Daily Archive

Daily they’re out to get us Mail headline:

Immigration has ‘no positive effect’ on Britain, finds landmark report

It is rare you see even a Mail article that is such a mess. Someone needs to sit down and carefully explain the difference between “migrants” and “immigrants” to both the Mail and the “landmark report” panel. Examples of their mixing them up, and therefore confusing matters, pops up all through the piece. Here are just a few samples:

…Despite the huge influx of more than 700,000 workers from Eastern Europe since May 2004, the number of vacancies has remained at between 600,000 and 700,000. The peers said that allowing more and more migrants to flood into the country created the need for ever more jobs, as they consume as well as provide services.

They called for the Government to set an “explicit target range” for immigration and set the rules to keep within that limit - effectively a cap…

…committee member Lord Layard, a Labour peer and globally-respected economist, said the population would increase by around 190,000 a year for the next 50 years without a limit…

…”We are suggesting that the Government should set a target range for net immigration and then the rules should depend on the target range, rather than the numbers following from the rules as at present.”…

A “target range” (what others would term a “limit”), including other EU states? Impossible, while Britain is in the EU.

In case the “globally-respected economist” Lord Layard is unaware about the EU political arrangement, eastern European origin EU citizens may be termed “migrants” (although what that word means legally seems pretty much anyone’s guess), but they are not “immigrants”. That’s because, under the EU, citizens of any other member state are as entitled to reside in Britain on a whim as Brits are to retire “no questions asked” to “villas in France or apartments on the Costas.” Simply put, EU citizens cannot be refused entry clearance to Britain, because they don’t need to apply for it.

It is only near its conclusion that the piece wobbles over to discover non-EU passport holders. Their numbers are (and can be) far more tightly controlled because they are in a very different category than someone from, say, EU state Poland. That’s because non-EU passport holders can be barred from remaining in Britain (or not allowed to enter, period).

In short, only those holding non-EU passports, and seek to or have had residence granted, technically are immigrants.  Meaning, uh, I suppose people like myself.  And a certain Mrs Crozier, who as anyone can see clearly plots to have “no positive effect” on British society . . . other than to be married to, and have the children of, a serving British soldier.

Just when you thought “cooking” programs had tried about everything, the BBC’s found another angle. And given it’s the BBC one can’t say one’s too surprised by this one. From a recent outing of BBC 2’s “Cooking in the Danger Zone” (yes, that’s really its title):

Food writer Stefan Gates continues to explore how ordinary people survive in some of the world’s most dangerous and difficult places…

…In Mexico, Stefan discovers that free trade with the US means Mexico is importing corn and exporting people. Vast numbers of Mexicans are leaving the countryside where agriculture has collapsed and jumping the US border…

U.S. consumers of late, as we know, find the price of corn soaring at least partly because so much now seems to be grown in the U.S. not to feed anyone, or any animal, but to add to car gas tanks. (The BBC knows one reason why: to fight “climate change“.) While U.S. farmers are clearly better subsidised, one might think there is room to explore how the rising price of staples like corn may, under free trade, have assisted Mexican farmers? No, it’s far more interesting obviously to listen raptly to balaclava-wearing Zapatista rebels, as they spell out their revolutionary agenda.

Noting also that “After two dictatorships and several military coups, Haiti is struggling to get back on its feet…”, Mr Gates’ had also informed us how Haiti’s troubles have much to do with recent U.S. agricultural policies. A blinkered penetrating observation, although one might just as well also ask when was it exactly that Haiti was ever on its feet in the first place? Prior to those two dictatorships? Certainly Haiti’s poverty would seem to have a bit to do with the fact that that country has been an economic basket case since even before a Napoleonic army was decimated trying to end a slave rebellion on the island over 200 years ago?

No, it couldn’t be the likes of its entire history: it must be about the 1980s, “the International Monetary Fund and World Bank” and “cheap and heavily subsidised US food.”  And as we have seen, Mr Gates eagerly also embraces the notion of a low/medium income Mexico somehow also being a currently impoverished, economic basket case.

…in Tijuana Stefan meets former farmers about to jump the border and are angry that US trade has forced them off the land, but then refuses to give them work permits.

In doing so, however, he supplies no suggestion as to why there had been massive illegal immigration from Mexico into the U.S. long before the corn-farming destroying (in Mexico only) NAFTA agreement came into force in the middle 1990s, but that perhaps modest oversight on his part is hardly surprising. For Mr Gates actually stands on the 104 million population (and growing) Mexico side just below San Diego with one man who had failed repeatedly to get across the border into the 300 million person U.S. There, deflatedly, Mr Gates gazes upon the high metal fencing and ponders aloud of how it reminded him . . . of “the Iron Curtain”.

Interesting, but most of us viewers also seem to recall “the Iron Curtain” being an horrific attempt not to deter economic migrants from trying to enter, but instead to keep populations imprisoned on the inside — particularly, from leaving then East in order to enter the then West Germany. That being so, in accidentally misappropriating that expression, Mr Gates must simply have been thinking of another “iron curtain”.

Most troubling is Mr Gates’ apparent incredulity as to the plain reality of every state having to have an actual frontier situated someplace. Even an island state does. But his possessing that geographic blind spot is not really shocking if one considers also how it comes from he as a food writer employed by a state TV broadcaster located on an almost entirely island country.

Meaning this beautiful United Kingdom, naturally. It is a country that, also, although Mr Gates has nothing to say about this either, remains remarkably unable somehow to forge a totally relaxed relationship even along a far shorter land frontier with a relatively much smaller neighbor. And it is a neighbor which speaks mostly the same language and possesses a similar standard of living. It is a UK that seems also about to — appallingly — rethink the indefensible idea of NOT granting voting rights to that same foreign country’s foreign nationals domciled in the U.K.

Heinous that, because why shouldn’t foreign nationals get to vote in UK elections, right? While surveying others’ border issues, such domestic blindness could be overlooked had Mr Gates at least seized this golden opportunity, but which he sadly did not. Americans actually would be sincerely thrilled if someone (anyone!) would offer them a serious, workable, reasonable prescription as to how to develop an untroubled relationship with their southern land neighbor — a relationship that would also assume what would follow would not be up to some 40 million of that neighbor’s 100 million population opting to relocate to north of the border.

He almost gets there. As we are shown footage of Mexicans desperate to cross into the U.S., Mr Gates’ voiceover compares the NAFTA which doesn’t give free movement to people across frontiers, to an EU that allows freedom of movement for EU citizens (and only EU citizens, by the way) within that trade bloc. Yet there he stops, short of delivering “a recipe”.

One wonders why? For developmentally akin to Mexico, but with only a very small land border along the southeastern fringe of the 320 million population EU is another low/medium income country: Turkey, which despite being a third smaller population-wise than Mexico and having desired EU membership for 20 years now, remains firmly kept on the outside. There but for the grace of Allah God Mr Gates undoubtedly must have thought as he peered into the U.S. from Tijuana. But yet, amazingly, EU countries do not appear comfortable with the notion of even just 72 million Turks suddenly becoming EU citizens and enjoying free movement throughout the entire EU.

Overall, Mr Gates clearly finds it is intellectually less troublesome to focus entirely on treating the U.S. as nastily exceptionalist in actually deigning to attempt to police a frontier. Such is borne out by another non-comparison: he doesn’t even so much as try to favor Americans with a brief take on how his U.K. would obviously far better cope if that same Turkey were a non-EU land neighbor, bordering England uninterrupted from, say, Land’s End to Portsmouth? Although, what might seem to be that final startling oversight on Mr Gates’ part may also only be because all would undoubtedly be blissful co-existence, without the slightest human of hitches.

_____________________________

In the final episode, he visits Israel:

…Stefan gets his first taste of tear gas when a protest against Israel’s security barrier turns violent. The Israelis say it is essential to keep suicide bombers out, but it cuts some villagers off from a large proportion of their land, and it has been declared illegal in a ruling by the International Court of Justice…

Notice the by now tiresome and typical BBC values juxtaposition there: those Israelis say suicide bombers are an issue, but inconvenienced villagers and an ICJ ruling certainly trumps that.

Got indigestion yet?