for several years, but were loath to vote against it in an election year. The House was scheduled to approve it last week but the vote was delayed until Tuesday to give sponsors a chance to round up enough votes. It picked up steam after the killing late last month of a rancher on the Arizona side of the Mexican border. Footprints from the crime scene led back to Mexico.

In an impassioned debate Tuesday, both sides relied on legal and moral arguments. "Illegal immigration brings crime, kidnapping, drugs -- drains our government services," said Rep. John Kavanagh, a Republican. "Nobody can stand on the sidelines and not take part in this battle."

Democrats were just as passionate. "This bill, whether we intend it or not, terrorizes the people we profit from," said Rep. Tom Chabin.

SOURCE



Fix America’s Immigration System by Focusing on Security

America’s immigration bureaucracies are rife with waste and inefficiency. Yet taxpayer dollars are not the only thing they put at risk. The nation’s security suffers, too.

According to a report released last week, twenty-three recently apprehended Somalis with suspected ties to the Islamist Al-Sabaab Mujahadeen were mistakenly released from a Mexican jail last January. American officials believe they are trying to enter the United States. So what are our immigration officials doing in the face of this threat? They’re busy protecting us from the supposed scourge of foreign labor.

The U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) is requesting $103.4 million in 2011 to continue the failed E-Verify program. The program was designed to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants, but a recent audit conducted by Westat and funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed that it failed 54 percent of the time (while legal immigrants and American citizens were denied employment around 2.5 percent of the time).

Then there is USCIS’ Office of Citizenship and Immigrant Integration, which, for a mere $18 million, is trying to integrate immigrants into American society, which is what they do without government prodding.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (USCBP) is requesting $574 million for border fencing, infrastructure, and technology. Earlier this year the Government Accountability Office found that the $1.1 billion already sunk into the border fence won’t even come close to fulfilling its stated objectives. High-tech border solutions have been ineffective as the sensors detect anything that moves just the same, from illegal immigrants to animals to tumbleweeds.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which enforces immigration and other laws, is spread thin engaging in activities that have little, if anything, to do with immigration—from enforcing Mexico’s gun laws to investigating intellectual property theft overseas. It has 25 top security concerns spread out across the country with little focus.

Together, ICE, USCIS, and USCBP will have over 90,000 employees and a $20 billion budget next year. Yet rather than spend those limited resources in a futile attempt to regulate the labor market—such as by conducting immigration raids on meat packing plants—the government should devote them to fighting real security threats.

Making legal immigration into the United States easier would dramatically improve the nation’s security. There are currently 10.8 million illegal immigrants in the United States, of whom the vast majority have not committed any crime other than circumvent our labyrinthine immigration laws. Almost all would have entered legally given a reasonable option.

Today, a low-skilled Mexican worker would need to wait 11 years to get a green card and then another five to apply for citizenship—and that’s assuming no bureaucratic holdups. There is no good reason for such a long wait. The issuance of green cards should be expedited, with only criminals and suspected terrorists screened out.

America’s immigration services should focus all of their energy and resources on weeding out real threats to national security, rather than trying to fruitlessly manipulate labor markets. Foreign workers, whether in the form of low skilled manual laborers or computer engineers, create economic opportunities, not security threats.

Forcing immigrants underground creates an enormous black market where terrorist activities and serious crimes can continue undetected. If legal immigration were much easier, the American government would know who was entering the country and do a better job in screening out criminals and suspected terrorists.

America has a huge immigration black market. Millions of undocumented workers enter and leave the United States every year without regard for legal channels. Legalizing future immigration along with amnesty will destroy much of the black market.

Liberalization, not control, will make us safer by allowing the government to shift its focus from checking permits at fast-food restaurants to legitimate threats like the twenty-three suspected Islamist militants trying to break into the U.S.

SOURCE





13 April, 2010

British PM is blasted over immigration plans

Critics have branded Gordon Brown’s immigration promises “too little, much too late”. The PM was yesterday blasted for jumping on the border control bandwagon to try to win votes.

Labour have also been accused of trying to con voters with sweeping policy claims. Their manifesto, officially launched yesterday, sets out a raft of pledges on migrants but fails to call for a limit on the numbers flooding in.

Labour were also accused of spin over claims they would make all migrants in public sector jobs take English tests. But their pledge only applies to workers who deal with the public.

Migrationwatch chairman Sir Andrew Green, 58, hit out at Brown, saying: “Given Labour’s record of admitting three million immigrants in the last 13 years, this manifesto is too little, much too late.”

And fuming Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling, 48, said: “Labour have let immigration get out of control. We can’t trust them to fix it now. “It is a shocking indictment of this government’s immigration policy that they have even had to introduce this pledge. “No previous governments would have issued visas to foreign workers providing a service in the public sector who couldn’t speak English.”

The manifesto extends English language tests to cover workers such as nurses, community support officers, social workers and call centre staff.

At present, the requirement is only for doctors from outside Europe, police officers and teachers.

The manifesto states: “We know that migrants who are fluent in English are more likely to work and find it easier to integrate. So as well as making our English test harder, we will ensure it is taken by all applicants before they arrive.”

Brown, 59, added: “We will ensure that all employees who have contact with the public have an appropriate level of English language competence.”

The manifesto also pledges to rely on a points system for immigration, rather then automatically granting citzenship after a set period in Britain.

And it promises that access to benefits and housing will “increasingly be reserved for British citizens and permanent residents”.

Brown also claimed that more EU and other foreign prisoners would be transferred abroad.

SOURCE



Prime Minister Rudd invited asylum-seeker boats to Australia, says people smuggler

The surge of asylum seekers flooding into Australian waters was a direct result of the Federal Government's policies, according to the men who send the boats here.

For weeks Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has denied the sharp rise in the number of refugee boats was connected to Labor's decision to overturn the Howard government's hardline Pacific Solution.

But a former people-smuggler now living in Australia, who can only be identified as Shadi, said: "The immigration rules in Australia were changed and everyone knows it and that's why so many are now coming. "Before, the reason it stopped was John Howard absolutely, he deterred some boats by force and Nauru Island where they (boat people) knew they could get stuck for one or two or three years.

"We and the passengers would check the internet daily to see what Canberra was doing and we all knew these things," he told The Courier-Mail.

The Rudd Government tightened Australia's borders on Friday by immediately suspending the processing of asylum claims from Sri Lanka for three months and claims from Afghanistan for six months.

About 50 men, who arrived at Villawood from Christmas Island last month, began a hunger strike late on Sunday, according to advocacy group the Social Justice Network.

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said yesterday the Government understood Australians were concerned about the influx of boat arrivals.

The Government will decide whether to extend the bans after the suspension period ends. But Mr Smith was forced to deny this amounted to indefinite detention, or a stripping away of human rights.

He said under the Howard Government "very many people (were) on very, very long periods of indefinite detention – years, not months". "We want to, once processing starts, process people expeditiously," he told the Nine Network.

"We don't want to return to the bad old days where people are left in the wilderness for years and where people are effectively vilified for exercising their rights under the refugee convention."

His comments came as authorities intercepted another boatload of 25 asylum seekers on their way to Australia yesterday. A large flotilla of boats is expected to leave from the Indonesian archipelago within days.

Authorities have identified at least 15 people-smuggling gangs in Malaysia and Indonesia, who have mobilised hundreds of refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Sri Lanka.

SOURCE





12 April, 2010

Asylum claim freeze won't stop the boats coming to Australia, admits Foreign Minister

More than 20 extra Australian Federal Police officers are expected to fly to Christmas Island to quell possible disturbances as authorities intercepted the first asylum-seekers to fall victim to the Rudd government's suspension of new refugee claims.

Four boats carrying more than 230 people have been intercepted since Immigration Minister Chris Evans announced on Friday a six-month suspension of all new Afghan asylum claims, and a three-month suspension for Sri Lankan claims.

A boat carrying 25 passengers, understood to be predominantly Afghans, was stopped by Customs and Border Protection personnel yesterday near Browse Island, off Western Australia's north coast. Later yesterday, another vessel, this time carrying 30 passengers and four crew, was intercepted by the navy in the Ashmore Islands, also off WA's north coast.

As the interceptions were occurring, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith conceded the policy changes were unlikely to have any immediate impact. "We're not asserting or suggesting this will stop the flow of boats in the short term," he said.

Tony Abbott continued the Coalition attack on the asylum claims freeze, labelling it a stunt to get the government through the federal election.

Yesterday's arrival may be the first boat to be affected by the suspension, which was designed to send a signal to asylum-seekers and people-smugglers that Australia is not a soft touch. It was not known if the passengers aboard the boat had been told of the policy changes, which will ensure a minimum six-month stay in detention should they proceed with refugee claims.

But in a clear sign authorities are concerned the policy shift could trigger violence in the detention centre, the AFP yesterday moved to boost its presence on Christmas Island. The Australian understands an extra 24 officers were due to fly in yesterday, but were delayed by poor weather. They will join the 17 officers understood to have flown in on Friday, plus a smaller contingent that arrived on Saturday.

On Friday, the officers held a meeting with senior immigration officials before unpacking riot gear, including shields. A freight plane that arrived on Christmas Island on Saturday is understood to have included tear gas, rifles and ammunition.

The insignia worn by some of the officers suggests they are members of the elite Operational Response Group, the AFP's offshore tactical unit.

However, there was no trouble at any of the island's detention centres yesterday. Afghans and Sri Lankans were told through interpreters on Friday that the claims decision would not affect their cases, although many are worried that their chances of being granted asylum are less hopeful if the government believes conditions are improving in their home countries.

Refugee Immigration and Legal Centre co-ordinator David Manne, who is on Christmas Island visiting asylum-seeker clients, said the announcement had created considerable confusion and anxiety among detainees. "For those not caught by the freeze, they are still finding it difficult to believe there won't be a negative impact on their cases as well," he said. "Some asylum-seekers sense there's a potentially serous misunderstanding and trivialisation of the grave dangers they believe they would face if they returned to Afghanistan."

The Immigration Department said yesterday there were 2162 detainees on Christmas Island, well above the official operating capacity of 2040. To ease the pressure, the department is trying to install new accommodation that would supply an extra 400 beds on the island, and a charter flight with a seating capacity of 177 is expected to leave today.

But with 202 intercepted asylum-seekers and crew en route to the island, combined with the bottleneck on new asylum claims looming due to the freeze, a spill to the mainland is considered virtually inevitable.

Mr Smith admitted yesterday there was little prospect the suspension of claims would have any immediate impact on the number of boats arriving, which has been steadily increasing. "But it does send a message to the people-smugglers, and to their potential prey, that if you come to Australia from Sri Lanka or from Afghanistan, there'll be a three-month or six-month pause, and you will not be guaranteed a visa."

Mr Smith denied the government had effectively consigned new asylum-seekers to indefinite detention, a fate Senator Evans described in February as worse than prison. "Once processing resumes, none of the rights that are currently accorded or afforded to them will be taken away from them," Mr Smith said.

The Opposition Leader said of the freeze: "They're trying to say you won't be processed for three months or for six months, but let's face it, people were waiting months on Christmas Island anyway." But Mr Abbott declined to say if a Coalition government would maintain the freeze should it win the federal election, which is expected in coming months.

A spokesman for the Indonesian Foreign Ministry, Teuku Faizasyah, offered tacit support for the measures, but said they were a matter for Australia. "In the broader perspective, any measure that prevents people from travelling illegally will suit any country in the region," he said.

SOURCE



Tim Dunlop is pretty rubbery on immigration

Tim is a fairer Leftist than most and he quite logically shows that Australians are not critical of illegal immigrants because of racism. Few countries have accepted more immigrants per head from all over the world than Australia has.

So what is Tim's comment on the open door to illegals which Prime Minister Rudd has been holding open but has now shut until the election?

Tim thinks Rudd is a spineless waffler and who am I to disagree with that? But the idea that an open door to illegals could be "sold" to the Australian population is preposterous. Tim below:

Arguments that equate a desire to control immigration with racism are often mounted by those who wish to assert their own purity against a straw man. The truth is, there is nothing inherently racist about wanting to control your borders and there is nothing unique about the way Australians react to the issue.

In fact, Australians have been as good as anyone about accepting people from overseas. That much of the concern, when it arises, is focussed on those who arrive by boat is hardly surprising. Not only does the sensationalist media spotlight boat arrivals and grossly exaggerate what is happening, but one of our major parties, the Liberal-National Coalition, viciously exploits the issue for political gain. This may tap into the racist feeling of some (it's not as if no-one is a racist ever) but it is more likely to be tapping into a range of other concerns, from jobs to the environment to national sovereignty.

In the face of misinformation from influential sections of Australian society, the only workable solution is a long and consistent campaign of pushback, of countering lies with facts and of standing up for the principle of dealing justly with asylum seekers while not dismissing as racist anyone who wants to place limits on our overall intake. The reason the Opposition can exploit the issue is at least in part because the Labor Party (in and out of government) is incapable of sustaining such an argument. The fact that, at the moment, Labor is led by a moral coward of the magnitutde of Kevin Rudd makes things especially difficult.

No-one should underestimate the difficulties for any PM dealing with this matter. As I say, influential forces within society are thrilled to use the subject as a way of delegitisimng a Labor government. And there are genuine concerns out there about population growth. But when the PM is as singularly weak as Kevin Rudd it is almost certain that Labor will capitulate in the face of a scare campaign.

It needn't be this way. During the hysteria over Tampa, independent MP, Peter Andren refused to countenance the fear mongering, went into his electorate and made the case for acceptance of asylum seekers. According to the Australians-are-racist crowd, not to mention the jelly-backs who run Labor's campaigning, this should have meant disaster for Andren. Fact is, though, he was reelected with an increased majority.

So the hysteria and lies can be fought if you have the spine to do it. Unfortunately, Kevin Rudd doesn't.

More HERE





11 April, 2010

British city's cry for help: Devastating toll of immigration on schools, housing and hospitals

The impact of uncontrolled mass immigration on the fabric of British life was driven home to the party leaders yesterday. A letter to Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg reveals in graphic detail the struggle of one community to cope.

It says public services - from schooling to housing, healthcare to police protection - are overstretched because councils have not been given the support they need.

The letter, from two independent councillors in the Cambridgeshire city of Peterborough, spells out in a straightforward and measured way how a community which 'lived in peace and harmony' has been transformed.

Local schools are struggling to educate children who speak 27 different languages and health services are under unprecedented pressure. The councillors, Charles Swift and Keith Sharp, contrast the situation with that of a few years ago. Then, they say, 'there was parental choice in education with school places. There was no homelessness. There were no problems with registering at the local doctors for health services. 'Everyone knew the local police officer and they were available at all times. People could walk the streets in safety and talk to their neighbours.'

The two men asked the party leaders for a reply, warning that the problem is a national one. But in another example of the way immigration issues have been brushed under the carpet, they have heard nothing.

The letter has been sent to Mr Brown and Mr Clegg three times since January 18, without any reply. David Cameron responded with an email from his correspondence secretary promising a reply from immigration spokesman Damian Green. Mr Swift and Mr Sharp are still waiting.

The two councillors represent North ward in Peterborough where 15 per cent of people are migrants, mainly from former Communist countries in Eastern Europe which are now EU members. Their letter - which they also sent to constituents - was passed to the Daily Mail by a local resident concerned that its urgent message was being ignored.

The councillors say: 'At our local primary school, Fulbridge, which has a roll of 675 pupils, 27 different languages are spoken with only 200 of the pupils having English as a first language. 'The first-year reception class has 90 pupils, of which only 17 are white British. Every day new arrivals are turned away.

'Registration at the local doctors' surgery has rocketed with more than 90 per cent of the new arrivals being from the EU. There has been a substantial increase in women who are pregnant. 'The Health Service and Primary Care Trust in the city has overspent by millions in the past year.'

A key issue is the Government's failure to support councils. But Mr Swift and Mr Sharp make clear that the local authority cannot track all new arrivals - crucial information in assessing what they need. They say there were only four EU citizens on the local electoral roll in 2004. Now there are 537 and 'we know there are substantially more here'.

The councillors also voiced the local fears that immigration is fuelling a rise in crime. They write: 'We had four police houses in the ward years ago. Everyone knew and respected the local constable. Now we have muggings, robberies, burglaries and neighbour disputes. We have prostitutes, drug dealers and an ever-increasing number of people who drive without road tax or insurance.'

Some 16,000 migrants, many seeking farm work, have moved to the Peterborough area since 2004. Immigrant communities account for 64 per cent of the population growth.

Details of the letter emerged a day after the Daily Mail revealed shocking figures showing that nearly every job created under Labour has gone to a foreign worker. Some 98.5 per cent of 1.67million new posts went to immigrants.

In their letter, Mr Swift and Mr Sharp say the arrival of so many migrants has left Peterborough's housing system in chaos, with immigrants sleeping rough and relying on the Salvation Army for food.

They say many properties have been bought by speculators and turned into multioccupancy dwellings let to immigrants. 'The consequence is that our housing waiting lists have rocketed and our homeless hostels are full.' This reinforces reports of migrants living in makeshift huts along the local river and slaughtering swans to eat.

The councillors' concerns were echoed last night in a Harris poll for the Daily Mail, which reveals that seven out of ten voters are 'very worried' about the scale of immigration and believe it is a 'significant cause of unrest'. Some 63 per cent think the influx of two million immigrants under Labour has been a 'bad thing' and three out of four want a tough limit on new arrivals.

Mr Swift, 79, a former train driver and trade unionist who was awarded the OBE for his council services, said last night: 'The political leaders must listen to ordinary people. 'There must be a control on migrant numbers coming in. It is what people want. They feel the situation has got out of hand. I have spoken to rocksolid Labour supporters, rocksolid Conservative supporters. They don't know how to vote.'

Sir Andrew Green, head of the Migrationwatch campaign group, called the letter 'a vivid and convincing account of the impact of immigration'. He added: 'It is shameful that these councillors should have received no substantive reply'.

Last night a Tory spokesman said a reply from Mr Green is due to be sent before MPs' offices close on Monday.

A spokesman for Mr Brown said: 'We are not currently aware of this correspondence but of course Gordon will answer any questions that are asked of him.'

Nick Clegg's spokesman said: 'We are very sorry these councillors have not received a reply. They will be getting one as soon as possible.'

SOURCE



The open door through which one in 20 Australians came

Comment by Andrew Bolt

Andrew Norton says one fast-increasing category of immigrants is slipping in under the radar:

Under a rule-based system, if you meet its criteria you can come to Australia, with no restrictions on total numbers…

There were big increases [between 2001 and 2009] in rule-based long-term visas for students and for people coming to Australia to work, the section 457 visas. A lot of people also came to Australia on working holiday visas.

They were added to another more long-standing group of people with residence rights in Australia, New Zealanders. New Zealand is also a ‘back door’ route to permanent entry to Australia, with about 30% of the ‘New Zealanders’ taking up residence in Australia being born somewhere else.

Put all these rights-based migrants together, and there were about 1.2 million of them in mid-2009.

One in 20 of us. Come in under an uncapped category. Norton puts much blame on Howard.

SOURCE





10 April, 2010

Immigration to Britain: What NONE of the major parties will tell you in the election campaign now underway

Politicians of all parties have lamentably failed to tell the truth about how immigration has changed this country beyond recognition during Labour's 13 years in power. But this is what is really happening...

NET MIGRATION

Net inward migration to the UK, the difference between the number of people arriving and leaving, is up threefold since Labour came to power.

In 1997, it stood at 48,000. By 2004, fuelled by a surge in new arrivals from Eastern Europe, it reached an all-time record 244,000, and in 2007 it was 237,000. The following year it did begin to fall, as Britain headed into a deep recession, but the total still stood at 163,000.

Mr Brown suggested the as-yet-unpublished figure for 2009 would be 147,000. But this was incomplete data which excluded asylum seekers, visitors who decide to stay long-term and arrivals from Ireland and earned the Premier earned a swift rebuke from Sir Michael Scholar, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority.

The Tories have pledged to reduce the level of net migration to 'tens of thousands' - but have yet to specify a number.

POPULATION GROWTH

The Office for National Statistics projects that - based on current levels of migration - the UK's population of 61million, will grow to 70million by 2029. The figure has become a battleground between the Government and those pushing for stricter immigration controls.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson initially said he did not 'lie awake' worrying about such rapid growth. He is now insisting the ONS figure is only a projection and that the statisticians have been wrong in the past.

The number of immigrants living in Britain has almost doubled in less than three decades. The total foreign-born population now stands at 6.7million.

JOBS

Mr Brown's now notorious 'British jobs for British workers' pledge is fatally undermined by employment figures from the ONS. These show that, in the private sector, there were 288,000 fewer UK-born people working in the third quarter of last year than there were in 1997.

Mr Brown likes to include people working beyond pension age as 'new jobs' - but if you strip them out, there are 637,000 fewer. Overall, immigration has accounted for more than 1.64million of the 1.67million jobs created since 1997.

THE BLACK ECONOMY

For much of the last decade, Britain has been a magnet for illegal immigration and it has never been possible to put a definitive figure on the numbers entering this way. Migrants mass at the Sangatte refugee camp near Calais, then smuggle themselves into the UK, often hidden in lorries.

The stowaways vanish into a black economy estimated to be worth billions of pounds. Commonly, illegal immigrants work in kitchens, agricultural and construction jobs. Immigration staff, struggling to cope with a backlog of asylum claims, do not have the resources to track them down.

During the 2005 election campaign, Tony Blair repeatedly refused to estimate how many illegals were living here. A month after being re-elected, his Government produced an estimate of 570,000. The campaign group Migrationwatch says the true total could be as high as 870,000.

Some Labour ministers have flirted with calling an 'amnesty' but it has been rejected as electorally unpopular.

EASTERN EUROPE

Officials estimated that, following EU enlargement in May 2004, between 5,000 and 13,000 Eastern Europeans would move to Britain. But by the end of 2009 the number who had signed the Home office's Worker Registration scheme alone was 1,041,315.

This does not include the self-employed or those who did not bother to sign. The unexpected influx - mainly from Poland - placed significant strain on schools, the health service and local councils, who have still not been properly funded for the new arrivals.

CITIZENSHIP

Handing out passports to foreign nationals is how the Labour Government changed the make-up of society for ever. In 1997 just 37,010 people were given citizenship. Last year the Home Office approved an all-time record 203,865 applications, an increase of 58 per cent in a year. In total, Labour has now created 1.5million new British citizens - all with full voting rights.

Ministers have repeatedly promised to toughen citizenship rules, most recently by insisting migrants must earn a passport by doing voluntary work.

ASYLUM REMOVALS

Labour has never recovered from the mayhem which occurred at the start of this century, when a record number of asylum seekers poured into the UK. Even on conservative estimates, it has left around 285,000 failed claimants living in Britain - but the number being removed is falling.

In 2009, there were 10,815 removals or voluntary departures, down 16 per cent on 2008. Of those who went, 2,985 benefited from the Assisted Voluntary Return scheme - worth £3,000 each.

The Government's target of concluding 90 per cent of asylum cases within six months by December 2011 has been dismissed as 'unachievable' by Independent Chief Inspector of the UK Border Agency, John Vine.

Only a third of failed asylum seekers - 7,850 out of the 26,832 served with deportation notices - were actually removed in 2008. Inspectors have recently identified a new backlog of 40,000 cases massing in the asylum system.

STUDENT VISAS

In 1998, the number of visas handed out to overseas students was 69,607. In 2008/9, this figure had risen to 236,470. The Government's own figures suggest more than one in ten of the foreign students studying in this country last year was sponsored by a bogus college. At least 1.5million student visas have been handed out in the past eight years alone.

The beneficiaries included Christmas Day transatlantic flight bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - given permission by the Home Office to study mechanical engineering at University College London between 2005 and 2008. A string of other terror suspects have used the student visa route into the UK.

PRISONS

Britain's jails have been turned into what the Tories have called a 'United Nations of crime' containing inmates from 160 different countries. The 11,546 foreign nationals represent one in every seven inmates in our prisons. They range from murderers and rapists to burglars, paedophiles, drug dealers and thieves.

There are only 192 member countries of the United Nations, so all bar 32 are represented in the British prison system. The vast number of overseas inmates is a major factor behind the overcrowding which has led to the early release of UK criminals.

THE SECRET PLAN

Arguably, the most damaging charge of them all. New Labour's election manifestos made little or no mention of immigration policy.

But according to a draft report by the Cabinet Office, written in 2000, ministers had a secret plan to 'maximise the contribution' of migrants to the Government's 'social objectives'.

Former Labour advisor Andrew Neather, who worked on the report, said the aim was to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.'

Source



Action from Australian government at last: Freeze on "asylum" applications

But action of the hamfisted sort one expects of Leftists

THE Federal Government has frozen processing of all applications from asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan to try to stop the tide of arrivals.

The suspension of processing is effectively immediately, and will be reviewed in three months for asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and in six months for asylum seekers from Afghanistan.

It says changing situations in both nations may affect visa applicants' claims for protection. The Government says it accepts its Christmas Island facilities are stretched because of the number of arrivals.

SOURCE





9 April, 2010

A new episode in Britain's immigration disaster

The Labour party's betrayal of British workers: Nearly every one of 1.67m jobs created since 1997 has gone to a foreigner -- and the huge influx of immigrants was deliberate Labour policy

Immigration was at the centre of the election campaign last night as it emerged that virtually every extra job created under Labour has gone to a foreign worker. Figures suggested an extraordinary 98.5 per cent of 1.67million new posts were taken by immigrants.

The Tories seized on the revelation as evidence that the Government has totally failed to deliver its pledge of 'British jobs for British workers'.

As Gordon Brown tried to fight on the economy and cleaning up politics, he was confronted in the Commons about how British people of working age have lost out. Shadow immigration minister Damian Green revealed unpublished figures showing there are almost 730,000 fewer British-born workers in the private sector than in 1997.

Last night Mr Green said the Tories would reduce net migration to tens of thousands a year from the peaks of 200,000 under Labour by enforcing an annual cap.

Mr Brown rejected the idea of an immigration quota, which he said would do 'great damage to British business'.

But Mr Green said the official figures were 'the final proof that Gordon Brown was misleading the public when he promised British jobs for British workers'. He added: 'Instead he has presided over boom and bust and left British workers in a worse position than when he took office 13 years ago.

'British workers have been betrayed. A Conservative government would introduce a genuine limit which would help us properly control immigration. 'We would reduce net immigration to the levels of the 1980s and 90s - tens of thousands a year, not the hundreds of thousands we have seen under Labour.'

The ONS figures show the total number of people in work in both the private and the public sector has risen from around 25.7million in 1997 to 27.4million at the end of last year, an increase of 1.67million.

But the number of workers born abroad has increased dramatically by 1.64million, from 1.9million to 3.5million.

There were 23.8million British-born workers in employment at the end of last year, just 25,000 more than when Labour came to power. In the private sector, the number of British workers has actually fallen.

The number of posts for people of working age has increased since 1997 by over 500,000, to 20.5million. But the number of British-born workers in the private sector has slumped by 726,000, from 18.4million to 17.7million.

The figures exclude people working beyond pension age, which critics say the Government includes as 'new jobs' in its assessments.

Last year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said that, over ten years, only Luxembourg had seen more of its new jobs taken by migrants.

The latest totals do not include the hundreds of thousands of migrants employed in the 'black economy'.

Sir Andrew Green, of the Migrationwatch pressure group, said: 'The government's economic case for mass immigration is finally blown out of the water.'

Much more HERE



Violence on the border endangers Americans

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, hears a lot of disturbing reports from Texas law enforcement officials working along the U.S. border with Mexico. Poe returned from his most recent trip to the Lone Star State claiming to have seen photographs taken by local sheriffs of Mexican military helicopters in action over U.S. territory.

One copter was photographed hovering over a building; the other over a recreational vehicle park, according to the Examiner's Barbara Hollingsworth. "We don't know what their intention was," Poe told Hollingsworth, adding: "The Mexican military has no business coming into the United States."

As troubling as is the possibility that a foreign military force may have violated U.S. airspace on multiple occasions, what is even more disturbing is the escalating violence on the border. It's no exaggeration to say that the Mexican government is fighting a desperate battle with powerful drug cartels for control of the country.

Americans who dismiss fears that this violence will spill over into this country should listen to Poe. He recently contacted sheriffs in the 14 Texas counties that share the border with Mexico and found that more than a third of the people in their jails are foreign nationals who have been charged with committing serious crimes in this country.

The apparent apathy of President Obama and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano is inexplicable. Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently asked Napolitano to dispatch unmanned surveillance drones and 1,000 additional U.S. soldiers to boost federal Border Patrol agents and local sheriffs in the effort to protect the border.

Instead of heeding Perry's warning, Napolitano instead canceled the "virtual" border surveillance project approved under the Bush administration. That decision virtually leaves Perry and the governors of Arizona, New Mexico and California to cope with the increasing flood of illegal immigrants, drugs, money and guns coming over the border from Mexico.

Some of the Mexican nationals crossing into the United States from border towns do so in desperation, seeking safety from the horror of towns like Guerroro, a town of 6,000 in which the local authorities recently warned residents to stay inside whenever possible or risk being killed in the crossfire between the drug cartels and Mexican troops.

But al Qaeda-linked terrorists from Somalia may also be coming into this country from Mexico, according to the Examiner's Sara A. Carter. At least 23 Somalis were detained by Mexican authorities for illegally entering that country last year, but then mistakenly released, according to a U.S. intelligence memo Carter obtained. The memo's author warned U.S. law enforcement personnel "to maintain a heightened level of awareness." The warning needs to be heard in the Oval Office, too.

SOURCE





8 April, 2010

The Tamil "refugees" are nothing of the sort

Unless they are former terrorists. And all of them could have chosen resettlement in nearby India if they wished

As arrivals of Sri Lankans in Australia claiming asylum continue, there is ample evidence to suggest the situation in Sri Lanka is very different from that portrayed by refugee advocates. Indeed, there is strong evidence that since the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in May 2009 Sri Lanka has moved towards stability and inter-ethnic reconciliation, rather than widespread or institutionalised persecution of its Tamil population.

Sri Lanka's steady return to post-conflict normalcy has been widely reported internationally. Key benchmarks include:

* The restitution of freedom of movement for all internally displaced persons.

* The resettlement of 193,607 IDPs throughout northern Sri Lanka (leaving only 76,205 IDPs yet to be resettled).

* The rehabilitation and gradual release from custody of nearly 2000 former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam combatants, co-ordinated with the International Migration Organisation and funded by the West.

* The recruitment of several thousand more Tamil-speaking police constables to serve in Tamil-majority areas.

* Removal of most travel restrictions nationwide and the lifting of the security curfew throughout the Northern and Eastern provinces, as well as progress in reconstructing roads and infrastructure.

* And, most significantly, the restoration of democracy through the re-emergence of Tamil political parties previously suppressed by the LTTE and their free participation in presidential elections.

In the naturally complex aftermath of a three-decade-long conflict, Sri Lanka has invested considerable material, financial and societal resources towards restoring normalcy. Indeed, although the nation still has much work to do, its rapid and practical progress is a noteworthy achievement after such a long and bitter conflict.

The Bishop of Jaffna, Thomas Sundranayagam (an ethnic Tamil), wrote in January: "Jaffna is returning to normal. Commercial activities are taking place and the civilians are also very happy. They can now easily visit Colombo and other areas. People from the south also come to Jaffna."

Sri Lanka's economic recovery has also been steady.. Travel advisories have been downgraded worldwide, leading to a significant growth in tourism. Early this year The New York Times rated it the No.1 travel destination for 2010.

In September last year, Michael Delaney, the assistant US trade representative for South Asia, told a news conference: "We had over 40 US companies, including several Fortune 500 companies, that came to Sri Lanka. We think the economic boost from the end of the war is much greater than commonly believed."

Australian investor Mark Scannell, who has begun construction of a multimillion-dollar hotel in eastern Sri Lanka, says: "Sri Lanka is safe and free for anyone to holiday or invest [in]. Tourists should disregard Western negative propaganda and experience what the country has to offer."

So, why does Australia see a growing number of Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekers? It appears that Australia's relative proximity as the closest Western country, high living standards and perceptions of sympathetic treatment have been a significant pull factor in attracting them. Australia is also the nearest country that is a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention.

Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekers who come to Australia have deliberately avoided the option of seeking asylum in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, only a two-hour boat ride away from Sri Lanka. Although India is not a signatory to the convention, it has long been hospitable to Tamil asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka.

V. Suryanarayan, a retired senior professor affiliated with the University of Madras and a respected expert on the subject (as well as a Tamil), wrote in September 2008: "Geographical contiguity, ethnic affinities and easy availability of boats made Tamil Nadu a natural choice. The government provides free housing, free medical care and free education, in addition to financial doles and supply of essential commodities like rice, kerosene and sugar at subsidised rates.

What is more, the government of Tamil Nadu has permitted the refugees to take up employment, a gesture not extended to Chakma refugees from Bangladesh. As far as refugees are concerned, it is not roses all the way, but . . . [they] do not feel any sense of insecurity in Tamil Nadu."

There are several reasons why Tamil asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka come to Australia instead of going to Tamil Nadu. Some are attempting to use Australia as a conduit to the West generally, as seen in the Oceanic Viking stand-off, where a note thrown to Australian journalists and published in The Age said: "Australia doesn't want to accept us. Send us to other countries like Canada, Norway, Switzerland, New Zealand."

Indeed, some of the asylum-seekers intending to enter Australia have for many years resided in countries other than Sri Lanka, such as India, Malaysia and Indonesia. A notable example was "Alex" Kuhendrarajah, the spokesman for a group of Tamils in Indonesia, who, contrary to his claims, had lived in Chennai, India, for many years and had previously been deported from Canada because of his involvement in criminal activities.

There are other reasons why so many Tamil asylum-seekers come to Australia instead of joining efforts to rebuild Sri Lankan society or obtaining asylum in Tamil Nadu. Some appear to be LTTE fighters seeking to evade legitimate detention in Sri Lanka, and have deliberately avoided India, where there is a high probability of arrest and detention, as the LTTE is a proscribed terrorist organisation.

Australia, unlike the US, Canada and the European Union, has not proscribed the LTTE as a terrorist organisation, which is likely to constitute a significant pull factor for LTTE fighters keen to seek asylum.

Second, a majority of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, an estimated 800,000 people, is based in the West and there have been indications that sympathetic elements within the diaspora have encouraged and funded the passage of asylum-seekers to the West. As one Australian Tamil community leader recently remarked: "People who have help from overseas will be able to pay the smugglers and come."

After the conflict in Sri Lanka ended, genuine displaced civilians (as opposed to LTTE combatants) traumatised by the violent final phases of the insurgency could not be faulted for wanting to leave Sri Lanka in search of a brighter future in Australia or elsewhere. Even with the end of the insurgency, to varying degrees Tamil fears of discrimination and Sinhalese triumphalism are likely to remain.

However, there is minimal evidence to support claims of widespread or institutionalised persecution, and given the rapidly improving situation in Sri Lanka, the Australian government should exercise heightened caution and scepticism in assessing the validity of asylum-seeker claims from Sri Lanka.

SOURCE



'Non-western immigration costs Nederland up to €10bn a year'

Immigration from non-western countries costs Dutch society between €6bn and €10bn a year, according to a preliminary report by private research institute Nyfer for the anti-Islam party PVV, the Telegraaf reports on Wednesday.

The research is based on 'conservative' estimates of the cost of 20,000 non-western migrants, the paper says. 'That is the number of foreigners who come here every year in order to reunite with their families. So the real cost is much higher,' PVV leader Geert Wilders told the paper.

According to Nos tv, Nyfer officials are angry the preliminary findings have been publicised and say the final report is due to be published at the end of the month. Wilders himself has come up with the rough estimates used in the Telegraaf, Nos quotes Nyfer as saying.

The price tag shows that the Netherlands must put an end to non-western immigration, particularly in the light of the spending cuts which need to be made, Wilders said.

'Academic research shows we can save billions if we stop or limit immigration,' Wilders said. He commissioned the research after integration minister Eberhard van de Laan said last year the figures were not available.

The Telegraaf says the research shows non-western immigrants cost society more because they are more likely to claim welfare benefits and long-term nursing care, and are over-represented in the criminal justice system. By contrast, they are less likely to use state-funded childcare and get student grants.

A stop on non-western immigration is likely to be part of the PVV's political manifesto ahead of the June 9 general election.

According to Trouw, it is still unclear when the manifesto will be published. Instead, the party appears to be releasing its standpoints bit by bit to generate maximum publicity, the paper says.

On Tuesday, for example, the PVV said it wanted to reduce the number of public tv channels from three to one and close down Dutch worldservice radio.

The party's popularity has been declining steadily in the polls since the local elections at the beginning of March.

SOURCE





7 April, 2010

Australia's conservatives to cut immigration if elected

TONY Abbott's Coalition will cut net migration levels if it wins government, in a bid to stop Australia's population reaching its predicted size of almost 36 million in 2050.

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison yesterday told The Australian the Rudd government had allowed immigration to rise too high and the population figure that Treasury's Intergenerational Report predicted last September for 2050 was unsustainable.

Mr Morrison said the Coalition would not allow the average net overseas migration of more than 300,000 a year that had occurred since the Rudd government took power to continue. "We want to return to the levels we pursued in government," he said. "A net overseas migration intake of 300,000 (as occurred under the Rudd government) would not be a feature of future Coalition policy."

Mr Morrison said the current population growth rate of 2.1 per cent put Australia ahead of Canada, Britain and the US. "It even puts us ahead of China and India," he said. "It's principally fuelled by net overseas migration. A natural increase in the fertility rate has (increased it) but what has been driving the numbers . . . has been spiralling rates of net overseas migration."

Mr Morrison said the Coalition would support skilled migrants coming, but was likely to cut other elements of the program, including family reunion. "It's about getting your immigration policy under control," he said. "The migration program should be tight and focused on skills and productivity."

The Opposition Leader last night backed Mr Morrison's comment that the prediction of a population of 35.9 million was not sustainable, saying the roads of Sydney and Melbourne were already choked.

But Mr Abbott stopped short of committing the Coalition to a cut in migration, saying decisions on the intake should be taken on a "year by year basis". "Immigration has to be in Australia's national interest," he said on the ABC's Q&A program last night.

Mr Morrison said the 35.9 million forecast, which Kevin Rudd has endorsed as appropriate, was being driven by net overseas migration well above what it was under the Howard government. He said average net overseas immigration under the Coalition had been 126,000 a year, but under Labor it had risen to more than 300,000.

Mr Morrison said that according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia's population was growing in net terms at the rate of one person every minute and 10 seconds, and immigration accounted for more than 60 per cent of the increase.

The new immigration spokesman toughened the Coalition's rhetoric on asylum-seekers, challenging the government to take control of Australian borders in the wake of 103 boats carrying 4575 passengers reaching our shores since Labor was elected.

Mr Abbott last night backed the return of the temporary protection visa system and said a Coalition government would return asylum-seekers to their homelands if they no longer had a fear of persecution.

Columnist Glenn Milne yesterday wrote in The Australian that the Opposition Leader and Mr Morrison had determined that if Australians were concerned about boatpeople, they were going to have similar concerns about Mr Rudd's declaration that a "big Australia" of 35.9 million people by 2050 was a good thing.

Mr Morrison denied the Coalition was pushing a racist agenda by endeavouring to cut migration numbers. "It has nothing to do with issues of race," he said. "We did not want to create an unpleasant debate. We were quite serious about having a debate that didn't degenerate into political name-calling on issues of race. "At the end of the day, we will obviously take a more conservative view about intake in the current climate."

The business community's reaction to Mr Morrison's comments is likely to be tempered by the immigration spokesman's support for the skilled migration program, which business leaders strongly back because of the nation's skills shortage.

Former NSW [Labor] premier Bob Carr, who has been outspoken on the issue of population, said the government must cut skilled migration. "The argument is about the level of immigration, the rate of immigration . . . we've ramped it up to levels the Australian people aren't comfortable with," Mr Carr said.

SOURCE



Runaway population growth will kill great Australian dream of owning a home

RUNAWAY population growth will end the dream for many young Australians of ever owning their own home, says federal Labor backbencher Kelvin Thomson.

Mr Thomson has defied his party by saying Australia's population should be capped at 26 million, disagreeing with his Government's projection of 36 million by 2050.

Representing the inner Melbourne electorate of Wills, which is made up of 30 per cent immigrants, Mr Thomson believes Australia's annual intake of migrants should be cut to 70,000.

Under the Rudd Government, migration has jumped to around 300,000 a year compared to 126,000 under the Howard Government.

Mr Thomson said tackling population growth was necessary to stop the dreams of owning your own from fading away. "Rising house prices and rising interest rates are leading to falling housing affordability and make it impossible for young Australians to own a home of their own," he said.

He said the appointment of Tony Bourke as Minister for Population was a step in the right direction. "I believe Australia needs to have a population policy ... but we still have quite a distance to go," he said. "We need to take steps to stabilise our population."

He said the Rudd Government should abolish the baby bonus, which costs around $1.4 billion annually, and put that money to educating and training young Australians and equipping them with skills. "The Government has not been supporting university places, apprenticeships and TAFEs in the way it needs to for over a decade now," he said. "We've had these things flatlining and we need to put greater investment into these areas."

In an address to federal Parliament last August, Mr Thomson outlined a 14-point plan for population reform which called for an end to the open door policy which allows New Zealanders to move here. In the speech he said the open-ended uncapped program made it impossible for Australia or New Zealand to implement a population policy.

He also called for a cut in the skilled migration program, sending overseas students home for two years for a cooling-off period before being eligible for permanent residence and increasing Australia's foreign aid.

SOURCE





6 April, 2010

CIS roundup

1. FOX News discussion with Steven Camarota

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2. Legal Excess for Criminal Aliens

Excerpt: The U.S. Supreme Court blundered in its recent ruling in Padilla v. Kentucky, so look out for two things to follow on its heels: lots of immigrant criminals will go for – and get – a second bite at the judicial apple, and activist lawyers and ethnic advocacy groups could well rush to push the envelope of criminal alien legal rights.

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3. Utah Enacts Universal Mandatory E-Verify Bill

Excerpt: Yesterday Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed a bill into law requiring Utah employers to use E-Verify to make sure their workers are legal. The bill passed both chambers of the legislature with large margins, making Utah the fourth state to require all employers to verify their workers (the others are Arizona, Mississippi, and South Carolina). Another 10 states require certain groups of employers, usually public agencies and contractors, to verify workers using E-Verify, and nine states have laws reinforcing federal law in other ways

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4. ICE HQ to Field: ISO More Removable Aliens

Excerpt: Advocates for illegal aliens must have been horrified to learn over the weekend via a Washington Post article that ICE's top manager for Detention and Removal Operations, James M. Chaparro, has directed ICE Field Offices to pick up the pace in removing not just aliens convicted of serious crimes, but – gasp! – other illegal aliens found in jails or who ignored previous orders to get out and stay out.

The Post report also included copies of DRO performance evaluation guidelines that – get this – establish numerical productivity benchmarks to help supervisors assess how effective their agents are.

ICE chief John Morton and other public affairs staff quickly issued statements suggesting that Chaparro had gone rogue, but the policy implications are clear: the administration's axe-murderers-only approach to immigration law enforcement is just not going to cut it. The agency could not credibly claim to have implemented a 'smarter and better' immigration enforcement regime that provides a foundation for 'comprehensive immigration reform' if the 2010 removal numbers were to drop by 25 percent, as would have been the case under current policies, which try to limit enforcement to illegal aliens with serious criminal convictions.

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5. Dept. of Labor Zaps H-1B Violator

Excerpt: The Obama Administration's Labor Department has severely penalized a New Jersey-based software firm for violating the rules of the H-1B program.

Peri Software Solutions Inc. and its president, Sarib Perisamya, were both charged with a series of violations, fined $439,000 and told to pay $1,456,422 in backwages. The Department's press release also said the 'company could face a two-year debarment from participating in [the] H-1B program.'

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6. George Will and Citizenship

Excerpt: George Will has never been particularly good on immigration, so I was a little surprised by his column calling for an end to automatic citizenship at birth (specifically, for the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens).

There are three issues: legal, empirical, and political. The first is the easiest — there just is no way to argue with a straight face that the drafters of the 14th amendment intended to give citizenship to the children of illegal aliens (Will persuasively cites this law review article by Lino Graglia). In fact, the amendment probably wasn't meant to apply even to U.S.-born children of legal immigrants who hadn't yet become citizens, though the Supreme Court decided otherwise in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision

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7. Thoughts on Criticism from Tom Barry

Excerpt: Tom Barry is the director of the TransBorder Project at the liberal Center for International Policy in Washington. He works from New Mexico, where for more than 30 years he has done valuable research and writing on public policy issues. I first began learning from his work in the late 1970s, when I was working on a book about a bitter land dispute between the Navajos and Hopis in northeastern Arizona. Peabody Coal and other energy companies insinuated themselves into the inter-tribal fight as it moved to Congress, and Barry's work helped me understand the land dispute's broader regional context.

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8. Cooking the Books on Immigration Lobbying

Excerpt: Charles H. Kuck (pronounced 'cook'), the immediate past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, clearly knows a lot about immigration law. But if the comments he made recently on his radio program, Immigration Hour, are any indication, he has a few gaps in his knowledge of immigration lobbying in Washington. Here are some excerpts:

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076. Email: center@cis.org. The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution which examines the impact of immigration on the United States.





5 April, 2010

75% of Britons think that the Labour government has failed on immigration

JUST four per cent of Britons think Labour immigration policies have been a success for the country, in a fresh blow for beleaguered Gordon Brown. Three-quarters of voters believe 13 years of mass immigration have been a failure, in an exclusive eve-of-election poll for the Sunday Express.

The survey, carried out in the wake of the Prime Minister’s call for an “honest debate” on the subject, shows it is the top issue for one in five voters. The poll reveals that 42 per cent think Labour’s policies on immigration have been “generally a failure” and 33 per cent believe they were “more of a failure than a success”. Eighty-four per cent regard unlimited immigration as bad for Britain.

Fears about Britain’s recession-hit economy emerged as the key issue for 61 per cent but 20 per cent ranked immigration as their chief concern. It outstripped health (which was most important for 11 per cent of voters), education (ranked the number one concern for five per cent) and defence, which was the primary issue for just three per cent.

David Cameron has promised to put an annual cap on net immigration, bringing levels down from 147,000 in 2009 to Nineties rate in the “tens of thousands”.

The poll, carried out by Angus Reid Public Opinion, shows 41 per cent of people back the Conservatives as the party most likely to curb immigration, compared with just 12 per cent who endorsed Labour.

But it is not all good news for the Conservative leader, with 38 per cent of voters not knowing which party would be best at bringing immigration under control.

The Prime Minister reignited the immigration debate last week with a keynote speech urging the nation to conduct an “open and responsible debate” about “who comes to Britain”. His speech was overshadowed by a humiliating rebuke from the Government’s own watchdog, the UK Statistics Authority, which slammed the Prime Minister for misleading claims about immigration.

Mr Brown said voters should choose the party that could best control immigration, not “who can appeal to our worst instincts of nationalism and xenophobia”. His comments enraged the Conservatives and risked the charge of hypocrisy from a man who once pledged “British jobs for British workers” in order to win over the white, working-class vote.

The poll of 1,991 adults put the Tories on 38 per cent of the vote, a commanding 11 points ahead of Labour on 27 per cent, and the Liberal Democrats on 20 per cent. However, on a uniform swing that would still only give the Conservatives a majority of fewer than 10.

Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green said: “I am not surprised that almost the entire country recognises the complete failure of Labour’s immigration policies.

“A Conservative Government would make a big cut in the amount of net immigration into this country every year. We would have a limit on work permits and would insist that anyone who comes here to get married must speak English. We would sort out the student visa chaos and would introduce a specialist border police to fight illegal immigration. “We will be explaining these policies to people over the next few weeks before the election.”

Whitehall documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act last month, revealed that Labour encouraged mass immigration even though it knew voters opposed it.

In his third immigration speech in three years, Mr Brown said last week: “The question is, who has the best plan to control immigration? Not who can appeal to our worst instincts of nationalism and xenophobia but who can appeal to our best instincts of a fairer Britain for all the decent, hard-working families across our country.”

SOURCE



Tardis solution as more asylum seekers arrive at Australia's illegal immigrant processing centre on Christmas Is.

CHRISTMAS Island is taking on qualities of Dr Who's Tardis - it seems it can never fill up. According to officials, the island still has room for the seemingly never-ending flood of asylum seekers, even though all of the beds are full.

And the island is about to get even more crowded with yet another boat with 50 asylum seekers and four crew intercepted east of Ashmore Island yesterday. That boatload - which will take four to five days to arrive at Christmas Island - was the 35th asylum seeker boat to arrive this year and the 103rd since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took office. Also on the way to Christmas Island is another boatload of 79 asylum seekers and four crew, intercepted on Friday.

When the two boatloads do arrive they will be added to the 2062 asylum seekers already on the island. That's 22 more than the island's capacity of 2040. Despite this, a Department of Immigration and Citizenship spokesman yesterday said: "We have adequate capacity".

That seemingly makes Christmas Island akin to the time-travelling Tardis which, despite outwardly being the size and shape of a phone box , has infinite space inside.

The spokesman refused to respond to reports in The Weekend Australian that some detainees were sleeping in rooms designed for teaching English or for conducting interviews with immigration officers. "Christmas Island has adequate capacity for the current caseload," was all the spokesman would say.

Outside church yesterday, Mr Rudd refused to discuss the rising tide of people fleeing persecution from, in particular, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. On Friday 36 men and one woman were granted protection visas and were transferred to the Australian mainland. Twenty-seven of the refugees were from Afghanistan, eight were from Sri Lanka and two were from other countries.

More detainees are expected to be transferred to the mainland either today or tomorrow but the immigration spokesman would not say if they were more visa recipients or were being moved to free up beds.

SOURCE





4 April, 2010

Asylum seekers are lured to the UK by its 'enormous' benefits, says Calais mayor in blistering attack on Britain

Britain's ‘enormous’ state handouts to asylum seekers were furiously criticised yesterday – by the Mayor of Calais. Natacha Bouchart said these payouts were the lure for thousands of foreigners using the French port as a staging point to cross the Channel illegally.

She said the UK government’s policy was ‘imposing’ migrants on the town, costing the local economy millions. Mrs Bouchart, 45, a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party, said she was so disgusted by what was going on that she refused to have any meetings with British government representatives.

She said the British system was predominantly to blame for thousands of Africans, eastern Europeans and Asians trying to clamber aboard lorries and trains in Calais every day.

‘Requesting asylum is easier with them (the British) than in France. The asylum seeker is given accommodation and receives up to £40 a week according to their case, when the annual income of the average Eritrean is around $200 (£135). ‘That seems enormous and it’s attractive to them.’

In Britain, asylum seekers can receive payments as soon as a claim is lodged. In France, an asylum seeker generally is given nothing for six months. That is because the French bureaucratic system means it routinely takes a minimum of six months to have a claim for asylum – and with it the opportunity to receive state support – accepted.

Once accepted, the claimant can receive a range of benefits – but almost all prefer to try to reach Britain and secure immediate benefits. Married asylum-seeking couples in the UK receive £66.13 a week, while single people get up to £42.16. They are also entitled to free NHS care, housing and education for any children.

Home Office Minister Phil Woolas has been seeking closer cooperation with France in the hope of preventing the crisis in Calais from escalating.

Ministers have been alarmed by figures showing the number of migrants caught trying to reach Britain by stowing away on lorries at Calais has doubled over the last year to more than 2,000 a month. The count of 6,031 in the first three months of this year compares with 2,919 caught by port security services trying to gain access to trucks queueing for ferries between January and March 2008.

The pressure on the port of Calais is being matched at the Channel Tunnel terminal outside the town, which has reported a 50 per cent rise in illegal migrants over last year. Most are trying to board lorries waiting for places on freight trains.

Mrs Bouchart said she had received many requests for a meeting with UK officials to attempt to sort out the mess. ‘I’ve never followed them up because I consider them provocative. To receive in the city hall a representative of the British governmentis to support what it imposes on us.’

The mayor pointed out that the Calais Chamber of Trade was having to pay £12million a year to secure the port area – money she suggested the French government should provide.

Calling for a ‘change in attitude’, Mrs Bouchart said the current build-up of UK-bound foreigners was ‘untenable’. ‘Each day the town of Calais finds itself under psychological pressure because of the presence of the migrants. ‘That blocks our economic development. That stops some businesses from establishing themselves and that costs a lot.’

Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green said: ‘The Mayor of Calais is right that the long-term chaos in our immigration system, from badly-protected borders to the Home Office not sending an officer to many appeal hearings, encourages people to try their luck. ‘The answer for Britain and the people of Calais is a well-run immigration system with a proper Border Police Force.’

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of MigrationWatch UK, said: ‘Gallic logic has reached the inescapable conclusion that Britain is a soft touch for asylum seekers. ‘You only have to say the word asylum and you have an 80 per cent chance of staying in Britain, more often than not illegally.’

In response, Mr Woolas said: ‘The illegal migrants in Calais are not queueing to get into Britain – they have been locked out by one of the toughest border crossings in the world. These successful controls have been possible thanks to the close co-operation of the French government.

‘Benefits are only available to those who play by the rules, work hard, pay taxes and learn to speak English. ‘I have made it clear that those trying to cheat our system will not be tolerated, which is why last year UK Border Agency staff worked tirelessly at our French and Belgium controls – stopping more than 28,000 attempts to cross the Channel illegally.’

Source



Rudd flips on 'big Australia'

Insane growth rate is stretching all services

The federal government will consider slashing Australia's annual migration intake to help tackle concerns about traffic congestion, housing, hospitals, water and the environment.

Just months after declaring himself in favour of a "big Australia", Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday warned of "legitimate concerns" with population growth and appointed Agriculture Minister Tony Burke as Australia's first Population Minister. Mr Burke has been given a year to develop the country's first population plan, including a review of immigration levels.

The announcement came as another boatload of asylum seekers - the 102nd to be intercepted since Mr Rudd took office - was placed in detention at the Christmas Island facility, which has reportedly reached capacity.

Mr Rudd denied the new strategy was a smokescreen to divert attention from the recent boat arrivals, saying the idea for a population plan had come after "extensive deliberations of the cabinet over the last month".

He said population growth must be monitored: "Particularly its impact on urban congestion, its impact on the adequacy of infrastructure, its impact on the adequacy of housing supply, its impact on government services, its impact also on water and agriculture and on our regions."

Mr Rudd's change of heart followed the release last month of Treasury's Intergenerational Report, which predicted Australia's population would swell from about 22 million to 35.9 million in 2050, with overseas migration by far the biggest contributor.

Australia's growth rate is now twice the global average, even outstripping that in some developing nations including the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Figures from the Bureau of Statistics show that last financial year net overseas migration added a record 298,924 people, while natural increase (births minus deaths) added 157,792.

Victoria's population, estimated at 5.44 million at June 2009, is growing faster than the national average, with 27 per cent of all immigrants in 2008-09 choosing to set up home here.

The majority moved to Melbourne, where population growth outstripped all other capital cities for the eighth year in a row, compounding pressure on the city's public transport network, roads and housing market.

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison dismissed Mr Rudd's announcement as a diversion to cover his failure to control boat arrivals. "Effectively what he has announced is a plan for a plan after the next election," he said.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said Australia needed a serious debate on population. "It's very hard to have a sustainable population strategy if you can't control our boat arrivals. You can't have a population policy without having a border protection policy," he said.

The Future Eaters author and former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery welcomed the move, but said the Government should create an independent board to set medium and longer-term targets that would take into account the environment, social issues and the economy.

Greens leader Bob Brown said the new strategy must be matched with action. "The major parties' population growth plan is outstripping Australia's infrastructure, environmental capacity and affecting quality of life."

Source





3 April, 2010

Australia's Christmas Island now a 'taxi service' after asylum-seeker boats slip through

CHRISTMAS Island has become a"taxi service" after an asylum-seeker boat slipped though Australia's border security and announced its arrival in a triple 0 [emergency] call, the Opposition says.

And the immigration detention centre is expected to come under further pressure today, with about 150 more boatpeople on three vessels reportedly expected to land.

Wednesday night's undetected vessel, which sailed within 1.5km of Christmas Island, was the 101st to arrive since the Rudd government took office.

It was also the second time in a week that authorities had been alerted to an arrival by a phone call from those on board, after a vessel carrying 41 people called the Australian Federal Police from the island's Flying Fish Cove on Monday.

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison today said Kevin Rudd needed to listen to the Australian people and take action on people-smuggling, predicting further transfers from the overcrowded island to the mainland would occur over the Easter long weekend. “It's not going to change under this government. They've shown no resolve to address this issue. The Prime Minister actually denies it is an issue,” he told the Macquarie Radio network. “He needs to listen to Australians on this because what they tell us, what they tell me is that they're sick and tired of this and they want someone to take some action.

“(The asylum-seekers) literally rang triple 0 to announce their arrival. Interception I don't think is the word for what's going on up there. It's basically becoming a bit of a taxi service. “Christmas Island's become a bit like a revolving door, they've got to get people off to get people on.”

Yesterday's boat carrying 64 Kurdish asylum-seekers and three crew was escorted by HMAS Broome to the island for health and identity checks.

Reports this morning claim the human cargo on board took the number of arrivals since the November 2007 election to 4450 asylum-seekers and 230 crew.

Mr Morrison said yesterday the arrival of the 101st boat would cost taxpayers more than $5 million and was the 16th this month which he described as an “all-time record.” “Four boats have arrived in the last seven days alone, with 160 people on board. With each additional person on Christmas Island costing almost $82,000, each boat is an expensive failure,” he said. “The budget has already blown out by $132 million and by the end of the financial year the Coalition expects it could blow out by a further $250 million.”

SOURCE

NOTE

Only limited posts today as I am ill

JR





2 April, 2010

Border violence threatens Americans

The killings last month in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez of two U.S. citizens, including an employee at the city's U.S. Consulate, along with the slaying of an Arizona rancher, have fueled concerns among U.S. officials that Americans are becoming fair game for Mexican drug gangs seeking control of smuggling routes into the United States.

For more than two years, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have been warning that the dramatic rise in violence along the southwestern border could eventually target U.S. citizens and spread into this country. The violence posed what the officials called a "serious threat" to law enforcement officers, first responders and residents along the 1,951-mile border.

The numbers bear out those concerns, according to the State Department: 79 U.S. citizens were killed last year in Mexico, up from 35 in 2007. In Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, 23 Americans were killed in 2009, compared with two in 2007.

In response, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and Sen. John McCain, both Republicans, have called on the Department of Homeland Security to deploy the National Guard along the Arizona border. Mrs. Brewer said the rising violence showed the "abject failure of the U.S. Congress and President Obama to adequately provide public safety along our national border with Mexico."

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona Democrat, whose district includes the area where rancher Robert Krentz was killed, said if the slaying was connected to smugglers or drug cartels, the federal government should consider all options, including sending more Border Patrol agents to the area and deploying the National Guard.

Former Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, and former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, a Republican who is seeking Mr. McCain's senatorial seat, joined in the call for National Guard troops to be stationed along the border.

Mr. Hayworth said the federal government should "act now and step up its efforts to secure our borders."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry also has put into play a "spillover violence contingency plan" to address attacks on American citizens in Mexico. The plan increases border surveillance; intelligence sharing; and ground, air and maritime patrols.

A day before the March 13 Juarez killings, Mr. Perry unsuccessfully sought help from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to use unmanned Predator drone aircraft and 1,000 additional soldiers for missions on the Mexican border. He said there was a disparity in the amount of federal resources allotted to Texas for border security.

The White House said Mr. Obama was "deeply saddened and outraged" by the killings and had pledged to "continue to work with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and his government to break the power of the drug-trafficking organizations that operate in Mexico and far too often target and kill the innocent."

More HERE



British Stats Agency savages PM Brown over immigration claims

The UK Statistics Agency has teeth and it is prepared to use them. The latest high-profile victim of the Agency is none other than Gordon Brown, who was taken to task yesterday for misleading voters with his selective use of statistics on immigration.

Last month, the UK Statistics Agency (UKSA) warned politicians that it would be watching them during the course of the election campaign and that any politician who misused official statistics could expect to feel the agency's wrath. While sceptics pooh-poohed the idea that a government body might actually be prepared to go head to head with senior politicians on this issue, the record of the UKSA over the last few weeks has been exemplary.

At issue is the vexed question of whether immigration has been going down under the current administration, and if so by how much. In a podcast last Friday, Brown claimed that his government had presided over a significant fall in net migration to the UK, from 237,000 in 2007 to 163,000 in 2008 and provisionally 147,000 in 2009.

He was using these figures to claim that a new points system introduced in 2008 - determining which skilled workers from outside the EU can enter the country - had "radically changed the way we are dealing with immigration".

However, as critics and the UKSA were quick to point out, this was not entirely accurate, since the figure for 2009 was provisional, and also excluded asylum seekers and those who had overstayed their visas.

Sir Michael Scholar, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, wrote to the Prime Minister (pdf) yesterday explaining the error of his ways in suitably school-masterly tones. He said: "I attach a note, prepared by the ONS, on these statistics. You will see that the note points out that the podcast did not use comparable data series for 2007 to 2009, and that it did not take account of the revised estimate of long-term net immigration for 2007."

He added: "The Statistics Authority hopes that in the political debate over the coming weeks all parties will be careful in their use of statistics to protect the integrity of official statistics."

A Downing Street spokesman said: "We accept that some of the statistics used in the Prime Minister's podcast were not strictly comparable and as a result were unclear." "Unclear" in this context is possibly a euphemism for misleading and wrong.

Lest it be thought that the UKSA is only concerned with errors by the government, Scholar is even-handed in his dishing out of reprimands. In February, he tangled with the Conservative Party, accusing them of misleading the public over crime figures.

At issue was the apparent preference by Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling for using police recorded statistics as a measure of crime in the UK, rather than the British Crime Survey. The latter is generally regarded by academics in this field as providing a more accurate and more rounded picture of what is happening to crime. ®

SOURCE





1 April, 2010

British PM's lies and chicanery on immigration are crying out to be exposed by the Conservatives

Six weeks before the probable date of the General Election, a major politician has at last dared to address the taboo subject of immigration in what was billed as a major speech. That politician is none other than Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Yet after he had conceded that the high rate of immigration rightly worries many people - it is one of the two concerns uppermost in people's minds, according to polls - Mr Brown's pay-off in a speech long on rhetoric but short on proposals was calculated to shut down debate. His preposterous claim was that New Labour, which has presided over a threefold increase in immigration since 1997, can be trusted to bring it under control.

He ended by launching an apparent attack on the Tories: 'The question is who has the best plan to control immigration - not who can appeal to our worst instincts of nationalism and xenophobia, but who can appeal to our best instincts of a fairer Britain for all decent hard-working families across our country.'

Talk about dishonest politics! Far from stirring up 'our worst instincts of nationalism and xenophobia', the Tories have barely opened their mouths on the subject of immigration. Whereas before the 2005 election they aired some anxieties - and were pilloried by New Labour and some in the Left-wing media for being racist - they have so far said precious little.

Mr Brown was in effect warning them to keep it that way. He fears that, if they were so minded, the Tories could make a devastating attack on this Government's abysmal record over immigration. in order to head them off, he unearths those old deadly charges of nationalism and xenophobia - sisters of the still more deadly charge of racism.

Meanwhile, we may be fairly certain that in constituencies in which Labour is challenged by the British National Party it will appear to sympathise with those affected by mass immigration.

On a national level, however, it will ludicrously claim to have the problem under control, and threaten to expose the Tories as racist should they dissent in any way. Isn't this all utterly depressing?

It remains impossible to have a mature and reasoned discussion about uncontrolled immigration without scurrilous allegations and false statistics flying around. Mr Brown may pretend it is no longer a taboo subject but that is exactly what he would like it to be.

To be fair to the Tories, they did respond quite robustly, pointing out in a press release some of the Government's many mistakes, none of which was mentioned by the Prime Minister in a speech free of the slightest word of apology or regret for the past.

New Labour distinguished itself by estimating that only 13,000 Eastern Europeans would come to Britain after their countries joined the European Union. in the event more than a million arrived. The Government could have limited the influx, as some EU countries did, but chose not to in the mistaken belief that there would only be a trickle.

There are reckoned to be up to 700,000 illegal immigrants in the UK, and the Home Office has lost the files of 40,000 of them. Countless rejected asylum sleeks have vanished. Stories of Home Office incompetence are legion.

Only yesterday we learnt how Alphonse Semo, a Congolese who served eight years here for a particularly nasty rape, was allowed by the authorities to marry an EU national while being held in jail prior to deportation. As a result, he may be entitled to stay here indefinitely. The pathetic response of Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, and possibly the most intellectually challenged person ever to have served in a British government (which is saying something), was to the effect that it was not for him to stand between a man and his intended bride.

New Labour's record over immigration is one of dazzling ineptitude. In part, of course, apparent errors may have been deliberate. A recently revealed document, as well as the testimony of a former Government adviser, suggest it may have encouraged immigration so as to boost its electoral support, the supposition being that first generation immigrants overwhelmingly vote Labour.

If ever there was an open goal for the Tories, this is it. But until now they have for the most part declined to press home their advantage, fearful of attracting the charge of racism, which Mr Brown half unsheathed yesterday, and believing that on this issue they already have the unspoken support of the vast majority of voters.

But surely a policy that has had such transformative effects on some communities, and has been marked by such incompetence and duplicity, cries out for exposure by the Tories. To his credit, Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, did respond to Mr Brown's speech by saying that bringing immigration under control would be a 'big job' for a future Conservative administration.

I hope that in coming weeks Mr Grayling and David Cameron and other Tories will develop these arguments. They must also point out that, to judge by Mr Brown's speech, the Government does not have any policies likely to curb immigration.

Moreover, not for the first time the Prime Minister has been caught fiddling the figures. In a recent podcast he claimed that statistics showed a steep reduction of 16,000 in the net level of immigration into Britain last year.

Now Mr Brown has been upbraided in surprisingly candid terms by no less a personage than Sir Michael Scholar, chair of the UK Statistics authority, for using two completely different sets of statistics which should not have been compared. As a result, he is likely to have underestimated the net level of immigration by more than 35,000, which means that the figure for 2009 was more than 20,000 higher than for the previous year. Contrary to his boast in yesterday's speech, there has been no decline at all. a policy characterised by incompetence, dishonesty and chicanery must not be a 'no go' area for the Tories.

Of course, they should stress that some immigration since 1997 has benefited the British economy, but the sheer uncontrolled enormity of the process has disquieted many people, including immigrants of longer standing. In some cases indigenous workers have been priced out of the jobs market, in others encouraged to remain on the dole as immigrants have filled low-paid jobs.

The Conservatives must not be frightened of saying as much, and no one with half a brain in his head will take seriously any allegations of racism which New Labour may unleash in order to cover up its record.

The issue is one of accountability. Citizens of whatever colour or background in what is supposed to be a democracy have a right to a say in their country's future.

If recent trends continue, the population of this already crowded country England - not Britain - could increase by 10 million within 20 years. Even with tighter controls on immigration, a substantial rise is certain.

Gordon Brown's speech yesterday was that of the oligarch who bends the truth out of a misguided belief that he knows what is best for us. It is the voice of New Labour's discredited ruling class. If the Tories spare him out of fear of bogus labels which no one any longer takes seriously, they will hardly deserve to be elected.

SOURCE



Labor losing control of Australia's borders, conservatives say

The Federal Opposition says the arrival of two more boats carrying asylum seekers and the escape of three detainees from a detention centre shows the Government is losing control of Australia's borders. One hundred asylum seeker boats have arrived in Australian waters since the Government was elected in 2007. The two most recent arrivals were detected in the past 24 hours.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that four detainees have escaped from Sydney's Villawood Detention Centre in the past month.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says the Federal Government's border protection policies are not working. "This is a 100-fold indictment of the Rudd Government's policies," he said. "When Julia Gillard was the shadow minister for immigration she would regularly put out press releases saying 'another boat, another policy failure'. This is a policy failure compounded 100 times."

The Immigration Department is threatening to fine the operator of the Villawood Detention Centre over a spate of recent escapes. Three Chinese nationals climbed over a fence at Villawood early this morning and are still on the run. New South Wales police are searching for the trio. Two of the men had been detained for over-staying temporary visas while the third is said to be an unauthorised air arrival....

Mr Abbott says the Government should take the blame for the recent escapes because it is responsible for policies on detention centres. "It's the Government's policy which has caused these problems," he said. "These are centres are being run for the Australian Government and the Government has to take responsibility."

An Immigration Department spokesman says the men who escaped are not considered to pose a threat to the community. He also said they were not part of the group of 89 failed asylum seekers who were moved from Christmas Island to Villawood over the weekend. Those men - from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran - had been rejected as refugees and transferred to Villawood while the Federal Government arranges to send them home.

The department spokesman said extra staff had been put on duty in each of Villawood's compounds to cope with the detainees arriving from Christmas Island....

The Opposition has been quick to attack the Government over the transfer of the 89 men, saying the move signals the end of offshore processing. It also says their arrival on the mainland could give the men new rights. But Senator Evans says they are still classed as offshore arrivals.

SOURCE








Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.


The "line" of this blog is that immigration should be SELECTIVE. That means that:

1). A national government should be in control of it. The U.S. and U.K. governments are not but the Australian government has shown that the government of a prosperous Western country can be. Up until its loss of office in 2007, the conservative Howard government had all but eliminated illegal immigration. The present Leftist government has however restarted the flow of illegals by repealing many of the Howard government regulations.

2). Selectivity should be based on "the content of a man's character, not on the color of his skin", as MLK said. To expand that a little: Immigrants should only be accepted if they as individuals seem likely to make a positive net contribution to the country. Many "refugees" would fail that test: Muslims and Africans particularly. Educational level should usually be a pretty fair proxy for the individual's likely value to the receiving country. There will, of course, be exceptions but it is nonetheless unlikely that a person who has not successfully completed High School will make a net positive contribution to a modern Western society.

3). Immigrants should be neither barred NOR ACCEPTED solely because they are of some particular ethnic origin. Blacks are vastly more likely to be criminal than are whites or Chinese, for instance, but some whites and some Chinese are criminal. It is the criminality that should matter, not the race.

4). The above ideas are not particularly blue-sky. They roughly describe the policies of the country where I live -- Australia. I am critical of Australian policy only insofar as the "refugee" category for admission is concerned. All governments have tended to admit as refugees many undesirables. It seems to me that more should be required of them before refugees are admitted -- for instance a higher level of education or a business background.

5). Perhaps the most amusing assertion in the immigration debate is that high-income countries like the USA and Britain NEED illegal immigrants to do low-paid menial work. "Who will pick our crops?" (etc.) is the cry. How odd it is then that Australians get all the normal services of a modern economy WITHOUT illegal immigrants! Yes: You usually CAN buy a lettuce in Australia for a dollar or thereabouts. And Australia IS a major exporter of primary products.

6). I am a libertarian conservative so I reject the "open door" policy favoured by many libertarians and many Leftists. Both those groups tend to have a love of simplistic generalizations that fail to deal with the complexity of the real world. It seems to me that if a person has the right to say whom he/she will have living with him/her in his/her own house, so a nation has the right to admit to living among them only those individuals whom they choose.

I can be reached on jonjayray@hotmail.com -- or leave a comment on any post. Abusive comments will be deleted.