Immigration

A British volunteer who worked in the Calais “Jungle” migrant camp has left her husband and reportedly plans to marry an Afghan migrant so he can live in the UK.

Helen Muller started a relationship with the migrant after travelling to France to work in the camp at a medical caravan.

The 28-year-old, who was married to Richard Muller and has two children, said the man was volunteering as a translator while he was waiting to get into England when they started talking “for hours” every day.

Ms Muller, who works in a residential care home in south Wales, told the BBC she is now divorced and concentrating on getting her partner, who has not been named, to the UK, admitting she may have to marry him to make sure he can stay here.

“Everything has had to become a lot more serious a lot faster,” she said. “For him to be able to legally move to the UK I would have to marry him within three months of him getting here. Everyone says I am crazy but it is the only legal way he can come here.”

Echoes of Polly’s Viking really, isn’t there?

The reality of being black in today’s Britain
David Olusoga

What is it actually like being black in possibly the least racist society the world has ever seen?

How bad is it when an Anglo-Nigerian is a BBC producer, with a TV series and the associated book to plug?

Calais’s refugee children are sleeping rough because of Tory policy

They’re in France aren’t they? Where the policies of the Tory government hold little sway.

Nicky Morgan tells us all that there should be no age checks on refugee children:

The last thing these children need at this traumatic time – where they’ve just left a camp in which they all fear violence, sexual abuse and exploitation – is an intrusive, inaccurate and unnecessary medical examination to determine their age.

You don’t have to take that just from me. In times like these, where there is disagreement, I turn to the experts.

The British Dental Association has made clear this week that the proposed examinations are “not only an inaccurate method for assessing age but both inappropriate and unethical”.

It is reassuring to see the Home Office confirm that these sorts of checks will not be carried out, but they could be doing more to challenge false information and to calm any doubts about just how thorough existing checks are.

But, err, what is the reason this is all unnecessary? You’ve not actually said why. You’ve asserted that they are, but not explained.

Two-thirds of child refugees screened by officials found to be adults, Home Office figures show

Many will read that as two thirds of so called child refugees are not children.

No. Two thirds of those that officials suspected were not children, and thus investigated, were found to be adults.

I’m sure Bayes would have something to say about this.

Refugee camps are not a long-term solution. But demolishing them or hoping other countries will deal with the problem because it isn’t happening on our soil isn’t a sustainable or honourable response. As signatories to the 1951 refugee convention, Britain should share responsibility for helping more people, not just in camps in poorer nations but across Europe too. That means providing more legal safe routes to sanctuary and funding the administrative mechanisms for people to access them.

The people in the Calais Jungle are in a safe country. Therefore it is right, proper and correct that they apply for asylum or immigration in France.

As far as I can tell the Jungle exists because France refuses to process said applications. Or they refuse to make them. Either way, it is not a British problem. Not under EU nor UN law.

You do indeed have an absolute right to asylum. That right being exercisable in the first safe country.

Daily Star

Schlossgrabenfest festival: Sex attacks blamed on Pakistani asylum seekers

So, you’ve not got that much German, you’ve got to work out these long words bit by bit. Err, it’s a festival where we go to the castle and grab?

Official figures show that, in the five years to 2015, just under one million immigrants came to this country from the EU, as they are perfectly entitled to do. But hark. Over the same period, the number of National Insurance numbers issued to EU migrants was more than 2.2 million.

In all, the ONS now estimates a total of 2.4 million entered the country. In one year, mid-2014 to mid-2015, a quarter of a million Europeans came in according to the official measure, yet almost 700,000 bagged themselves a NI number.

My word, it’s almost as if someone wasn’t all that keen on revealing the true number, isn’t it?

Can’t for the life of me think why. It being true (and yes it is) that incoming migrants add to the economy of the UK, the joy and vibrancy of the UK, so why not trumpet how much joy and vibrancy are being added?

A German rail operator has introduced women-only carriages to some of its trains following a spate of violent sex attacks as the reason.

Of course, it is stoutly denied that the segregation comes from the influx of people used to a segregated society….

A new poll has found “overwhelming support” within Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom for granting nationals reciprocal rights to live and work freely in each other’s countries, as new immigration policies shortly to take effect in the UK have the opposite effect.

Although note what wasn’t asked: the whole Commonwealth?

Another idea I’ve seen floated which seems fair enough is proper open door free immigration: among countries of roughly the same economic level.

If you promise not to sneak in then we’ll fly you in for free.

Russia is trying to topple Angela Merkel by waging an information war designed to stir up anger in Germany over refugees, Nato’s most senior expert on strategic communications has claimed.

The attempt to provoke the removal of the German leader, who has been a strong supporter of sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s regime, is said to have been identified by Nato analysts.

Jānis Sārts, director of Nato’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, based in Riga, Latvia, told the Observer that Russia had a track record of funding extremist forces in Europe, and that he believed there was now evidence of Russia agitating in Germany against Merkel.

Maskirovka is a Russian word meaning the sort of misleading stuff the KGB used to plant in compliant media. And this is a lovely example of it: just that it’s not being done by the Russians at all.

But it is very cute and rather clever. Because the take away message is that any German slightly upset about the idea of gangs of near feral youth touching up the local womenfolk are just being paid by Uncle Vova.

Job done.

What is it that you actually expect?

The 24-year-old bottle blonde behind Sweden’s bikini-clad ‘grope-watch’ vigilantes has been accused of spurring fear and racism at the pool where she launched her campaign, with the manager saying staff have received a deluge of hate mail since she began last month.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph has learnt that the co-founder of the group’s Stockholm spin-off last year received a suspended prison sentence for taking part in a neo-Nazi attack on anti-racist protesters, armed with a knife.

Siri Bernhardsson and friends, who refer to themselves as the “tafsvakten” or “grope-watch”, started patrolling the local swimming pool in Kalmar, southeast Sweden, last month in a bid to deter migrants from molesting female bathers.

But their campaign has sparked outrage among locals and the swimming pool’s management, who say the stunt is encouraging racism towards refugees.

!) There has been an influx of refugees.

2) There have been incidents at swimming pools. Not just the odd grope but in Germany the rape of a child.

3) Yes of course there will be a reaction.

4) Yes of course some of said reaction will be by mouth breathing racists.

But what did anyone expect would happen?

A rather large part of what we call civilisation is that social training, that control, of what young men are like in their natural state. Introduce a decent portion of those who have not been so socialised and there will be such problems. Whatever the race or religion of either group in fact.

Despite having accepted 90,000 people last year, Austria is the latest country to impose quotas on asylum seekers and send refugees towards Germany.

Because maybe?

Anti-migrant mob in Germany ‘cheered’ as refugee shelter burned in front of them
Up to 30 drunken onlookers clapped and cheered as a former hotel, which was being converted into an asylum seeker refuge, caught alight in Bautzen, Saxony

“Caught fire” there is a bit of a misnomer, accelerants have been found.

But this sort of anger about foreigners is, while not exclusive to the old DDR, very much more common there than in the old GDR. A couple of generations of socialism don’t seem to have brought on that peace and brotherhood of all men.

And it’s also the old DDR that has the vast expanses of empty properties that people can be put into. And if we look at it purely on an economic basis filling those up with the young immigrants isn’t all that bad an idea: the local populations very definitely skew old, as many of the young moved west.

It’s one of those “interesting” problems.

Claiming refugee status means that your claim for refugee status will be considered. Not that it will be granted:

Sweden intends to expel up to 80,000 migrants who arrived in 2015 and whose application for asylum has been rejected, Interior Minister Anders Ygeman said on Wednesday.
“We are talking about 60,000 people but the number could climb to 80,000,” the minister was quoted as saying by Swedish media, adding that the government had asked the police and authorities in charge of migrants to organise their expulsion.

There’s going to be an awful lot of pissed off people.

Authorities in the German city of Cologne are to set up a “safe zone” for women during the annual carnival which begins next week, to avoid a repeat of the New Year sex attacks on women.

Why not turn the whole city into a safe area? Heck, the whole country?

The European commission is expected to propose scrapping arrangements that mean refugees have to claim asylum in the first country European they arrive in.

Because it’s not really just an EU regulation. That’s the way the whole international asylum seeker set up works. Claim in the first country you get to where it is safe for you to do so.

Aid and succour to those fleeing a violent death, starvation or oppression is the point of the system, not allowing people to pick and choose which place they’d like to receive it in.

This cover-up of sex assaults in Sweden is a gift for xenophobes
Andrew Brown

Police failure to report widespread assaults by immigrant gangs at a Stockholm music festival will be immensely damaging for the country’s race relations

Remarkable really. It not the attacks that are the problem, not that there are groups willing to make such attacks which is the problem but that people might get a bad image of a group that is the problem.

Meanwhile, groups of apparently foreign men in Cologne staged what look like premeditated sexual assaults on women, prompting a new outburst of the racism barely hidden behind German constitutional reality.

Err, racism is “taste discrimination” as the economists have it, not “rational discrimination”. and objecting to a bunch of young men criminally feeling up the birds of the nation isn’t taste discrimination nor racism: it’s rational discrimination.

Twat.