Thursday 14 April 2011

The Immigration Debate

I read a news article on the BBC's web-site that reported on David Cameron's recent speech on what the government proposes to do about the numbers of immigrants entering the UK today. As ever it was masterful piece of political obfuscation.


The facts are that immigration always becomes an issue amongst the chattering masses whenever there's a recession and regardless of the root causes and actual figures (never let the facts get in the way of  good propaganda material).


The graph on the BBC link clearly showed that the majority of immigration into this country is from non EU countries but did not make any distinction as to the category breakdown : asylum, economic or family application. At the last election, I took a close look at the figures on the National Statistics web-site. Non EU economic migrants make up a relatively small percentage of overall nett immigration. However they are the only category of immigration where our government can alter the numbers without having to pass legislation at National, EU or even International level.


It would be a far more profitable use of government debate time for them to get the current immigration systems working effectively and in finding the funding to be able to remove those found to be here illegally. It is ridiculous that we catch illegal entrants and then let the go under their own supervision whilst awaiting deportation. Of course they are going to run!!!! We also need to find a way of speeding up the appeals process without compromising human rights.


On a broader front we need to have a National Debate on why certain ethic minorities seem to have greater trouble integrating than others and what we should be doing to prevent ghettoisation. Of course such a debate is almost always rail-roaded by extremist views; shouts of "send them home" and "racist pig" being the least of it. If we really want to work out how we want the UK to be structured demographically, then those of us adults out there need to insist on the debate and ignore the idiots.