Immigration

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?

But I’m willing to be corrected:

More than half the children in custody are from ethnic minorities for the first time amid a rise in knife crime, according to figures from the chief inspector of probation.

Justin Russell said there were 415 blacks, Asians and minority ethnics (BAME) aged ten to 17 in young offender institutions or secure units compared to 396 whites in May.

It is the first time they have topped 50 per cent despite only comprising 18 per cent of the general population and 27 per cent of those who received a caution or conviction in 2017/18.

Average BAME (actually, “non-white” which may not be the same thing) is about 14% for all age groups. With a very definite bias younger. For over 80s it’s perhaps 4% for example. So, only 18% in that age group? Don’t think so.

It’s still nowhere near half of course.

I’d suggest another alteration too – let’s look at central urban populations only. At which point it wouldn’t hugely surprise to find that 50% of the total age group are in fact BAME. At which point, well, do we think that inner city teens are more likely to be arrested, be in custody, than non-inner city teens?

Dunno, but I think that just those two alterations would get us a lot of the way to explaining this number. Rather than what we’re going to get told it is, the rassssist British State.

A village in New Zealand has banned a replica of Captain Cook’s ship from docking there to mark 250 years since the explorer’s arrival after an outcry from the local Māori community.

The vessel is part of a flotilla circumnavigating New Zealand next month for the Tuia 250 – a NZ$13.5m (£7m) series of events that “acknowledges the first onshore encounters between Māori and Pākehā in 1769-70”. It was due to visit Mangonui, in the North Island, but the stop was cancelled by the ministry of culture and heritage after complaints from indigenous figures.

Anahera Herbert-Graves, the head of Northland’s Ngāti Kahu iwi, or tribe, told RNZ: “He [Cook] was a barbarian. Wherever he went, like most people of the time of imperial expansion, there were murders, there were abductions, there were rapes, and just a lot of bad outcomes for the indigenous people.

“He didn’t discover anything down here, and we object to Tuia 250 using euphemisms like ‘encounters’ and ‘meetings’ to disguise what were actually invasions.”

Ask the Moriori about the behaviour of the Maori.

Well, quite, you don’t get to whinge bitterly just because you lost a particular encounter.

Per WIkipedia: Afua Hirsch was born in Stavanger, Norway, to a British father and an Akan mother from Ghana,

If it’s viable to distinguish between an Akan from Ghana and, say, Hausa from Ghana, then why is it such a terror to distinguish between an Anglo Saxon from England and an Akan or Hausa from England? Or, if you’re anti-assimilationist, why isn’t it?

We have to avoid ‘integration’ becoming another form of racism
Afua Hirsch

Assimilation is an invidious concept. No one in Britain should have to give up their heritage to fit in

Eh?

Iwill never forget the day I joined an English Defence League march in Chelmsford, Essex, in the run-up to the Brexit vote. I went as a journalist, and I wasn’t expecting it to be a comfortable experience. But the most shocking moment was not what I predicted. Instead of threatening me with directly racist slurs, a senior figure at the march told me he wasn’t fussed by my presence. “You’re OK,” he said. “You speak English properly. You know our ways. You’re like us. It’s the others we have a problem with.”

By “others”, he meant Muslims – the EDL’s most frequent target – or any other visible minorities he deemed to have made insufficient effort to assimilate into British culture. It struck me as the most chilling and insidious form of racism of all: he was, in effect, saying, “People who come to England are acceptable to the extent they attempt to mimic us.” Underpinning that is a confidence in one culture’s inherent superiority over others. It’s for exactly this reason that it is becoming more widely recognised that assimilationist thinking – the idea that a particular culture is preferable, and that others should therefore adopt it – is a racist ideology.

Why come if you don’t want to join the culture?

‘We are a target’: wave of xenophobic attacks sweeps Johannesburg
Men with homemade weapons march along a street in Johannesburg on Sunday. Photograph: AP
Migrants in South Africa’s commercial capital face looting, violence and sometimes even death

by Jason Burke

In the Kismayo meat restaurant at the heart of the Mayfair neighbourhood of Johannesburg, the elders of the city’s Somali community hold urgent meetings about the attacks on foreign-owned businesses and traders that have been surging for more than a week.

D’ye mean that it’s not just Whitey who is sometimes xenophobic and racist?

Gosh!

How well’s this going to play in Peoria?

The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren called the initiative “immoral”.

“Our laws and values compel us to help those fleeing violence and oppression,” she wrote. “As president, I’ll welcome at least 175,000 refugees per year by the end of my first term.”

Let’s hope she does. Shaking each hand individually will leave her with no time to do anything more dangerous.

Four teenage boys have denied harassing two women in a homophobically aggravated attack after they refused to perform a sex act on a bus.

Two 17-year-olds, a 16-year-old and another boy, 15, appeared at Highbury Corner Youth Court in London on Wednesday to enter not guilty pleas to a charge of causing harassment by using threatening or abusive words or behaviour.

They’re not named – that guide to appearance and backgrouind – because they’re under age.

A British University has closed its Student Union bar because of a dwindling demand for alcohol from its students who increasingly prefer coffee to beer.

Abertay University, located in Dundee, Scotland, said that stocking alcohol at Bar One was no longer viable as the income generated from sales has “dropped drastically” in recent years.

Alcohol sales at the venue, which opened in 2005, have plummeted by two-thirds since 2014, as young people are choosing to spend their money on non-alcoholic alternatives such as coffee.

Might there be religious reasons for this? The religious structure of the population, as with that of race, being very different across the age cohorts.

There appears to be some uncertainty as to which “home” the four congresswomen could go back to (Trump’s ‘go back’ racism is crude, but may yet be effective, 17 July). Is it too much to hope that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s family tree might reveal roots in the UK that she could return to? She would be most welcome.
Ginny Gough
Cottenham, Cambridgeshire

And much of America would like her to take the opportunity too.