Thursday 15 March 2007

Stop Immigration!

The petition is entitled stop all immigration in to this country and the explanatory notes say
"stop all stop all immigration in to this country until it is known how many refuges are already here and speed up/reduce the time it take's to deport"

All immigration? So an American friend of mine, who recently married her British long-term partner, and who's got a job as a university lecturer here, couldn't stay after all? A (purely hypothetical invented-on-the-spot) elderly Indian widow whose son's been here 20 years and has taken British citizenship and who wants to come live with him to help look after his kids and have them look after her, can't come? What about all those Australian and New Zealander teenagers who come doing a world tour and stay a few months working in bars - is that immigration that would have to stop? Or Eastern European au pairs? What about the vast quantities of Indian and Japanese and Chinese students that make up so many students at our universities?

None of them can come any more? Until we manage to count how many "refugees" there are - which, actually, I think we already know, since a refugee is surely someone who has been granted asylum, which means they've been noted and, I assume, counted, by the system.

Or is this just yet more ill-thought-out, knee-jerk, point-free rubbish? Why yes, so it is.

(I've said it before - I'm biased. My grandparents immigrated to the UK from the Netherlands and duly supported themselves and their children here until the children were grown up, and then supported themselves until their deaths. Contributed enormously to their local communities, and in my grandfather's case national community, too. I take exception to people wanting to prevent people like them from coming here.)

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