The minister for immigration says the unsayable:...
The minister for immigration says the unsayable: let in more immigrants - Home Office Minister Barbara Roche

New Statesman, Oct 23, 2000 by Jackie Ashley

Was it supreme courage, or suicidal political folly? After a year when asylum-seeker bashing has been the right's favourite sport, Barbara Roche, the Home Office minister, has just called for more immigration. Some on the left will snort. Roche, after all, was identified more than anyone with the tough stance on asylum-seekers, so perhaps she is trying to buy back some political credit. But credit where credit is due. In a speech for the Institute for Public Policy Research last month, she opened a debate that has been closed for years, declaring that Britain needs more, not less immigration, to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

The response to her call was, as she herself admits, surprisingly low-key. There was no hysteria about "swamping" and "rivers of blood"; even the Daily Mail and the Telegraph welcomed the opportunity for a real debate. "Most of the comments were actually pretty favourable," she says. "People on the right didn't throw up their hands in horror. People said, at least let's debate it in a grown-up way."

If this is what Roche, the immigration minister, has achieved, it is really something new. As the recent, viciously attacked report for the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain puts it: "The immigration debate in the UK has always been conducted on the assumption that immigration is a problem, not an opportunity. In contrast to the situation in other countries . . . no detailed economic and social studies have been carried out in the UK into the effect of, or the need for, immigration. However ... western Europe will soon face a shortage of young workers."

That shortage is already blatantly obvious. Emergency summonses of nurses from the Far East, the arrival of Middle Europeans to do a hundred thankless tasks and the huge numbers of "students" who fuel the black economy are all strongly reminiscent of the conditions that caused the arrival of Caribbean, then Indian and Pakistani workers during the 1950s and 1960s. From then on, however, immigration became one of those too-hot-to-touch political issues. Until now. Taking a long view, it may seem that the hysteria over immigration during the past few decades will look like an anomaly for what is, after all, a nation regularly topped up with immigrant groups. But politics is famously short term, and credit must go to Roche for reopening the question.

It is clear that she feels a sense of pride in being able to speak the unspeakable. She is herself, by her own admission, a "living, breathing melting-pot", with a Polish Russian Ashkenazi Jewish father and Sephardic Jewish Spanish Portuguese mother, a husband who is a combination of Irish, French and Yorkshire, not to mention her own upbringing in the East End of London. "I wanted to be the first immigration minister to say immigration is a good thing," she declares. "We have a multiracial, multicultural society; we are a stronger country for it."

So just what is Barbara Roche proposing? She shies away from giving even a vague figure on the numbers of immigrants she is envisaging. But it is clear that she has in mind not only the highly qualified, well-educated migrants who could fill the many vacancies in the information technology sector. Her IPPR speech was strongly critical of two previous attempts to control immigration -- the 1905 Aliens Act, which she says was "motivated in part by anti-Semitism". Equally, in the speech, she described the immigration acts of the 1960s as being a deliberate attempt to limit nonwhite immigration. Any future immigration, she believes, must not exclude any group on racial grounds, nor should we focus solely on well-qualified migrants. She refers not only to those well-publicised shortages in the health service, but even to fruit farms: "We noticed there were reports during the summer of strawberry fields where fruit was rotting because there was nobody to pick it ... well then, you have to respond accordingly."

Does this mean, I ask, simply legitimising the illegal immigrants over here already, who, farmers admit, play an essential part in the summer harvests, not to mention the cleaners, waitresses, bar staff and nannies who may not have visas to work here? Certainly not, according to Roche. "You have to maintain the integrity of immigration control," she believes -- for the sake of the illegal immigrant, as much as anyone: "There is smuggling and trafficking, and of course those people can be dreadfully exploited. It's shocking the way some of those people are exploited, with health and safety considerations ignored and people paid almost nothing."

So, who is to decide who comes in and who does not? Roche's idea is to let business, the trade unions, academics, the general public have their say. She is aware of pressure from business for more immigration -- "You need to listen to what the business community is saying to you as to what it wants. There is no doubt that, in terms of skills, we're in a global market to get the brightest and the best." But it is not just about pinching the best from the third world: "You've got to be very sensitive as to what effect this is having on the developing world. There are some countries, such as India, that quite welcome emigration because of the remittances that people send back, and the effects of networking -- which outweighs any harm. There are other countries that have a different attitude."

Yet isn't it, honestly, a bit rich that the minister who has been tougher on asylum-seekers than even some Tories is suddenly presenting herself as the champion of immigration? Roche insists that her whole purpose is to separate the two issues: "You have to separate off asylum from immigration--they're about two completely different things. The debate was incredibly muddled and confused on all sides." She is unapologetic about the government's attempts to crack down on asylum-seekers. "I believe passionately that we should have asylum...you can't have a more ancient or a more honourable concept than the right to seek asylum...but it's a matter of whether a person meets the 1951 UN Convention [relating to the status of refugees] or not. If so, you speed it through as quickly as possible; if not, you have to say so as quickly as possible."

She attributes the recent row over asylum-seekers to a complete breakdown in the system of processing claims: "The reason for all the delay in the past isn't because there was a team of people poring over all the cases. Basically, they were just gathering dust on the shelves." Now, she claims, around 11,000 cases a month are being processed, compared to just 2,000 when the government took office. "The system is now working properly. It doesn't mean to say I haven't got some challenges. We're on our way to fixing it -- it's a darn sight better than a year ago."

Representing Hornsey and Wood Green, a true melting-pot of a constituency, Roche has personal experience, from her constituents, of the type of problem with which she, as a minister, is trying to deal. Her task, as she sees it, is to strip out the emotion: "As far as the right is concerned, every asylum case is unfounded; as far as the left is concerned, every case is a torture victim -- now it's not like that, but it's almost as if there is no middle ground."

According to Roche, it was the sheer number of asylum-seekers who were economic migrants that caused much of the confusion in the public mind. "There was this tendency in the asylum debate to start to take into account economic value -- of course, you can't do that when you're considering an asylum claim." But that then skewed the debate on immigration, she says; in fact, she believes that "economically driven migration can bring substantial overall benefits both for growth and the economy".

Is the electorate ready for this new debate on immigration? Hasn't the lesson of the past year been that the xenophobic rants of the Daily Mail can all too easily light a racial fuse? And aren't her superiors at the top of government a tad too willing to bow to that Daily Mail agenda? Roche insists that she has said nothing that hasn't been cleared at the highest level. But she stresses that the government must not go for the easy target: "I think people have to be incredibly responsible about this...exploiting this issue is not the way to go." And she is optimistic about the British character: "I've got a lot of faith in the British public. I think, if you're honest about it, that you can have a proper debate. What the public don't like, quite rightly, is that they don't like to see the asylum system being undermined; they don't like illegality. In terms of immigration, what I think we can say is, well, let's look at the history, let's look at what we are, and see if we can debate about it. It's not only a d ebate that's happening here -- it's happening in the rest of the European Union; there's a debate going on in Canada and Australia as well."

We turn to the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, mentioned earlier. Roche clearly has even less time for it than her boss, Jack Straw-in particular, the idea that "British" has racial connotations: "I was really disappointed by their conclusions, because I feel British. What I bring to my Britishness is my Jewish background, just like other people bring their bits. I think you need to reclaim being British for the left. I'm proud to be British. It means fairness and tolerance -- we all have our own definition, and we all bring our personal history.

"For me, it's a wide definition of Britishness and that's what we're very good at." Maybe Roche's optimism about the British character and the chances of a reasoned debate on immigration will prove to be justified. It is still hard to believe that the new Labour spinmeisters will let this issue play very big in the forthcoming election campaign, particularly if the right-wing press decide to whip up prejudice.

But the signs so far, as Roche admits, are good.

COPYRIGHT 2000 New Statesman, Ltd.

Source: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4509_129/ai_66454686

Ponzi Party : Immigration and an old con - Republican Party supports immigration increase National Review, August 30, 1999 by John O'Sullivan
Ponzi Party : Immigration and an old con - Republican Party supports immigration increase

National Review, August 30, 1999 by John O\'Sullivan

Charles Ponzi almost never turns up on the Wall Street Journal\'s list of distinguished immigrants, but in his way he was a financial genius and he continues to influence political economy. In 1920 he collected $9.5 million from about 10,000 optimistic investors by selling promissory notes paying 50 percent profit in 45 days. Ponzi was an Italian immigrant with a criminal record in both Canada and the U.S., but any disquiet this may have caused was quickly quenched when he paid early investors the promised amount. Sadly, these payments were made not from the vastly profitable investments of which Ponzi boasted, but from the contributions of later investors. Ponzi saw that as long as new suckers came forward in sufficient numbers to finance the generous dividends to earlier investors, the scheme named after him could hum along very nicely. Eventually, of course, it ran out of investors-and Ponzi was eventually nabbed. But that took some time, and meanwhile, \"Waiter, more champagne.\"

In the past Ponzi was not generally regarded as an attractive role model by Republicans or conservatives. They were devotees of the depressing \"root canal\" school of economics and raised such pessimistic points as, \"What\'s the bottom line?\" But a new optimistic economics has gripped the Right in recent years, and as a result Charles Ponzi and his economic theory are back in fashion.

His principal insight is usually applied to entitlement programs, in particular Social Security, for the very good reason that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Benefits are financed not from the invested contributions of current recipients-they have already been handed on to past recipients-but from the contributions of current workers. Sadly, however, as the baby boomers head for retirement age, the number of workers is declining in relation to the number of recipients. In other words, the Ponzi scheme is running out of people.

That strikes some conservatives as a one-time opportunity to reform Social Security in line with a more conventional investment strategy. Others, however, prefer what would be Ponzi\'s own solution-namely, to recruit more contributors. Thus a 1996 Wall Street Journal editorial proposed the following:

\"Widening the number of young immigrants paying into the Social Security system may be the only way to diminish the demographic crisis expected when the Baby Boomers retire.\"

The Journal\'s editors failed to cite Mr. Ponzi as the godfather of this proposal, but the columnist Ben Wattenberg, writing in the New York Times, gave credit where credit was due. Was the idea of saving Social Security by bringing in more immigrants, he asked, a Ponzi scheme? Yes indeed, and what of it? \"Life is a Ponzi scheme. Parents pay for their children. When they reach old age, they are most likely supported by those children, either directly or indirectly through Government benefits. And so it goes, through the generations.\" And since we are not having enough children of our own, the children of foreigners will have to bail us out.

Or, to paraphrase-\"Waiter, more champagne.\" This Ponzi rescue of Social Security fails even on its own terms, for the additional contributors become additional recipients in short order. As Peter Brimelow points out in Alien Nation, the median age of new immigrants is 30, and they become eligible for benefits within 20 years. So, still more immigrants must then be brought in to finance the payments to the previous ones. A few years ago, the National Center for Policy Analysis calculated that if existing Social Security contributions and benefits were to be kept steady, then the U.S. workforce would have to double through immigration over the next three decades. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests further that America would need to import the entire world population (about 6 billion people) over the next 160 years in order to keep saving Social Security. This Ponzi-scheme-to-end-all-Ponzi-schemes would then definitively run out of people-human beings, anyway-and require extra-terrestrial immigrants to stay in business.

This Pyramid of Babel, however, is a model of logical prudence in comparison with the perverse Ponzi scheme that is the GOP\'s current electoral strategy on immigration. Because minorities-and in particular Hispanics-are thought to favor immigration, bilingualism, affirmative action, etc., Republicans have determined to downplay or even reverse their policies on all of these. Among these reversals, the GOP now favors raising levels-and expanding categories-of legal immigration on the calculation that the party will thereby gain a larger share of a growing electoral constituency.

Such a calculation is open to attack on innumerable grounds-notably on the grounds that, according to the evidence of polls, the Hispanic minority that actually votes Republican today favors less immigration, official English, and individual rights. Here, however, let me confine myself to mathematical objections to its logic.

1. National figures show that support for the GOP fluctuates between one quarter and one third of the total Hispanic vote-rising or falling in line with the electorate as a whole. Regional, state, and national variations there are, of course. Broadly speaking, Cuban-Americans are more Republican, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans more Democratic. But no statistics show that a majority of Hispanic voters either supports or identifies with the Republicans. Cuban-Americans are shrinking as a proportion of the Hispanic total. And even Republicans who make a special pitch for the Hispanic vote rarely rise above 50 percent. Despite all the hoopla, for instance, George W. Bush gained just over 40 percent of Hispanics in his second Texas gubernatorial election. That\'s a landslide-but in reverse.

2. Immigration further strengthens this strong Democratic tendency of Hispanic voters. To be sure, individual Hispanics are likely to move rightwards politically the longer they remain in the U.S. as they become more prosperous and assimilate to the American majority. But this effect is canceled out, and even reversed, mathematically by the arrival of new immigrants who are poor, culturally unassimilated, and on both grounds amenable to Democratic appeals. Hence the proportion of Hispanics who vote Democratic, instead of falling gradually, has risen slightly but erratically.

3. Finally, immigration also swells Democratic voting blocs as a percentage of the total electorate. The Census Bureau projects, for instance, that the Hispanic share of the population will rise from about 11 percent today to over 20 percent by 2050. Edwin Rubenstein and Peter Brimelow pointed out in these pages what these changing demographics would mean electorally-namely the disappearance of a natural Republican majority by about 2008. America will then tip permanently, if gradually, into the Democrat column as California has probably done already.

In short, winning elections by importing voters via immigration policy is perhaps the only workable application of Ponzi\'s logic-but it works for Democrats, not Republicans. The Democrats plainly know this since they have been standing at docksides and airports with citizenship applications, voter registration forms, and warm smiles. Republicans will gain very little by smiling warmly too. As long as present immigration levels stay in place, they will always be running up the down escalator.

Of course, in the end Ponzi\'s inexorable logic will come to their aid and the Democrats will run out of immigrant voters. That should be-oh, see the calculation on Social Security above-in about a.d. 2159.

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Review, Inc.

Source: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_16_51/ai_55432931

Churches in Canada defend sanctuaries Christian Century, Sept 7, 2004
Churches in Canada defend sanctuaries

Christian Century, Sept 7, 2004

Canadian church leaders have condemned remarks of federal immigration and citizenship minister Judy Sgro, who earlier this summer called on churches to abandon the time-honored practice of providing sanctuary to people under the threat of deportation.

In the wake of several controversial eases in which Christian houses of worship were used as sanctuaries by those dodging the law, a frustrated Sgro told Canadian Press that \"frankly, if we start using the churches as the back door to enter Canada, we\'re going to have huge problems. ... People shouldn\'t be allowed to hide anywhere.\"

About half a dozen individuals, most of them failed refugee claimants, were being sheltered in churches across the country--a practice that goes back to tire Middle Ages or perhaps as far back as Old Testament days.

At a joint press conference this month, leaders of several Christian denominations said sanctuary is not the issue Canadian immigration officials need to address.

\"Sanctuary is not a solution. We want to stop the need for it,\" said Mary Corkery, spokesman for Kairos, an evangelical group committed to justice issues.

Kairos joined the Presbyterian, United, Anglican and Christian Reformed churches as well the Canadian Council for Refugees and the Romero House refugee shelter in calling on Ottawa to revamp its appeal process for refugees.

\"Some churches have pointed out that as a Canadian you can appeal a parking ticket ... yet if someone is at risk of torture, you don\'t have a right to say, \'I think you got it wrong.\' The process is flawed,\" said Corkery.

The Canadian Islamic Congress also weighed in on the issue, saying Sgro\'s remarks were \"in reality targeting Muslim refugee claimants.\"--RNS

COPYRIGHT 2004 The Christian Century Foundation

Source: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_18_121/ai_n8582417