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I was watching a comedy (show or film, don't remember, probably British rather than American) where a comedy bigoted character said about immigrants (paraphrase) : they are lazy, they don't want to work and they come over here and take our jobs. He said this all in one sentence, oblivious to the irony (or something) of what he was saying, and even when a more level-headed character pointed out that they were either lazy OR job-stealing, but obviously not both, he didn't get it. So this was comedy, right? A few days later, today, I was watching a supposedly serious show about "benefit fraud" on a supposedly serious BBC channel. They featured a story about a woman who came from Ghana to the UK, illegally forged a new identity based on a stolen British passport with her photo substituted and a faked birth certificate and faked educational credentials. she then got a job with the NHS which she had for several years (I am guessing from the earnings cited below seven to ten years.) Most of the fraud involved here was pretty ham-fisted; her birth certificate said Lutterworth, which is in Leicestershire, but then said County of Surrey (hundreds of miles away.) (For Americans, this is sort of like saying Sacramento, Illinois, only even more impossible.) Also, some documents implied she had never left the UK after being born here, but her fake diplomas were from Ghana. And implausibly had a photo on them. The same photo as on her stolen passport. So, look here, I am not saying she is a hero, or not a fraudster, or not a criminal. I am not defending her. But this is how the BBC summed up the story. This woman was said to have earned £230,000 plus a £40,000 "bursary" (not sure what that is, but I am guessing some kind of grant for either work or education.) So they claimed her fraud had COST British taxpayers (which includes me) £270,000, or "over a quarter of a million". But wait a minute, this woman was also a British taxpayer. And she didn't COST the country £230K of that, since presumably they got at least nearly that much value from her in service to the NHS. Oh, but here's the real kicker, just as ignorant in its way as that "lazy and steal our jobs" line: the woman is now in prison for many years! So she is "paying back that debt to society." No, she is now costing the British taxpayers (including me) probably about 10 times as much per annum to support in a prison, doing nothing of worth, as she was paying in taxes while committing her crime. Is it just me, or is this FREAKING INSANE?
I am so appalled at this latest turn in the saga of Great Britain's immigration policies that I can hardly find the words. You would think after the even worse incidents in France (picture above from a notorious video of French police beating women and children during a protest by immigrants there) that the UK would be keen to be seen as more humane in their treatment of "failed asylum seekers".
I have visions of the scene toward the end of my favourite movie, Lawrence of Arabia, where a British doctor comes upon a marketplace full of dead and dying Turkish soldiers and no one doing anything to help them, and he keeps shouting "Outrageous" in an impotent fury. That's how I feel about most immigration stories I read, but this one really is outrageous, not for naked aggression, as in France, but for an utter failure to do the right thing, for pandering to racist tabloid media, for treating and thinking of asylum seekers and economic migrants as less than human.
After campaigning on the "moral outrage" of children of asylum seekers being kept virtually imprisoned, the LDs as part of the coalition government have helped to hatch this cynical flash-deportation scheme, trying to circumvent both human rights rules and liberal public opinion.
The briefing paper also shows that the border agency is worried that ending the use of detention could give families facing deportation more chance to launch community protest campaigns backed by the media and MPs. It says more police may need to be involved in deportations because "significant public order problems" could follow removals. "The alternative is not to inform the family of the exact time and date of removal, so that they are not prepared. However, this has its own difficulties, which would need analysing and addressing." The document says it is undecided whether a specific time and date should be given, or a longer period of a couple of days.
No, it's not a story about call centres, far from it. This New York Times article is about the astonishing reverse-migration of US-born men and women of Indian extraction migrating "back" to India in search of their fortunes, or just a more comfortable or exciting way to make a living. There are some fascinating insights and great quotes in this short article:
Prior to living in India:
My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. ... It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is what America did to people, what it always has done.
My parents brought us to India every few years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always felt alien, impenetrable, frozen. ... Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, the need to know someone to do anything. Or the culture shock of servitude: a child’s horror at reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an American middle school, then seeing servants slapped and degraded in India. My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities. But history bends and swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around. Living in India today: At first we felt confused by India’s formalities and hierarchies, by British phraseology even the British had jettisoned, by the ubiquity of acronyms. Working in offices, some of us were perplexed to be invited to “S&M conferences,” only to discover that this denoted sales and marketing. Several found to their chagrin that it is acceptable for another man to touch your inner thigh when you crack a joke in a meeting. We learned new expressions: “He is on tour” (Means: He is traveling. Doesn’t mean: He has joined U2.); “What is your native place?” (Means: Where did your ancestors live? Doesn’t mean: What hospital delivered you?); “Two minutes” (Means: An hour. Doesn’t mean: Two minutes.).
Countries like India once fretted about a “brain drain.” We are learning now that “brain circulation,” as some call it, may be more apt. India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.
In his numinous and magical novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut introduced the idea of "granfalloons". These are random groupings of people who think, erroneously, that they have some shared destiny as a group, and for whom this delusion is a source of suffering and misguided action. Examples, famously, are given, thus:
Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Association of Oddfellows - and any nation, anytime, anywhere. I think of this statement, which has become a sort of mantra to me over the nearly 40 years since I read Cat's Cradle, literally every time I pass through an airport, see a reference to immigration or international trade, and about the half the time I am watching, listening to or reading the news. Especially when I read about things like this.
I really wanted to post the accompanying picture to this brief article in the Independent, but it was not on the web, apparently. The story is about a boatload of refugees from Africa who landed on a pleasure beach in the Canary Islands, and the picture, a two page spread of stunning impact, showed the dehydrated asylum-seekers, some of them barely conscious with heat exhaustion, being administered water, shade and human comfort by holiday-makers as they all awaited the arrival of a Red Cross rescue team.
In less heartening immigration news (not about immigration at all, in fact, which is what makes it especially maddening), the same paper had the story of numerous cases of respected musicians who have been deported from or refused entry to the UK due to visa technicalities. Care to take a guess which continent most of them happen to hail from? Included in the litany of ignominy is the story of Thomas Mapfumo, billed for the Womad Festival but sent back from the airport to Zimbabwe, and a nine-member Mozambique group not permitted to pass through Britain on the way to a concert in Italy because of the lack of transit visas. I really cannot say anything more about all this, or I will start ranting.
There have been times lately when I have despaired for my country. News from the USA often speaks of a people who have lost their heart, their compassion and their greatness.This reassures me.
The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin. In preparation for the mammoth task of reviewing the mammoth literary work known as "the Barock Cycle" (Neal Stephenson) I have been browsing the Quicksilver Metaweb, where I found the sublime quote above. Slavery and the history of abolition movements is one of about a dozen major themes that run through the three weighty tomes that make up the Barock Cycle. As you may know, abolition movements, the study of, is one of my areas of passionate interest, and the Stephenson novels seem to uncannily hit upon a lot of them (cryptanalysis, metaphysical debates, religious wars and slightly unusual sexual practices also feature prominently.)
I am struck by the vast philosophical gulf between the sentiments in the quote above, from an English judge in an historic case which may have sparked the British abolitionist movement, and the beliefs (or perhaps total lack of beliefs) of the current guardians of British liberty, ironically known as the Labour Party.
Several cases in point will illustrate this:
Yesterday I neglected my weblog. It was either yesterday or late Sunday that a bit of free-style web browsing led me to a possibly life-changing decision. If you look at my second or third post (back in the archive) you will see where I was moaning because I cannot vote now, seeing as how I am not a British citizen. I had been saying, these past five years, that I had no intention of becoming one, because I was under the mistaken idea that I would lose my US citizenship if I did so. A web-expedition amongst the papers of the US Department of State has convinced me that this is not the case. It says there that although the US does not encourage dual citizenship, mainly because it is a pain in the neck to Departments of State everywhere, they do not automatically strip natural-born Americans of their citizenship if they take up residence elsewhere and decide to become citizens there. In fact, the only way I can be deprived of my US citizenship is if I ask to be, or if I commit treason or certain other heinous crimes that I have no inclination to commit. So, all in all, I have decided to apply for British citizenship in due time. I just hope they won't make me sing that "Long to reign over us" line from God Save the Queen.
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