notthenews

Let me ask you to contemplate something for a minute.  Imagine what would you have to do to deter a person who is willing to swim across a crocodile infested river and face roaming gangs of rapists, robbers and murders?  Then again, what about people who are willing to pay, sometimes as a result of putting their families into near slavery, to be transported by rickety boats which have a large possibility  of sinking or that have to deliberately sank on approach to destination?

What we fail to understand is that in most cases immigration is nearly always about survival.  In the case of skilled migrants it might be about a better standard of living with a good chance of converting immigration to residency and even to citizenship.  To the unwanted and unskilled it is about getting in and surviving.  These are the uncontrollable ‘hordes’ who attempt genuine and bogus asylum, genuine and bogus college admissions, overstaying and in a more than a few cases, the ‘smuggled in the trunk’ immigrant.

What has to be understood is that the more you try to shut the door to immigration, the more you are going to get the smuggled and un-quantified illegal immigrant.  They will keep coming because they have a reason to do so and it is not the ‘benefits’ that draws them despite all the rhetoric.  Most of us know that surviving in the UK on benefits, especially those that can be safely claimed without proof of citizenship or national insurance contributions and other considerations, is not easy.  Where we do have immigrants on benefits, it is where the immigrant has been denied the opportunity to work whilst their status is being determined.  We are unlikely to withdraw such benefits simply because we do not want to be fighting off beggars or stepping over starving families or frozen dead foreigners on our streets.  If there are others that are managing to obtain benefits, then it is our system of accessing benefit rights that is at fault.  The problem with fixing this is that we may make it even more difficult for our own citizens to qualify too.

Many of us underestimate the ‘extended’ family because we have lost that in our society.  For many of the immigrants, there is a commitment to those who are left behind, some who may have contributed financially or in slave labour to the cost of their migration.  Even those who come to study have family pressure to do well so that they may either return to well-paying local jobs or that they eventually qualify as skilled migrants.  All would be expected to contribute significantly to the wellbeing of the family.  Don’t believe me?  The World Bank estimates that some $317 billion was remitted in 2009 by the diaspora back to their home countries.  It is likely that the Zimbabwean economy would have completely collapsed if this had not been the case.  I doubt that level of remittances can be achieved on benefits!

Quotas and caps are for those who come through major ports of entry, for those attempting to enter legally.  Can we seriously believe we are capable of policing every inch of our coastline 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?  If we could how much would it cost a year to do so?  Chris sakes, you could swim the English Channel if you were so motivated!  Having come this far, are detention centres a deterrent?  No they are not because there is a chance that your case may be accepted and in the meantime you have food, warmth and relative safety.  Long term detention though is not ideal for the illegal immigrant and problems are likely to surface occasionally adding to the increasing costs of the host country.

Those who propose tightening immigration controls demand them on the basis that failure to do so will result in every man and his dog in Africa, India and the like will be beating a path to our door.  That is not the truth – just the cost alone for such an endeavour is way out of reach of the majority of the world’s poor.  Our own reluctance to emigrate to better climes is also prevalent in other societies, ties to family and land are much stronger than many people imagine.  The ultimate destination of the daring individuals is likely to be one determined by language and culture.  I would hasten a guess that given a choice, the vast majority of immigrants would prefer the ‘land of the free’ as opposed to Europe.

So how do we control immigration?  The best you can hope for in any situation is some measure of control and immigration caps are not it.  Migration is a human trait that has yet to be evolved out of existence.  They forever will be those who go out for adventure, to discover and to seek pastures new, after all that is how humans populated the planet.  Attempting control means controlling the reason that immigrants come here, namely survival in the form of jobs and money.

In a society that worships success and profit even at the expense of human suffering and our own incessant search for cheaper prices for goods and service, how likely is it that businesses especially the small to medium ones to stop providing opportunities for immigrants who will accept wages way below the minimum wage in order to survive?  How many of our “wouldn’t do it for love or money” jobs would go begging if it were not for these people?  We have given our own citizen’s an expectation of reasonable job satisfaction and a minimum standard of living,  to the point that we subsidise many industries by topping up minimum wages with benefits. Why on earth would one wipe old people’s bums for £5.93 an hour unless one felt inclined to do so?

All the talk of foreign student visa overhauls and capped immigration numbers is basically hogwash and many in government know this.  They are being told by their business friends  just how damaging these controls can be and if you watch carefully these capped numbers will increase to accommodate all these businesses’ needs.  The government ministers and the rest of us will be again discussing the illusionary ‘runaway immigration’, come the next election.

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This entry was posted by admin on Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 at 5:30 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.