Immigration

What ICE is doing on US streets looks terrifying, but don’t forget: it could happen anywhere
Nesrine Malik
This shocking moment is the outcome of a political, institutional and media environment that is not far off Britain’s

Are we about to send Ms Malik off to Sudan? Really?

“Civil servants inside the Home Office have been waving through asylum claims for foreign nationals with known histories of sexual offending. That is not a grey area.”

OK, so deprt them.

Civil servants who have knowingly let foreign sex offenders into Britain would be prosecuted under a Reform UK government, and face losing their jobs and pensions.

OK. And:

The spokesman added: “The integrity of the UK immigration system is paramount. We operate within a robust framework of safeguards and quality assurance measures to ensure that all claims are thoroughly assessed, decisions are well-founded, and protection is granted only to those who meet the established criteria.”

Ah, well, yes, but.

I claim no internal knowledge here, this is from outside everyone talking about this. But what if certain former nationals are now those lowly paid immigration officers wh are becoming partial to certain of their countrymen?

This is not all that far fetched. Allocation of council housing in Tower Hamlets is said to be – said to be, to put it mildly – influenced by former national origin after all.

Ms Mahmood told The Telegraph: “We expect countries to play by the rules. If one of their citizens has no right to be here, they must take them back. I thank Angola and Namibia and welcome their co-operation.

“Now is the time for the DRC to do the right thing. Take your citizens back or lose the privilege of entering our country. This is just the start of the measures I am taking to secure our border and ramp up the removal of those with no right to be here.”

Not just citizens, but people who arrive from there of course.

Diplomats and ministers from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will no longer receive preferential visa treatment and its citizens will be barred from fast-track entry to the UK.

The central African nation has been branded “obstructive” by the Home Office after refusing to take back migrants, including violent criminals and sex offenders.

Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, has threatened the Congolese government with a full visa ban on anyone travelling from the country, including its president, if it continues to refuse deportees.

Yep, apply it to France.

We could even use it to perform an experiment. Apply it to France, not to Belgium, then see how much that changes routings across the Channel. Which would be a good test of how much such restrictions do stop boat crossings….

The new head of the equalities watchdog has attacked those who describe migration as a risk to Britain.

Mary-Ann Stephenson, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), used her first major intervention since taking the job at the beginning of December to warn against the demonisation of immigrants.

Dr Stephenson, who was chosen by Sir Keir Starmer’s administration to succeed Baroness Falkner of Margravine, also said that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – the treaty that has been blamed by critics for blocking migrant deportations – would be a mistake.

For the hard right or far right all over Europe, the “gift” of migration crises and panics keeps giving. Though this should be clear to all by now, it deserves reiteration: when you engage in a politics of cruelty to outbid those whose entire political agenda appears founded on cruelty, defeat is inevitable. Even if governments succeed in implementing “tough” migration policies, or bring the number of asylum seekers down, the far right will find other racial minorities to target, scapegoat and dehumanise.
…
Since migration has become the cornerstone of the current authoritarian turn, it is precisely around migration that resistance needs to form. How we will look back on the decade 2026-35 is ultimately up to us. Carrying out rescues in the Mediterranean, disrupting immigration raids and deportation flights, reclaiming cities as spaces of plurality and solidarity – all these are urgently needed interventions that defend our fellow human beings, and take the fight to the authoritarian forces that are growing all around us.

Migration is allowing the far right to win. Therefore let us have more migration. Assuming that hr doesn;t want to far right to win – this is in The Guardian after all – this is not whoilly logical, is it?

The whole section on Europe is steeped in decades of European far-right ideology and propaganda. The EU and migration policies are held responsible for “transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence”. According to the document, if “present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies”. Indeed, the Trump administration believes that “within a few decades at the latest, certain Nato members will become majority non-European”.

As ever with anything said the first test is “Is it true?”

And if it is true then what?

After all, varied lefties have been gleefully predicting that the US is about to become non-majority white for decades now. We can imagine the same thing about certain European entities too. Like, say, London.

Well, OK. So the thing to be discussing is is this true, do we want it to be true and if not what then? Rather than shouting at the messenger….

In her telling, racism and xenophobia seem not themselves objectively bad things that must be combatted, but a natural outcome that occurs when too many rights are given to immigrants and asylum seekers.

And?

The targeting of black and Asian Britons stretches back to well before the current controversy over small boats. From the 60s to the 80s, racism was often explained away as the inevitable result of there being too many immigrants, who were unwanted and didn’t belong. Many suggested that to stop racist abuse and violence we needed to stem immigration and deport black and brown Britons.

Today, apart from those for whom figures such as Enoch Powell remain heroes, few would accept that the way to staunch racism is by indulging racist claims. Half a century on, the character of both racism and immigration has changed, though in complicated ways. Britain is no longer as viscerally racist as it once was, and yet, over the past decade, the language of the far right has seeped into the mainstream, with migrants denounced as “invaders”, calls for mass deportations and laments over “white decline”. This has been justified by pointing to soaring immigration numbers and popular disaffection.

“If we fail to deal with this crisis”, Mahmood told parliament, “we will draw more people down a path that starts with anger and ends in hatred.” The hatred certainly is directed at migrants and at Britons of migrant background. But the anger has been brewing from long before the small boats crisis.

At its root lies the shattering of the postwar social contract and a sense of betrayal as successive governments have failed to address questions of inequality and poverty, of falling living standards and unaffordable housing; a sense of feeling abandoned by political parties and social institutions and of being rendered voiceless.

So the indigenes have been saying for a couple of generations that there’s too much immigration, they’re unhappy about it. But to agree with them is to be wrong – in a democracy, eh? – and it’s all something else entirely.

Ho hum.

That case made her a target of local politics, but it also gave her something invaluable: the ability to turn frustration into organizing power. Her latest lawsuit against the school board wasn’t simply about procedure, but questioned who gets to decide the future. Is it the people who live there or the corporations that profit from polluting it?

The people who gain from what is produced by the corporations?

Anyway, fun isn’t it? At The G the answer there is obvious – the locals should decide. But when it’s immigration of course it’s not the locals who should decide. Which is fun, no?

Of all the measures introduced to deter people from seeking asylum in Denmark over the last decade, it is the impermanence of refugees’ status that is often cited as the most effective.

Before 2015, refugees in Denmark were initially allowed to stay for between five and seven years, after which their residence permits would automatically become permanent. But 10 years ago, when more than a million people arrived in Europe fleeing conflict and repression, largely from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea, the Danish government dramatically changed the rules.

Since then, temporary residence permits have only been granted for one to two years at a time and there is no longer any guarantee of getting a permanent visa. In order to gain permanent status, refugees have to be fluent in Danish and are also required to have had a full-time job for several years.

So, it seems to work then. Applications are well, well, down.

But the reduction has come at a cost, critics say, to Denmark’s reputation and sense of self. The incorporation of populist rightwing ideas into nominally centre-left politics have, they suggest, eaten away at some of the ideals that Denmark is internationally best known for.

And that’s the best they’ve got against it. But, but, we’re lefties!

One of the reasons that Denmark’s really rather lefty social democracy works is that at times – the right times too – they’re really very right wing and harsh about it. Unemployment bennies, for example, are high, the retraining very good indeed. After two years you get absolutely nothing though. Two years is long enough to get a new job, see?

There’s a missing link in British public life – and it underpins crises from the BBC to our prisons
Rafael Behr
A declining sense of collective identity is corroding trust in our institutions and undermining democratic politics

We’ve just had the biggest wave of immigration in our island history – in size and speed vastly outweighting anything the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes ever did – and you’re now saying we’ve lost something of our collective identity?

Rafa been reading a book of Enoch speeches or something?

The key is collective identity. A routine finding in the game is that participants’ willingness to share goes up when they feel part of a group.

Rilly?

The system has to be seen as a collective investment for mutual advantage, not expropriation and transfer to strangers. That in turn presumes there is a critical mass of people who self-identify as a single political community.

Gosh.

And, you know, guess what? Rafa doesn’t even mention that the reason we’ve lost some of our collective identity is because we simply have less of a collective identity. No doubt he’d be affronted if you even suggested that as a possibility.

BiS points out that it would be far cheaper to offer a cash payment to those we’re throwing out than it would be to keep them.

So, how do we price that freebie?

My best guess is at about 50% of the fees it costs to get here. We cannot afford to make roundtripping profitable now, can we?

This has been one of the key successes of British ultra-conservatives – the question of race can confidently be undermined in the public sphere.

Britain has ultraconservatives?

If you’re the inhouse race grifter for The Guardian, perhaps so. No one else manages to spot them.

The migrant who returned to the UK on a small boat less than a month after being deported to France on the “one in, one out” scheme has submitted a modern slavery claim in a bid to block his removal.

The unnamed Iranian migrant has claimed that he was a victim of trafficking during his time in France.

Doesn’t Laddie have an inventive lawyer?

A lawyer we are paying, of course.

Foreign nationals are underrepresented as a proportion of prisoners jailed in England and Wales when compared with rates of incarceration among British citizens of similar age, an analysis of government data has found.

There must, of course, be total equity between indigenes and our welcome new diverse arrivals.

So, bang up more of the immigrants, obviously.

What was striking about last weekend’s march wasn’t the turnout, easily matched by some of the protests about Gaza. It’s the lack of shame, the brazen insistence on an Englishman’s right to make others feel small. It’s the normalisation of what was until recently considered malicious extremism.

And possibly what has changed is the sheer volume of that immigration.

You know, Paracelsus, it’s the dose that matters?

We could even go back fuirther in the history of thought – Sorites. One immigrant is just Joe who comes from yonder. 5 is that nice family down the street who bring pakoras to the school fayre. 6 million could be a large enough pile to be a problem – a problem in the sense that they generate a reaction.

Could be, eh?

neither the government nor the opposition have been willing to draw red lines, to argue against the conflation of whiteness with Britishness

Blackness is certainly conflated with Africanness as more than one country has been pointing out. As the American education system goes on, tryong to point out that Cleopatra must have been black because she was African….

The first flight to France carrying people who crossed the Channel under Keir Starmer’s “one in, one out” deal has not taken place as planned, according to reports.

A small group of individuals were removed from an Air France flight on Monday due to travel from Heathrow to Paris after a legal challenge, according to multiple newspaper reports.

Which side of that case is Lord Hermer appearing for?

The first Channel migrants are to be deported on flights as early as Monday under Sir Keir Starmer’s “one-in, one-out” deal with France, The Telegraph can reveal.

The asylum seekers who arrived in the UK on small boats last month have been issued with formal removal directions, telling them that they will be deported back to France within five days.

Some 100 were detained on arrival in the first two weeks of August before their names and details were passed to the French government for approval.

A similar number of asylum seekers who have applied from France to come to the UK, largely on the basis of family connections, will be transferred in tandem to Britain under the agreement signed in July by the Prime Minister and Emmanuel Macron, the French president.

So the more who make it over the Channel the more we have agreed to accept?

Doesn’t sound like a grand method of reducing overall numbers now, does it?

This is all a far cry from my own laissez-faire childhood, which reflects many of the experiences of young people of colour who grew up at a time when racist attitudes were in decline. In 1993 almost half of Britons said they’d be uncomfortable if their child married someone of a different ethnicity; by 2020 that number had fallen to just 4%, a stunning drop. Likewise, the percentage of people saying that you have to be white to be truly British has fallen from 10% in 2006 to 3%. While British society has always been far from perfect (many have rightly taken aim at the continued prevalence of institutional racism and unconscious bias) a consensus seemed to have evolved that racism was itself a fundamentally bad thing that was on the way out.

Britain is one of the most racially tolerant places in the world. No, really, believe me. Whatever you think of what happens in Britain everywhere else is worse, far, far, worse.

And yes, us Angles and Saons were doing what we’ve done to every other wave of immigration – fuck ’em and have children with ’em.

Then came The Wave. Simply an amount too large to be dealt with by those standard methods. And therefore here we are.

It’s almost like that radiation hormesis thing. Some is fine, even good, lots ain’t.

So, what do we all do now?