Immigration

The next chancellor of Austria could be Europe’s most Right-wing leader after establishment parties failed to strike a pact to keep a populist pro-Putin faction out of power.

The victory for Herbert Kickl’s Eurosceptic and anti-migrant Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) marks a paradigm shift on the continent as traditional coalition building between moderate parties falters.

So, you build this firewall, this cordon sanitaire. If we, the right thinking, stop those baddies from ever getting a taste of political power then, well, they’ll never have any political power.

But there’s a reason they’re doing well in elections. Lots of people like their ideas. And so it’s possible – possib le, not certain – that their vote will keep going up. And one day, leap your firewall. At which point you’ve no defence, have you? Becauyse everything was reliant upon their never actually gaining power.

Migrants from cultures with “medieval attitudes to women” should be blocked from coming to Britain, the Tories have said amid the ongoing row over child grooming gangs.

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said some of those who had migrated to the UK in recent years had “backward, frankly medieval attitudes to women” – and that “we have to be very careful about who is coming into this country”.

His remarks were supported by Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, who has previously said that all cultures are not “equally valid”.

Great. OK. So what about asylum seekers? Who might well be coming here in order to escape medieval attitudes…..and, under the law as it stands, have a right to asylum for precisely that reason. Heck, how about some proudly bourgeois Afghan family just trying to escape the Taleban? Escape by migration, not asylum?

This is not to say the goal ain’t great – it’s to point out that it’s not that simple.

Foreign nationals are more than three times as likely to be arrested for sexual offences as British citizens, according to the first analysis revealing the scale of crime by migrants.

OK

This represented a quarter (26.1 per cent) of the total estimated 35,000 sexual offence arrests, according to the first analysis of its kind by the Centre for Migration Control of data from police forces, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Foreigners were 3.5 times as likely to be arrested for sex offences as British suspects, based on a rate of nearly 165 arrests per 100,000 of the migrant population against 48 per 100,000 for Britons.

OK.

Without thinking too hard about it all those boats seem to be unloading prime age males and criminality – let alone sex offences – is a prime age male thing.

Here’s the number that juddered for me:

While foreigners make up nine per cent of the population

One tenth, eh? Thassalot. A lorralot.

Inside the ‘priority’ NHS services for migrants
Asylum seekers receiving ‘preferential medical treatment’ despite increasing wait times for Britons

But it’s near enough true to stand.

The worm is turning here, no? 15 yers ago this would have been Nick Griffin shrieking in the street and the newspapers taking no note of that smell.

Now….

Ooooh, no, Missus, can’t go around claiming genetic determinism! What happens to the Blank Slate Theory if we do that?

Like so many of us, I was dispirited to wake up a few weeks ago to learn that Donald Trump will be back in the White House. This time he was aided by the world’s richest man and professional spaceship-crasher, Elon Musk. Among the many charming aspects of their partnership is a fondness for some highly unsavoury views on genetics. Trump is an enthusiastic advocate of “racehorse theory”, which he shares with white supremacists; the belief that he is personally superior and that this is rooted in his “good genes”. It’s a vapid idea, but it directly informs his toxic views on immigration, where he argues the country needs to be shielded from the “bad genes” of outsiders.

Meanwhile, Musk has his own equally baffling take on genetics, infused with a characteristic messiah complex. Like some of his fellow tech moguls, he is determined to “save humanity” by producing as many offspring as possible, convinced that our future depends on it. This might all be laughable were it not for the fact that Trump and Musk now wield more power than they ever have before. The shared thread running through their rhetoric is genetic determinism: the idea that who you are, and what you can achieve, is all down to your DNA. Nothing else matters.

So, very naughty. Instead, we must accept that environment, culture, matters:

Because, if genes are everything, why bother with policies aimed at tackling inequality? Why waste time and resources addressing social problems when we’re all just products of our genetic code?

In debates surrounding genetics and social policy, it is easy for the language of genetic determinism to lure you into an ill-advised “nature v nurture” debate. You know this debate: maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s the pervasive conditions of social inequality? But this debate misses the bigger picture entirely: it should not be seen as a binary choice. The truth is, humans are born with genes that require a good environment to thrive. It’s not either/or, but a complex interaction between the two that determines who someone becomes. We have a nature that requires nurture. Good science accounts for this complexity, rather than reducing it to a simplistic binary.

This is, of course, entirely true.

But as curerent research is showing, there are good cultures and bad cultures foir those genese to thrive in. And we do seem to be importing a lot of people from those bad cultures, they bringing those bad cultures with them.

Perhaps we should stop doing that?

The point about the Blank Slate being that sure culture matters. So why load up on bad cultures?

No one has realised just how bad Britain’s immigration disaster is

Rather a lot of the peeps themselves seem to have an idea.

Reform UK has overtaken Labour in a national opinion poll for the first time, pushing Sir Keir Starmer’s party into third place.

Rogue poll etc but still…..

The accusations levelled at Soumahoro by Maréchal and her followers have been rebutted by the academic as an “unspeakable aggression”, a “violation” of her intellectual arguments and a distortion of the very meaning of racism. They have also been debunked in some detail by Mediapart: they simply do not hold up to scrutiny. Maréchal accused Soumahoro of being part of a “radical and provocative ideological fringe”, because she “promoted the concept of ‘racial burden’”, and endorsed the “conspiracy theory” of “white privilege”.

Another of the complaints is that in 2016 she took part in a summer camp devoted to decolonialism and that this was allegedly “forbidden to whites”.

Soumahoro has indeed theorised on the “burden of race”. This refers simply to what anyone who is not white has to face daily in societies not built to include them, and in which they constantly face discrimination. White people are privileged in not having to handle systemic racism. The allegedly racist summer camp was intended for people who personally face racism. Obviously this means people of colour.

So the allegations are true then?

UK charity declares ‘refugee homelessness emergency’ as numbers hit record high
Naccom report says gaps in state support have led to more than 1,940 refugees having no accommodation

It’ll, let us say, vary along rather a wide spectrum?

Personally, my observation would be that out of what, 100k? 2% failure rate is pretty good for government work.

‘Toxic culture’ around mayor at Tower Hamlets council criticised by inspectors
East London council found to have a ‘suspicious and defensive’ culture centred on Lutfur Rahman and his allies

It’s an outpost of Bangladeshi politics in London. With all the joy, honesty and value for money that implies.

And yes, I do know more than a bit about Bangladeshi politics.

This sort of thing is why the Danes actively insist – to the point of forcibly moving people in council housing across areas – on not allowing geographic concentrations of immigrants. So they can’t end up with this sort of clan/group politics.

Yvette Cooper
Britain can’t stop small boats by shouting at the sea

The Home Sec manages an entire newspaper column about protecting this island nation from illegitimate invaders and not once does she metnion the Navy.

That’s what it’s there for, Love. To stop the dastards comin’ over the water. Been doing it a few centuries now too – might want to give it a thought?

Amid a 40 per cent uptick in migrant boat arrivals in Spain’s Canary Islands, with close to 40,000 people reaching the archipelago so far this year,

So, what’s the PM doing about it?

Legal requirements will be eased for failed asylum-seekers, who will be able to apply for work papers after six months of residing in Spain, according to a draft of the reform revealed by the newspaper El País.

His government will also back a legislative initiative that will give residency to half a million illegal immigrants currently without papers in Spain.

That’s going to reduce numbers, right?

British holidaymakers heading to France have been warned of delays from Nov 1, when border checks will be reintroduced to combat illegal migration and terrorism.

France has joined six other countries in reintroducing Schengen Area border checks, which will be carried out on travellers entering by road or train from neighbouring countries.

They are being introduced for an initial six-month period on its borders with Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Italy.

They will be spot checks rather than being carried out on every person, but travel experts said they would add to delays at the border.

It’s not going to make any difference in entering from Britain of course. We never were in Schegne, passports always were checked. But that plan of borderless trvel is having its problems all the same, eh?

Britain is home to more illegal migrants than any other European nation, a new study has found.

There are up to 745,000 illegal migrants in the UK, accounting for one in 100 of the population, according to the research led by Oxford University experts.

This is more than double the 300,000 in France and ahead even of the upper estimate of 700,000 in Germany, which has the second-largest population of illegal migrants in Europe.

When is too many?

Britons have suffered a slump in living standards, official data shows, as a surge in net migration wiped out any gains from economic growth.

So-called real GDP per head shrank by 0.3pc between April and June compared with a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said, suggesting living standards have slid backwards as the population grew.

It comes after net migration hit a near-record 685,000 last year.

Are we not enriched by our diversity?

And that ne migration number is, erm, about 1% of total population……which is, by the standards ofthese things, v v high. Like Germanics enteringthe Roman Empire in 476 type high.

When lecturing on Irish immigration history, I usually start by asking: in which decade was the first footage of people of colour in Ireland filmed? Some students guess the 1960s. Others reach back to the 30s when the singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson performed in Dublin. The answer? The first filmed footage depicting an African diaspora gathering in Ireland is older than the independent Irish state.

The film, a silent black-and-white British Pathé reel, shows members of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, an early jazz band, at Dublin port in October 1921. The men and women were survivors of a shipwreck. After their safe arrival on another vessel, the band performed for Dublin audiences. In the same month that Dubliners enjoyed the orchestra’s music, Irish republican leaders negotiated national independence with the British government. The footage provides a visual metaphor: Ireland’s history of diversity predates the state itself.

So the Protestants – Church of Ireland, all the littler churches – are to be allowed back then? Not the religious cleansing of the country that did in fact happen after independence?

OK, fair enough.

Except that’s obviously not what Matey means, is it?

The Willkommen is turning frosty even in Germany’s integration capital
Almost ten years after Angela Merkel opened the borders tensions are visible in Offenbach, the city with the highest proportion of migrants

What’s that “even” doing there?

Think on it, immigration’s a problem or it isn’t. Integration’s a problem or it isn’t. If either are problems then they’ll – logically – be greatest where immigration is highest and therefore integration has the greatest effect – or not.

Low-paid migrant workers are an immediate drain on the public purse, costing taxpayers more than £150,000 each by the time they hit state pension age, according to the Government’s tax and spending watchdog.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said the average low-earner who came to Britain aged 25 cost the Government more overall than they paid in from the moment they arrived.

Bit of a pity they say this after, not before, allowing a few million in…..

‘The end of Schengen’: Germany’s new border controls put EU unity at risk
Jon Henley
Europe correspondent
Critics say tightened land border checks a ‘transparent’ bid to appease far right that breaches free movement rights

If demoracy means the people get their say and the people are getting their say then what are you going to do if democracy comes up with the wrong answer?

A British man killed by a Spaniard with a garden hoe belonged to an “expat hooligan” community, the suspect’s lawyer said.

Martin Allwright, 59, died in hospital from head injuries on Aug 19 after being assaulted by one of his neighbours in southern Spain.

José Ramos has admitted striking Mr Allwright with a garden hoe but claims that the Briton threatened him first and he had previously reported his neighbour to police.

José Ramón Cantalejo, defending, said his client was a Spaniard in his fifties with no criminal record who had co-operated with police investigators.

Mr Cantalejo said that Spaniards in villages like El Palacés de Zurgena in Almería – where the attack took place – “live in terror of these British residents, many of whom are complete hooligans”.

80 km or so along the coast. Closer to my brother actually…..

France wants migrants to be able to claim UK asylum from within EU

No, no, I know, you don’t *have* to apply for asylum in the first safe place. That’s not the rule. The rule is that the first safe place *has* to grant asylum. Everyone else can do what they wish, grant or not as they wish.

So, given that folk here will be, by definition, in a safe place inside the EU why would we grant asylum?