Immigration

On the subject of forced marriage – the annual report from the people trying to deal with it is out or summat – we get this:

Dame Jasvinder warned some perpetrators hid behind accusations of racism.

She said: “They (perpetrators) will try and put you on the back foot. ‘This is our culture. This is our religion. You’re being racist’ or whatever, to put you on the back foot, to make you look the other way.

“And I do feel that it still does exist in terms of professionals having the confidence (to report such safeguarding concerns). Cultural acceptance does not mean accepting the unacceptable.”

And, you know, which culture?

The Home Office said forced marriage was “not a problem specific to one country, religion or culture; there is no archetypal victim or perpetrator, and no two cases are the same”.

And isn’t that a nice piece of blindness?

Racism and sexism have become normalised in Britain, the equalities minister has said, as she warned that young men were being sucked into violent misogyny by the “cesspit” of social media.

Bridget Phillipson said she was increasingly worried about how commonplace misogyny and racism had become, fuelled by online interactions and statements by politicians she said would not have been acceptable a few years ago.

Stop importing racist sexists by the bucketload?

How a far-Right conspiracy infiltrated British politics
The Great Replacement Theory blames Jews for eroding the white race. Now, its anti-Semitic roots are being embraced by a new populist wave

I’d agree that blaming the Jews would be a conspiracy – who, seriously, thinks they have any grand power in our current society?

But that someone, somewhere, wants to drown Anglo Saxonism in diversity seems that it might not, in fact, be conspirazoid to believe in. You know, that there might actually be people working to do that?

On Thursday evening, Spain’s interior ministry announced that 60 members of the armed forces would be deployed to Ceuta, along with an additional 30 Guardia Civil officers. “The armed forces will reinforce the Guardia Civil in the exercise of its powers and any others that may be necessary to maintain security in the city of Ceuta,” the ministry said.

But it rejected calls for the declaration of a national emergency, saying such emergencies could not be declared over migration issues, and could be declared only in response to dire meteorological events – such as the current wildfires – or in the face of a volcanic or nuclear threat.

Caesar, the Alemanni have overrun Gaul!

Pity we cannot declare an emergency, eh?

Flawed and racialised models that underpin the AI-powered age-detection systems to be introduced by the British government will endanger children, rights groups and children’s charities have warned.

Urging ministers to reverse plans to introduce facial age-estimation technology to screen migrants, critics have warned that black children arriving from conflict zones are at risk of being of thrust into the adult system.

So, correct the models and then use it.

Shrug, this isn’t difficult logic here.

It also suggests that the replacement of one group with another, such as evidence of the near-total disappearance of the Stonehenge-building Neolithic Britons, just a few centuries after the arrival of the Bell Beaker people around 2400BC, was relatively common. But it cannot answer why or how that replacement took place. These are big questions that will keep scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists busy for decades.

Why actively import your replacements?

An Albanian former drug dealer who snuck back into Britain 40 days after being deported has been allowed to stay in the country after a judge ruled it would be unfair on his wife if he were deported.

Or, perhaps, we do not need the ones we’ve got?

OK, one answer is why the hell doesn’t this already happen?

All foreign criminals face deportation
Home Office to expand removal orders beyond high-level crime

Bonzer!

Except, well:

Foreign offenders will face deportation irrespective of the seriousness of their crime under Shabana Mahmood’s immigration crackdown.

Under the current legislation, only foreign criminals handed a sentence of a year or more are usually considered for deportation.

But the Home Secretary is expanding the rules to allow all foreign offenders to be considered for deportation for any offence.

Deportation for littering – which as we’ve just found out, can include leaving a cardboard box by the side of an already overflowing bin – does seem more than a tad de trop.

Myself, well, that one year sentence (not possible sentence, but actual) seems close to the right sort of level to me. Purely a matter of opinion, of course, but that’s the level at which we throw out MPs* so possibly appropriate.

*Well, we don’t, that’s the level at which a recall can happen. We settled it some centuries back that whoever the voters vote in is the person voted in. Even if they’re in jail. John Wilkes etc etc.

Foreign nationals living in social housing would be given three months to find private accommodation or face being deported under a Reform UK government, Nigel Farage has announced.

Not that the Lanyard Classes will allow this to happen. Would require primary legislation that overrides every possible roadblock, obviously.

But ballsy, deffo.

A source close to Steve Reed, the Housing Secretary, hit out at the proposals, claiming they would create an “ICE-style” system in Britain.
“Farage knows there’s no way of this happening without establishing a Trump ICE-style deportation police force in the UK. Something he will presumably be trialling in Manchester should he win the mayoralty election.”
They added: “If he thinks Brits look at American politics longingly,

Well, some do acshully. And the point of democracy is to find out how many, no?

Everything always, is the fault of the Proddie Ulstermen. Obviously:

On the other hand, what value democracy if it doesn’t produce what the local population desires?

Much of this is broadcast in real time from the phones of bystanders. That includes the horrific footage out of Belfast this week, of a Sudanese refugee alleged to have carried out a knife attack on a white man, gleefully circulated on X by the likes of far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Considerations of the decency of sharing such footage, of how the circulation of graphic, violent crime images can indignify and rob victims of bodily agency, are nullified by what are considered greater political priorities: to identify and profile the ethnic violence that is supposedly tearing the fabric of the nation.

Don’t show furriners doing naughty stuff as it’s unfair to the victims?

That knife-attack image is potent. In solidarity protests in Southampton, the scene of riots over Henry Nowak’s murder last week, it is illustrated on banners. It has perfectly landed within a pre-existing online visual language that has, for some time, cast the United Kingdom as in decline, and besieged by “invaders”, with ordinary white people betrayed by the state that was meant to protect and privilege them.

Some stories jibe with reality a little less than others perhaps?

A surge in migration across Northern Ireland had already caused racial tensions to spiral long before Monday night’s knife attack.

The country’s foreign population has risen at almost twice the rate of that of mainland Britain.

NI really is one place where migration has already been shown to be an issue, no?

However, for some, it is confirmation that Northern Ireland’s sectarianism does not offer protection against anti-immigrant sentiment.

If you run this through history the sectarianism *is* anti-immigrant sentiment, no?

What distinguishes Islamophobia from other forms of racism is that it is rarely expressed in overtly racial terms. Instead, it is mediated through specific language, making it easier to defend and harder to challenge. The Trinidadian historian and writer CLR James argued that racism was not about attitudes, but systems of exploitation, while the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon showed it is produced by economic and political domination. Discrimination persists not because of what people believe, but because of how power is organised.

When James and Fanon are rolled out we know we’re dealing with proper idiocy. ‘S all Capitalism, see? In fact, from the presence of those two approvingly being mentioned we can predict everything else that will be said.

Elaine Roe, 61, a cafe worker, has no doubt what is the most important issue in this week’s byelection for Dublin’s north inner city. “The government is wrecking our country, they’re bringing in rapists and murderers and kidnappers. It’s a shame. I might vote Hutch, he seems a normal person.’

That would be Gerry “the monk” Hutch, a prominent gangland figure who is running as an independent in an election that is far from normal. The 63-year-old – who was jailed for robbery convictions in his youth – is a celebrity candidate in a contest for a parliamentary seat that has been dominated by xenophobia and immigration.

Voters in the Dublin Central constituency will cast ballots on Friday, with results on Saturday, but one outcome is already clear: hostility to newcomers, especially Black immigrants and Muslims, has entered Ireland’s political mainstream.

Wonder how long they’ll keep the system if people keep voting the wrong way, eh?

Pork sausages were served to passengers on a deportation flight from Ireland to Pakistan, it has emerged.
The men, from the Muslim-majority country, were offered a traditional Irish breakfast on the flight from Dublin to Islamabad last year, which was described as “inappropriate” in a human rights monitor’s report.

If only we could believe that this was intentional.

I’ve no idea about his other views – apparently conservative Catholic – but:

Far right and reactionary these days means anti-immigration does it? Rather than, say, invading Poland?

Which tells us something about how far right anti-immigration is or where the declared centre of French politics is?

For years, Viktor Orbán, with his anti-migrant and white Christian nationalist rhetoric – sentiments that endeared him to Donald Trump and his Maga base – offered his European counterparts the comforting fiction that racism in the EU was the preserve of a few unsavoury men and women. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.

Racism is not the work of one individual. It is structural. Racial logic is woven into our laws as well as our political, economic and social systems.

It’s such a weird complaint. Humans always – but always – run on in group and out group lines. It’s a fairly basic environmental pressure upon us in fact. There’s an us and a them. And?

Racialised biases are being stamped into our AI tools.

As I keep insisting for AI to be useful it has to reflect the world as it is. As there is bias in hte world then so must AI be biased – otherwise it’s not describing reality, is it?

Changing this dynamic is not easy. A deeper study of colonialism must be made part of our collective memory to ensure a shared reckoning of how Europe’s wealth, borders and ideas of civilisation were built through empire and racial hierarchy. These truths need to be embedded in our education systems and cultural institutions, not merely mentioned as footnotes in history books or explored in temporary exhibitions.

Therefore up the propaganda, Comrades!

And human beings will still work on in groups and out groups because that’s how humans work.

Remind me: when did the British people vote to allow the mass immigration of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals, many of whom don’t work and never will? Immigrants who will cost the British taxpayer hundreds of billions – a national bill that breaks down into £20,000 for every single UK household, and could bankrupt the country.
Yes, £20,000 a British household. That is the real cost of the “Boriswave”, the mass immigration made legal and encouraged by successive Conservative governments, as exposed in a report launched yesterday by Reform UK.

The calculation might well be right, but that bill is pretty high, no?

We’re back in St Milt’s world – you can have free movement or a welfare state but only one of the two.

Russian shadow-fleet crews will be able to claim asylum if Britain seizes their ship in the Channel, ministers fear.
Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, and Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, are understood to have raised concerns that seizing tankers in British waters would allow Russian mercenaries to exploit the asylum system.

‘They singled out non-white, foreign-born workers’: the restaurants raided by Britain’s version of ICE

If you’re looking for non-citizens, those without work permits, then that looks like a useful early filter. No?

Or is simple Bayesian reasoning now illegal?