Immigration

The squalid conditions inside former military barracks hastily converted into refugee camps are revealed for the first time today amid mounting opposition to the Home Office move.

Images of the “unsanitary and unsuitable” living quarters inside the disused army training camps show crowded dormitories where it appears challenging to socially distance. The British Red Cross said that the Ministry of Defence sites, surrounded by barbed wire and high fences, were not fit to house vulnerable and traumatised asylum seekers who had fled conflict.

So far two sites – in Penally, Pembrokeshire, and Folkestone, Kent – which together could house more than 600 asylum seekers while their claims are being processed, have been converted.

Jennifer Blair of the Helen Bamber Foundation, which supports refugees who have endured extreme cruelty, said the pictures from inside the military camps prompted fresh disquiet.

“For a start, there’s a lack of privacy for showers and sleeping, and for survivors of rape and abuse that is unacceptable. The Welsh site in particular looks really rundown, with bunk beds and concerns over social distancing.

“It is unacceptable to house survivors of torture and human trafficking in unsanitary and unsuitable conditions. The use of barracks as refugee camps has been done without adequate risk assessment, proper vulnerability screening and specialist trauma-informed healthcare.”

But there is no evidence suggesting that asylum fraud occurs on a wide scale. The Trump administration has often cited the national asylum grant rate, which is currently about 12 percent, in arguing that most asylum claims are illegitimate, but that’s disingenuous: Being denied asylum says nothing about the credibility of an asylum seeker’s underlying account. Rather, it simply means that an immigration judge has found that they don’t qualify for the specific kind of protection afforded under the law.

Priti Patel looked at idea of sending asylum seekers to South Atlantic
Home secretary asked officials to see if applicants could be processed on isolated St Helena

Not got the transport links, d’ye see?

Yes, African-Americans were always at the bottom, but there was no monolithic “whiteness” in the mosaic anywhere. Remember: when I was at Harvard in the 1980s, when an Italian-American Catholic married an Irish-American Catholic in Boston, it was a “mixed marriage”, and people would shrug their shoulders and say it was unlikely to last.

To an extent the same was true in the UK. Don’t forget, Catholics couldn’t build churches until the 1840s. The Navy was very much a Protestant citadel until well into the 20th century. Glasgow doesn’t exactly have an entirely harmonious mix between Paddie Papist and Prot today. The idea of a unified whiteness just wasn’t the historical truth at all. And given the mixed marriage – or at least mixed child parentage – rate in London today I expect those racial boundaries to decline rather faster than those earlier ones.

The Navy could be called in to help reduce the number of illegal migrants crossing the Channel after 235 reached the UK in a new record for a single day.

Don’t they already do this? In fact, didn’t we build/buy some new ships so they could?

The “uncomfortable” history of the Commonwealth must be addressed, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have said, as they tell young campaigners the world cannot move forward until it “rights those wrongs of the past.
The Duke, whose grandmother is head of the Commonwealth, said there is way that we can move forward unless we acknowledge the past, with “still so much more to do” to tackle racism.

It’s not going to be easy and in some cases it’s not going to be comfortable, but it needs to be done, he said, explaining institutional racism still exists because someone, somewhere, is benefiting from it.

The Duchess, who noted she had “personal experience” of racism and unconscious bias, added that “we’re going to have to be a little uncomfortable right now” in order to “push through” and “get to the other side
The couple, who are president and vice-president of the youth organisation Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, spoke to young people via video link from their new home in Los Angeles, following their recent vocal campaign work in the Black Lives Matter movement.

No, no, noNo, no, no, Laddie.

The standard line is that the Commonwealth is the solution to this evils of Empire problem, not a cause of it itself.

And as for wossname, “push on through” what? The “other side” is what?

Drivel.

Of course there is actually a solution and it’s the one that will eventually come about. Harry and wossname showing us how to do it as well – actions, not words that is. To use the old language Archie’s a quadroon. And when all are octoroons there’s no more division into Eloi and Morlock, is there? That is, current distinctions of race are going to be solved the same way all the other past ones were – there are very few indeed who worry about that division between Norman, Angle and Saxon these days – which is a couple of centuries of vigorous miscegenation.

Not that it’s politic to point this out these days but then bully for the politics of these days.

Mr. Ecclestone says:

“In lots of cases, black people are more racist than what white people are [sic].”

A Fulani speaking about Ibibio, a Zulu about Khoi San, could certainly make you think that. Robert Mugabe’s treatment of Ndebele might lead you to that conclusion.

But is he right?

If there’s going to be distinguishing by race then we’ve got to have a definition of race. You know, that thing that doesn’t exist

Asylum applications in Europe fell to the lowest level for over a decade in April as borders closed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, European Union figures show,

The question then becomes well, how many asylum applications do you want and therefore what do you do to the borders?

There really is a racial divide in the US. My own – based on little more than my own prejudice and observation – assumption is that the different groups don’t shag each other enough. The only long term solution to caste that I know of being a blending of the subsequent generations into there not being castes or racial groupings that can be identified or that people care about. My own genetic heritage includes a number of groups that would, at one time, have been considered very much outsiders – Irish, a tad of Peruvian, Huguenot further back and so on. Nowadays no one gives a toss about any of that – OK, a dermatologist might comment on the Irish fairness and the noonday sun – and people hate me for my character, not my origin.

Any look at the demographics of London show this process carrying on, as it always has done in that city. “Mixed race” being by far the fastest growing group. The outmarriage (or, to be modern, out-partnering) rate for Afro Caribbeans is something like 35% in a generation. There won’t be that identifiable group, without further immigration at least, in a few generations. London always was like this too, I think I’m right in saying that it was late in the 19th cent. before the place actually replaced its own population without immigration. There have, that is, been Londoners for a long, long, time but the genes have near always been, in large proportion, those of incomers.

OK, well, an interesting diversion. Looking at the same problem an activist has a different solution:

In the next 66 years, fulfilling the promises of Brown requires we reimagine and rethink our social structures. This reconsideration requires shedding the entrenched individualism that allowed white landowners to equate human suffering with their rights to enslave.

Oh, group rights, rather than individual, are the solution to people being seen as members of a group, not individuals.

That’ll work, right?

We’re told, endlessly, that we should have a more democratically controlled economy. It’s one of those stock phrases on the left:

More than three quarters of the public believe employers should prioritise hiring British workers rather than migrants, research has found.

The poll for Migrationwatch showed the vast majority of the public wanted employers to prioritise getting British people back to work after the covid-19 crisis.

OK, so it’s MigrationWatch, it will have been a leading question but still. How long will democratic control last if the Demos keeps asking for what it shouldn’t?

Last week, the Office for National Statistics confirmed what many had suspected since the start of this pandemic – black, Asian and minority ethnic people are far more likely to get and die from coronavirus. But it is the scale of difference that is so worrying. Black people are more than four times more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people. Even after taking into account age, underlying health and income factors, they are still almost twice as likely as white people to die from the virus.

The government has promised that a review by Public Health England into how ethnicity affects vulnerability to coronavirus will be published by the end of May. It can’t come soon enough: among frontline NHS and social care workers, the difference is all too stark: despite accounting for just 20% of the workforce, 94% of doctors and 71% of nurses who have died from Covid-19 were black, Asian and minority ethnic. It has prompted NHS England to recommend risk assessments for BAME frontline staff to reduce their exposure to the virus.

If that Vitamin D hypothesis is true one very objectionable manner of pointing it out is that people with darker skins aren’t well adapted to living at higher latitudes. So, perhaps for their own health, they shouldn’t?

Or, to be less objectionable, perhaps that melanin enhancement should be considered – despite that connection with race and all that political malarkey – in the health advice proffered to those who decide, on balance, that life is better here than in the tropics. A point about which they’re entirely correct of course.

For there is a reason that paler skin developed. Not because evolution directs or anything but because among those who moved to higher latitudes the darker skinned kiddies died earlier, had fewer children, than the lighter skinned.

While the Indian ethnic group makes up 3% of the
working-age population of England and Wales, they account for 14% of doctors.

From the IFS report into effnics and covid-19.

Would be interesting to take that a stage further. What’s the split between waves of immigration? Or, another way of the same thing, how much of that is the Ugandan (really, East African) Asians and how much direct from India to here?

The Ugandans were much like those strivers from Grantham, traders who aimed for the kiddies to be professionals and thus climb in the social rankings. How much of that is true of those coming direct? If from the same Gujerati background, quite a lot perhaps. But what about the wider sources?

Not important, would just be an interesting sociological insight.

Coronavirus: Irish people on ships linked to outbreak

Allow the potatoes onto your ship and you get a pneumonia outbreak.

Sheesh.

100,000 children in London ‘without secure immigration status’
Research finds more than half UK’s estimated 674,000 undocumented adults and children live in the capital

Better get the lads working on that then, eh?

Hmm? Ah, yes, The Guardian’s answer is the opposite. Let’s issue many more papers…..

Ms Long Bailey marked out her pitch with a call for an open immigration system – perhaps even a continuation of free movement after Brexit – calling that “the million dollar question”.

People were “under the impression” that their wages were hit by an “influx of so-called migrants, but she said: “That just isn’t the case.

“I have not seen any economic evidence to suggest that the influx of workers from any country across the world at the moment has depressed wages in any way.”

Err, right.

The majority of NHS staff in England are British – but a substantial minority are not. Around 153,000 out of 1.2 million staff report a non-British nationality. This is 13.1% of all staff for whom a nationality is known, or just over one in eight. Between them, these staff hold 200 different non-British nationalities. Around 65,000 are nationals of other EU countries – 5.5% of NHS staff in England. Around 52,000 staff are Asian nationals.

How much would we have to increase wages by to gain 13% more British born and trained nurses?

Lucky we got that name there, we might have thought the police officer was a Jehovah’s Witness or summat.

Private schools are making hundreds of thousands of pounds from Vietnamese children who are entering Britain on student visas then disappearing, The Times can reveal.

Children as young as 15 are being brought to the UK by suspected trafficking gangs through legitimate visas sponsored by private schools.

The students typically pay a term’s fees then go missing within weeks or months of starting at the school. Many disappear into the system and are left at risk of exploitation in nail bars, cannabis farms and brothels.

The number who end up in brothels will be from tiny to zero.

But it’s a clever exploitation of the system.

The whole smuggling thing in a lorry isn’t cheap and has its angers. So, cough up a term’s school fees and you’re in instead.

Do note, I’m not approving. Just saying it’s clever.

The 39 people who died in the lorry were victims. Why does the law treat them as criminals?
Annie Kelly

An Algerian asylum seeker who committed a string of violent offences culminating in an assault on his own teenage daughter has lost his 15-year human rights battle to stay in the UK.

This week three appeal judges finally ruled that his criminal offending, which included a sexual assault on a woman and an assault on a police officer, was so serious that he must be deported to Algeria.

The man from West London, who can only be identified as OH, committed 13 offences over a 30 year period, his first in 1988 just weeks after illegally entering the UK.

He was thrown out of the UK in 1991 but managed to breach border security and sneak back, marrying a British woman in 2000.

Can’t see asylum there. Illegal immigration, yes, Then legal immigration – or legal status to stay through marriage at least.

By asylum is a specific legal status. Why use that word to describe him?