I million workers come to UK: defacto open borders?

[treelover]

Well if one believes the Telegraph, then we already have open borders and the campaigners can go home. If this is true, this is also one of the biggest changes to the U.K since the 1940's or perhaps the 19th C. Whether this is good or bad, its implications are massive and the wider public have had no say on it, surely that is wrong

A million foreign workers come to UK

Ben Leapman and Tom Harper, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 2:20am GMT 12/03/2007

More than a million foreigners have been allowed to come to work in Britain in just three years - and given the right to remain indefinitely.

The numbers of migrants, who are also entitled to bring their families and settle, have been revealed in new figures released to MPs by the Home Office. They reveal for the first time the full impact that officially sanctioned immigration is having on the UK work force.

They show that the issuing of work permits to people from non-European Union countries continued to accelerate even after the expansion of the EU in 2004, which has already brought an unprecedented number of eastern European workers to Britain.

Between 2004 and last year, a record 309,000 non-EU citizens were granted long-term work permits carrying potential entitlement to settle.
In the same period, 555,000 eastern Europeans have also joined the UK's Worker Registration Scheme, while the Home Office estimates that a further 150,000 eastern Europeans have come to Britain as self-employed.

The figures total slightly more than a million - but they do not even include the workers' dependants, migrants on short-term work permits, workers from "old EU" countries such as Italy and Portugal, asylum-seekers or illegal immigrants.


more

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/11/nimm11.xml

 

[chilango]

be interesting to see the figures for uk citizens leaving during the same period....

 

[ViolentPanda]

be interesting to see the figures for uk citizens leaving during the same period....

What I find interesting is the language used by the Telegraph journalists, for example their use of "given the right to remain" instead of the correct formulation of "given leave to remain", the journalists in effect implying that these "foreigners" have no checks and balances on their presence.
Of course, what's even more interesting is their leaving it until the penultimate paragraph to mention that these non-EU immigrants are here on work permits, which may allow you to apply for leave to remain, but aren't in any way a guarantee that you'll get it.

A very obvious case of spinning, I do believe.

 

[TAE]

What does 'eastern european' mean in the torygraph, EU or non-EU, or both ?

 

[treelover]

Thats why i qualified my post, VP

 

[ViolentPanda]

Thats why i qualified my post, VP

I know.

I was just making the point in plain language in case mr baldwin reads the thread and starts one of his rants.

 

[guinnessdrinker]

I read the original article on sunday. it was some kind of a rant about uncontrolled immigration to frighten old ladies and retired colonels in somerset.

 

[treelover]

So are you dismissing the figures quoted or just the tone of the article?

 

[guinnessdrinker]

So are you dismissing the figures quoted or just the tone of the article?

are you worried about the figures?

 

[ViolentPanda]

So are you dismissing the figures quoted or just the tone of the article?

Dismissing? Nowt.

Critiqueing? The numbers and the tone.

They've conflated non-EU workers who've been awarded work permits with EU citizens who are entitled, due to their membership of the EU, to work here without a work permit, with the implication (the reference to "right to remain") that every last one of them will choose to settle in Britain, that well-known paradise.

They've spun the data in every way that it's possible to do so to make a "story" out of it that is acceptable to their readership. Not big and not clever.

 

[guinnessdrinker]

the tone is to be expected from the torygraph. it just makes me laugh, to be honest. but the idea that every young EU citizen who come down here for a year or so to learn/improve english is an immigrant is totally dishonest. and they haven't counted all the english immigrants to the Dordogne and other sunny french places, or the South of Spain.

 

[becky p]

I read the original article on sunday. it was some kind of a rant about uncontrolled immigration to frighten old ladies and retired colonels in somerset.

 

[AnnO'Neemus]

and they haven't counted all the english immigrants to the Dordogne and other sunny french places, or the South of Spain.

Or to the Middle East...

I'm leeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaving
On a jet plane
Don't know when
I'll be back again

 

[Brainaddict]

the tone is to be expected from the torygraph. it just makes me laugh, to be honest. but the idea that every young EU citizen who come down here for a year or so to learn/improve english is an immigrant is totally dishonest. and they haven't counted all the english immigrants to the Dordogne and other sunny french places, or the South of Spain.

Yes, the BBC website piece about brits abroad recently was very revealing - there are around 5 million British people living abroad I seem to remember. Of course they should be *allowed* to move around because...they're British so of course they can do what they want. Whereas anyone who turns up here to work is a threat to our economy, our culture and presumably our women.

 

[guinnessdrinker]

why the roll eyes?

 

[guinnessdrinker]

Or to the Middle East...

you mean the british illegrant emigrants currently in Irak?

 

[biff curtains]

Isnt there something like 5 million immigrants living here (including EU and even Irish) and % million Brits living abroad?

Situation neutral.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Since WW2, more people have left the Uk than entered it.

I am not having a go at anybody here, but this is a fact that is too little knwon.

Of those that object to their Nigerian neighbour, how many object to their Australian cousin?

 

[Giles]

I don't mind particularly all the EU new member country people coming over here. They seem nice, the birds are mostly fit, and they want to work.

Perhaps we could send them some of our homegrown wasters?

Giles..

 

[Fruitloop]

Or mayhap an arsehole export?

 

[treelover]

with giles comment , we see that many leftwingers who support unregulated mass migration/open borders have strange right wing bedfellows and of course the CBI!


btw, have to say, its so funny, (not ha ha though) watching how the racism witchhunters are always examining comments, trying to tease out if the poster is a racist...

 

[ViolentPanda]

Any chance of you actually letting people know why you're rolling your gnomic little eyes?

Thought not.

 

[ViolentPanda]

why the roll eyes?

Check out her post history. The is kind of a motif. I suspect it substitutes for having to think for herself. A bit like Balders' cry of "LIBERAL SUPREMACIST".

 

[ViolentPanda]

Isnt there something like 5 million immigrants living here (including EU and even Irish) and % million Brits living abroad?

Situation neutral.

Neutral situations don't sell papers to people who're more than happy to believe any immigration-related bit of gloom or despair that the Torygraph puts their way.

 

[ViolentPanda]

with giles comment , we see that many leftwingers who support unregulated mass migration/open borders have strange right wing bedfellows and of course the CBI!


btw, have to say, its so funny, (not ha ha though) watching how the racism witchhunters are always examining comments, trying to tease out if the poster is a racist...

Of course, if you're being honest (which you usually are on this subject, unlike some), then you'll acknowledge that most "leftwing" views are quite a bit more nuanced than what you're stating, and usually (unless you're some species of misbegotten Trot) run somewhere along the lines of "Open Borders is a nice dream but it's impractical, so I'm in favour of some degree of control". It isn't as if this particular point hasn't been made time after time on Balders' interminable immigration threads, but you, he and Durruti seem to keep harking back to your simplistic and inaccurate argument regardless.

 

[Fruitloop]

How do the anti-immigration folks feel about employees of scary US detentions companies beating would-be immigrants in prison camps? Is that part of the nuanced position?

 

[ViolentPanda]

How do the anti-immigration folks feel about employees of scary US detentions companies beating would-be immigrants in prison camps? Is that part of the nuanced position?

I don't believe that the rightwing view on immigration is quite as nuanced as the left.

Any sensible soft rightist should, of course, be disgusted at what happens in the "detention centres" (which are nothing like the detention centres that existed in the 1970s and 80s for juvenile criminals, they're far worse than that), as it doesn't particularly accord with ideas of "fair play".

 

[treelover]

Personally, the camps are if what we hear is true, a disgrace..

 

[Fruitloop]

I reckon we only hear the half of it.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Personally, the camps are if what we hear is true, a disgrace..

Back when I worked at the Home Office (early 90s) and the idea of such places was first mooted (under Michael Howard, naturally), it was taken almost as a given by the POA (Prison Officers Association) that they'd be introduced as part of the privatisation regime, so that any complaints by inmates would be harder to sustain and easier to "manage" (prisons complaints may grind exceeding slow, but they also grind exceeding fine).

We probably hear about 10% maximum of the worst complaints against the most egregious infractions of individual rights, and the Home Office are, IMO, complicit because of the laissez faire attitude they've historically taken to the management and administration of private sector penal establishments and detention facilities.