Mass Immigration; No Benefit.

[InsaneApache]

Whenever a minister is asked about high levels of immigration, the same answer is trotted out: migrants boost the economy, fill jobs that Britons cannot or will not do, and pay taxes that benefit the exchequer. Last December the home secretary, Jacqui Smith - a former economics teacher - talked of "the purity of the macroeconomic case for migration".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/01/immigrationpolicy.immigrationandpublicservices

81% of new jobs created since 1997 have gone to immigrants. Nice one Tony and your racist henchman McBroon, are you moles for the BNP?

[Fragony]

This has to be an april fools prank!!!! How can the mass immigration of people who can read or write from medievalstan where they still eat eachother not be good for the economy ???

[HoreTore]

Might be true for you overpopulated brits, the few people living in mountains over here would crumble without immigration though. We have a country with a size requiring at least 10-15 million humans to be effective, but we're only 4,8.... Which means that either we have to make a LOT of babies, which isn't going to happen, or the best option; import another 5 million.

[InsaneApache]

This has to be an april fools prank!!!! How can the mass immigration of people who can read or write from medievalstan where they still eat eachother not be good for the economy ???

We're doing immigrants today Frag, it's moslems tomorrow. :playingball:

[Banquo's Ghost]

Surely immigration is needed for jobs Britons refuse to do, the government argues. But they refuse to do these jobs only at current pay rates. In many cases, higher wages - never popular with employers - could solve the "shortage". In other cases increased mechanisation could bypass the need for migrant labour. Many employers today rely on the skills and hard work of migrants. But in the longer run, when wages can be increased and production methods changed, there is no valid argument for continued high net immigration.

So the government must force employers to pay a much higher minimum wage and thus solve the immigrant "problem".

Nice red flag you've got flying there, IA. :wink3:


Anecdotally, we've never needed to employ immigrant workers (at least for agricultural work - we have pretty loyal tenants) but plenty of neighbours have. Ireland has an even greater immigrant workforce than the UK - 12% of the workforce, IIRC - and now the Poles (particularly) are seeing greater economic activity back home, they are not coming here.

Suddenly, construction projects and harvests are facing grinding to a halt. They may not add much to your economy, but they sure help here.

(Anyway, I have always found it hard to stomach any Irishman who complains about immigration, given our history).

[InsaneApache]

Nice red flag you've got flying there, IA

Perhaps a shade of pale pink. :sweatdrop:

[Fragony]

We're doing immigrants today Frag, it's moslems tomorrow. :playingball:

Have to start somewhere I am flexible

[Fragony]

oh gah to it

[Banquo's Ghost]

Gentlemen,

InsaneApache started a topical, if controversial thread. Let's start discussing the subject rather than making beastly commentaries on immigrants/hosts.

:bow:

[InsaneApache]

I can only say Sopocka to that.



















I love it with a bit of stilton and picallilly on tiger bread, washed down with a blond beer! :yes: :verycool:

[Papewaio]

Can UK which sent out so many people to so many other countries hold the moral high ground against immigration?

[Adrian II]

Can UK which sent out so many people to so many other countries hold the moral high ground against immigration?It's not about morality, it's about net benefit to the British economy.

Based on the committee president's article, the net effect seems more or less zero, except for the lowest-paid whose wages have somewhat decreased due to immigrant competition.

However, I wonder if the economic benefits have been properly assessed in that report. Fiscal calculations are only part of the picture. For instance I would expect certain export benefits from the presence of large communities of immigrants with ties to their countries of origin.

[Tribesman]

For instance I would expect certain export benefits from the presence of large communities of immigrants with ties to their countries of origin.
What you mean like exporting cash , importing tobacco and then exporting more cash ?:laugh4: :laugh4: :laugh4:


(Anyway, I have always found it hard to stomach any Irishman who complains about immigration, given our history).
Stomach this then , I have been on a job the past couple of weeks (quitting friday but I ain't told them yet), a right mixed bunch , people from every corner of the globe .
There are 16 slovaks , good craftsmen , hard workers , good finish ...they are getting paid the minimum approved starting rate for completely unskilled labourers...well they would be getting paid that but apparently they havn't had any wages at all for the past 10 weeks .
The bunch doing the road and pipes are working 7-10 5 days and 7-6 saturday..all at a flat rate of 7 euros .

Now there is nothing wrong with immigration , but virtual slavery is another matter entirely .
Of course there is worse , the crowd down at Moneypoint that did a bunk owing 150+ Poles 3 months wages , or the crowd in Dublin who were paying all the Turks 2 euros an hour

[Adrian II]

What you mean like exporting cash , importing tobacco and then exporting more cash ?:laugh4: :laugh4: :laugh4: Munitions, rather.. :sweatdrop:

Seriously, US studies have found a high immigration-trade link. I was just wondering if the same could be found in the UK.

[Papewaio]

It's not about morality, it's about net benefit to the British economy.


I concur, my tongue was firmly planted in my check.

[Papewaio]

However, I wonder if the economic benefits have been properly assessed in that report. Fiscal calculations are only part of the picture. For instance I would expect certain export benefits from the presence of large communities of immigrants with ties to their countries of origin.

And other areas of life. Or does no one in the UK want to eat a curry anymore?

I'm sure things there is a net benefit in food. Its not like you can't have a roast one night and a chicken kebab the next. Food is one of the better upswings of immigration.

[Incongruous]

wrong post

[Incongruous]

Before I got all angry and stuff, I was wondering what you more educated fullas thought?
Do you think mass immigration is another way for rich capitalists to get richer, while weakening the working class, with the help of the govt?

[Banquo's Ghost]

Now there is nothing wrong with immigration , but virtual slavery is another matter entirely .

:shame:

Agreed. That's why I'd have some sympathy with the communist IA when he demands employers pay more. :wink3:

[Ironside]

Stomach this then , I have been on a job the past couple of weeks (quitting friday but I ain't told them yet), a right mixed bunch , people from every corner of the globe .
There are 16 slovaks , good craftsmen , hard workers , good finish ...they are getting paid the minimum approved starting rate for completely unskilled labourers...well they would be getting paid that but apparently they havn't had any wages at all for the past 10 weeks .
The bunch doing the road and pipes are working 7-10 5 days and 7-6 saturday..all at a flat rate of 7 euros .

Now there is nothing wrong with immigration , but virtual slavery is another matter entirely .
Of course there is worse , the crowd down at Moneypoint that did a bunk owing 150+ Poles 3 months wages , or the crowd in Dublin who were paying all the Turks 2 euros an hour

How's your local newspapers? When stuff like this comes up in local media there's a lot of noice about it and usually the company in question is forced to pay in the end (although there was one case when the company declared bankrupsy (=phoney company), but I think the workers got payed from some other place in that case).

[Big_John]

And other areas of life. Or does no one in the UK want to eat a curry anymore?

I'm sure things there is a net benefit in food. Its not like you can't have a roast one night and a chicken kebab the next. Food is one of the better upswings of immigration.recipes can be written down.

[Tribesman]

When stuff like this comes up in local media there's a lot of noice about it and usually the company in question is forced to pay in the end (although there was one case when the company declared bankrupsy (=phoney company), but I think the workers got payed from some other place in that case).
Well a couple of examples , just for a flavour of things .

The town square was being redeveloped ,the unions and media picked up on the fact that the workers were being paid a pittance(well below minimum wage) , big support for the workers , news stories , strike , pickets the lot . Then on the monday the firm had dissappeared and abandoned the job leaving centre of town in a complete mess .

The one I mentioned with the Turks on 2 euros an hour , that caused a Dublinwide strike , even the government said it was disgraceful and firms like that shouldn't be allowed to operate in the State ...then the governmnet gave the firm a prime 58 million contract .

Irish ferries ...once again 2 euros an hour for the Thais , big support , strike , eventual payrise ...... followed by getting rid of all the workers and re-registering the company where pay and conditions legislation are very different .

Another crowd in town , always a high turnover of workers and a ridiculously high accident rate , finally after killing another two of their employees they got hit with a massive fine . They announced that as the fine was so large and they could no longer afford insurance they would have to close sacking all their workers .
They started up again with an entirely Eastern European workforce and carry on killing and maiming them instead .





Munitions, rather..
No look at Limerick , the stuff is coming into the country , not being exported .

Seriously, US studies have found a high immigration-trade link. I was just wondering if the same could be found in the UK.
Well I don't know about the UK as I havn't worked there much in the past decade , but one immigrant trade link here is tractors .
There is a big rash of "farmers" who may only have 10 acres of cregg but have the idea that they just have to have the biggest most powerful tractor in the parish . This has led to a big glut in the market on second hand tractors . With new nations in the EU now getting the agri-subsidies these are getting snapped up at bargain prices and sent over (especially Zetors and Belarus obviously)

[HoreTore]

And other areas of life. Or does no one in the UK want to eat a curry anymore?

I'm sure things there is a net benefit in food. Its not like you can't have a roast one night and a chicken kebab the next. Food is one of the better upswings of immigration.

Couldn't agree more. I'd die from starvation rather than eat norwegian food.

[Fragony]

Are we really going to excuse mass immigration policy's because of the food a very limited amount of immigrants could also introduce? Maybe 1% starts a restaurant whoopiedoo

[Ronin]

The simple fact is that the fertility rate for the industrialized nations has been bellow the value necessary for population renewal.... that alone ensure that we need immigration....

and let´s not forget the fact that nowadays everyone wants to be a doctor or a software designer....nobody wants to pave roads and stuff like that....

so if you are so mad about immigration I propose you go home right now....tell the missus to drop her panties and do something about it.....preferably several times.......unless people want to do that immigration is necessary.

[Fragony]

The simple fact is that the fertility rate for the industrialized nations has been bellow the value necessary for population renewal.... that alone ensure that we need immigration....

and let´s not forget the fact that nowadays everyone wants to be a doctor or a software designer....nobody wants to pave roads and stuff like that....

so if you are so mad about immigration I propose you go home right now....tell the missus to drop her panties and do something about it.....preferably several times.......unless people want to do that immigration is necessary.

We need baby's only to keep wealthfare state going, that same wealthfare state that is burdened by massive immigrations and the rediculous amounts of money it costs that don't fly. We can't use them, except the poles they have the wrong mentality.

[Adrian II]

The simple fact is that the fertility rate for the industrialized nations has been bellow the value necessary for population renewal.... that alone ensure that we need immigration....Not at all. Population renewal is a totem pole for latter day Indians. Lower fertility rates are a major factor behind the economic success and mass welfare of western states.

I'm all for dropping panties, but not in the interest of GDP...

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

I, um, agree with Adrian. We are overcrowded as is, particually in the Uk, population fall is desirable and there's at least csome evidence that people have less kids when things are overcrowded. Look at the Baby Boomers for the opposite.

The immigrants generally don't pay national insurrance but still use the Welfare State, this makes things worse for the rest of us. With the looming rescesion this is a particually big problem. Further, wages at the lower end of the economy are being depressed and those jobs are losing whatever prestige they had because "only immigrants do them."

It gets worse, because we have a social problem. Too many people on benefits because of a miss-managed welfare state. The immigrants give the economy a crutch and the career-unemployed an excuse. Then the immigrants work the joke out and jump on the bandwagon, so things get worse.

We need to sort our house out over here and with the best will in the world mass immigration is not helping.

[Banquo's Ghost]

The immigrants generally don't pay national insurrance but still use the Welfare State, this makes things worse for the rest of us. .

:inquisitive:

I'm intrigued as to how you work that statement out.

Immigrant workers are, more often than not, employed. In the UK, it's employers who are responsible for paying national insurance for their employees.

Thus, if the NI is not being paid, the employer is either exploiting the worker (by employing illegally) or avoiding HMRC. Either way, it isn't the immigrant worker's fault.

:shrug:

[Big_John]

Couldn't agree more. I'd die from starvation rather than eat norwegian food.what is that, various cured or fermented fishes?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

:inquisitive:

I'm intrigued as to how you work that statement out.

Immigrant workers are, more often than not, employed. In the UK, it's employers who are responsible for paying national insurance for their employees.

Thus, if the NI is not being paid, the employer is either exploiting the worker (by employing illegally) or avoiding HMRC. Either way, it isn't the immigrant worker's fault.

:shrug:

Well, there's the illigal employment and the ones that come to the country and then go on the dole. I don't see how it's not their fault if they're employed illigally.

[HoreTore]

Well, there's the illigal employment and the ones that come to the country and then go on the dole. I don't see how it's not their fault if they're employed illigally.

Because they don't have much else to do?

It's not a whole lot of fun to starve to death, and thankfully, not everyone likes to steal stuff.

[Papewaio]

recipes can be written down.

Yeah and Starbucks makes Espresso's that are twice the cost and half as nice as those made by most Cafes which are run by our European Immigrants.

There is an advantage to using the expertise of someone who grew up eating a food vs one who photocopied it.

[Papewaio]

Are we really going to excuse mass immigration policy's because of the food a very limited amount of immigrants could also introduce? Maybe 1% starts a restaurant whoopiedoo

It was the most obvious part and I did say it was just one part. And I wonder what component of your own food uptake is 100% local.

I would obviously add in fashion, work styles, knowledge, special skills, variety and multicultural women for starters.

[HoreTore]

what is that, various cured or fermented fishes?

You're thinking of our most famous dish, rakefisk:

Rotten fish swallowed down with Aquevit, mostly in the hope that the two will cancel each other out and you won't taste anything.

Other celebration dishes include cooked sheep's head(also swallowed down with strong liquor) and the bones of the sheep with a thin splinter of meat, that's salted down so much that you're going to need a bucket of water for every mouthful.

As for everyday dishes, we have... well, anything involving cooked potatoes(usually some sort of sliced meat and/or cooked fish), except that it seems to be illegal to use any kinds of spice.

@Pape: too true, there's no way I'm buying a kebab unless I can see that the guy making it looks middle-eastern. Euro's can't make the 'bab, plain and simple.

@Fragony: You're overpopulated even with just the natives, the solution is simple; stop procreating. One child policy ftw! Or get a big portion on a boat and send them over here...

[Papewaio]

@Pape: too true, there's no way I'm buying a kebab unless I can see that the guy making it looks middle-eastern. Euro's can't make the 'bab, plain and simple.


Meh all you Euro's look the same to me. :laugh4: Turkish or Spanish, if the Kebab is good I'll eat it.

Tongue yet again firmly in cheek.

[Furious Mental]

Now we know why the Vikings were so eager to get out of the place.

[Big_John]

but Pape, who goes to starbucks? only newbs. i can make a mean rogan josh or pad prik king because i can read a recipe (it has to be a good recipe of course). no need for immigrants. colonization gets the job done well enough. :whip:

now the hot foreign chicks.. thats another matter.

[Papewaio]

And where do you get the freshest and widest selection of those ingredients?

[Big_John]

And where do you get the freshest and widest selection of those ingredients?imports from the colonies.

[Adrian II]

Yeah and Starbucks makes Espresso's that are twice the cost and half as nice as those made by most Cafes which are run by our European Immigrants.

There is an advantage to using the expertise of someone who grew up eating a food vs one who photocopied it.One word: icecream.

I mean, Ben & Jerry's may be the best canned icecream in the world, but the handmade zuppa inglese from the Italian shop around the corner (granddad is brought in by car from Turin every two or three months to make the icecream) is unsurpassed. :artist:

[Big_John]

ben & jerry's is garbage since unilever bought them. there is better overpriced ice cream availible in the US.

gelato is better than ice cream anyway.

[Fragony]

Häagen-Dazs > Ben&Jerry

[Big_John]

Häagen-Dazs > Ben&Jerryyears ago, this would have been false.. but nowadays it's quite true.

[Adrian II]

Häagen-Dazs > Ben&JerryOK, so let's put this to the test.
You treat a girl to a can of Häagen-Dasz.
I take a girl around the corner and treat her to a zuppa plus an admiring Italian smile the width of Lake Como.
I win hands down. :coffeenews:

[Big_John]

don't discount the currency of the haåaäagen dazs brand name among the ladies. it's like godiva to many of them.

[Fragony]

OK, so let's put this to the test.
You treat a girl to a can of Häagen-Dasz.
I take a girl around the corner and treat her to a zuppa plus an admiring Italian smile the width of Lake Como.
I win hands down. :coffeenews:

Girl runs of with the italian you are left with none. I get none but still have a can of icecream to counter my depression.

I don't win but you lose.

[Adrian II]

don't discount the currency of the haåaäagen dazs brand name among the ladies. it's like godiva to many of them.That's why I win.

[Fragony]

That's why I win.

You haven't thought it over, sublimal messages is key. What sounds more like a swedish sauna? Ice cold/hot get it?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Because they don't have much else to do?

It's not a whole lot of fun to starve to death, and thankfully, not everyone likes to steal stuff.

They chose to come here, it's not my fault they can't find jobs. I'm more worried about the people born here who can't get work. Anyway, my main point was that we use immigration to cover a hole in our society, i.e. lack of work ethic among the population.

And no, that isn't a contradiction because some of us do still want to earn a living rather than sponge it.

[Kralizec]

@Pape: too true, there's no way I'm buying a kebab unless I can see that the guy making it looks middle-eastern. Euro's can't make the 'bab, plain and simple.

Racist!

[Innocentius]

Racist!

No, you can only be a racist if you're a white man discriminating non-white (men and women).

And actually no, there's no benefit in mass immigration, no economic benefit at least. However, it's an excellent way to create segregation, racism and conflicts. If you rate exotic food higher than low crime rates, that's up to you.

[Fragony]

Is the org radicalising? Global warming? So many of you start to remind me of me.

[Papewaio]

And actually no, there's no benefit in mass immigration, no economic benefit at least. However, it's an excellent way to create segregation, racism and conflicts. If you rate exotic food higher than low crime rates, that's up to you.

Yeah I know in Aus all the criminals immigrated in. :laugh4:

[HoreTore]

Racist!

Not really, "culturalist" might be more suitable.

I buy bab from arabs, chinese food from asians, pizza from italians and spicy food from indians. Hasn't failed me yet.


And actually no, there's no benefit in mass immigration, no economic benefit at least. However, it's an excellent way to create segregation, racism and conflicts. If you rate exotic food higher than low crime rates, that's up to you.

There certainly is, that's one of the reasons our economy boomed when we found the oil. If we hadn't received a load of pakistani's, our economy would've stopped because of an extreme labour shortage. Getting some immigrants solved that problem nicely.

[Fragony]

Not really, "culturalist" might be more suitable.

I buy bab from arabs, chinese food from asians, pizza from italians and spicy food from indians. Hasn't failed me yet.


So do I but I eat it when I am home. Multiculture is still a luxory item for Norway, why don't you take a look at your Swedish neigbours where they just can't hug it off, but you don't really have to it isn't like rape hasn't skyrocketed in Bergen, what was it a 300% rise in just a few years? Keep pumping that oil there is enough for everyone huh.

[Kaidonni]

You'd think that mass uncontrolled immigration would only be done by an idiot. Seriously. You don't just let anyone into the country willy-nilly. There have to be controls, rules, regulations. And I mean ones that are strictly enforced. Then, the UK population is already 60 million, which is more than enough. We're full up. A dropping fertility rate is little argument for mass immigration because it's just throwing numbers at a problem, hoping for a solution.

Besides, if we lowered the population carefully to 50 million or so (yeah, I know, less colourful than a revolution and lots of raving lunatics with machine guns on orders to purge the population, but we might get told off by the UN :laugh4:), with very careful planning, focusing on what would need to be done with funds for different services, etc, we might have a few less problems. This island is getting crowded, and enough is enough. Humans do need to learn to control themselves a bit better, or we're really screwed. Not just other parts of the world, but we UKers too.

Human populations need to be reduced the world over, carefully and properly. To save Humanity, as well as the world around us.

[Redleg]

Human populations need to be reduced the world over, carefully and properly. To save Humanity, as well as the world around us.

Solient Green anyone?

[Tribesman]

You'd think that mass uncontrolled immigration would only be done by an idiot.
Well I know the world is full of idiots , and the overwhelming majority of politicians are idiots , but I cannot actually recall countries having policies of uncontrolled mass immigration.

[Kaidonni]

Well I know the world is full of idiots , and the overwhelming majority of politicians are idiots , but I cannot actually recall countries having policies of uncontrolled mass immigration.

When our government has let in murderers and paedophiles, and rejects Gurkhas? I guess it's not that uncontrolled...it's controlled, but against many of the decent.

We need stricter border controls. Simple as. It's as good as uncontrolled at the moment. If criminals try to snake their way in, deportation. If an immigrant comes here, then starts committing crimes, deportation. No paying them off or anything. Would be a very good start.

So, I do guess you're right about controlled, but it's still just not good enough.

Oh, and no Soylent Green, Redleg...again, we might get told off by the UN. :P

[HoreTore]

So do I but I eat it when I am home. Multiculture is still a luxory item for Norway, why don't you take a look at your Swedish neigbours where they just can't hug it off, but you don't really have to it isn't like rape hasn't skyrocketed in Bergen, what was it a 300% rise in just a few years? Keep pumping that oil there is enough for everyone huh.

Yeah.... About norwegian rape statistics, there's something you should know:

Last year, there was a "rape-wave" in Oslo. The outcry was enormous, it was unsafe for women to walk in the streets at night, etc etc.

The number of rapes? I think it was 5 total in 1-2 months. In a city with 500.000 inhabitants.

300% increase in Bergen would probably mean an increase from 1 rape to 3 rapes a year... Or that "The Pocket Man" has added a few more cases.

[HoreTore]

When our government has let in murderers and paedophiles, and rejects Gurkhas?

Does it really matter if a pakistani murderer kills a pakistani instead of a brit?

[Kaidonni]

Does it really matter if a pakistani murderer kills a pakistani instead of a brit?

He has murdered once, therefore he is dangerous. Where you see a murdered Pakistani, I see a murdered person. Can't we have common sense and stop giving in to criminals?

So yes, it does matter. A murderer is a murderer, and I don't blindly forgive. I don't excuse people for their actions. People must be punished for their crimes. I'm so fed up of the bleeding-heart brigade. We need to protect the public from criminals who pose threats. If someone has killed once, don't give them a second chance. Keep tabs on them, control them. And revoke the priviledge to live in another country - a country must take responsibility for the criminals native to it's system, not shirk it and pass it off on to someone else.

How you can downplay murder so easily...and decide to let all sorts into the country...

One word: common sense. Two words, actually. People do things cock-eyed, and then try to jump ship and shift the blame when they screw up.

We need proper controls, and not to bow to criminals. Like I said, a country is responsible for the criminals native to its borders. It is irresponsible to shirk this and pass it off to another country. If a murderer is native to England, he/she must remain the responsibility of the English authorities. Likewise, a Pakistani murderer must remain the responsibility of Pakistani authorities in Pakistan. People can not be allowed to simply come and go as they please. Like I said, again, common sense is needed.

[Redleg]

Oh, and no Soylent Green, Redleg...again, we might get told off by the UN. :P

Well there is always disease and war to reduce the population.

Then again how about them Chinese, how has their population control policy worked out?

Oh by the way I am all for immigrantion controls that allow people to come to another land to search for employment and a better life. If they prove themselves unworthy of that fresh start then they suffer the consequences of their new action, but nothing wrong with allowing someone a fresh start.

Your beginning to sound like the radicals here in the United States that think we can fence up the Mexican border and the Canadian border to prevent illegal immigrants from crossing over.

[Kaidonni]

Well there is always disease and war to reduce the population.

Then again how about them Chinese, how has their population control policy worked out?

Eh...I was thinking of something a bit less panicky than drowning new-born girls or abandoning them on the side of the street. Something more carefully worked out and not too cruel...

Although, now that you mention it, all those nuclear warheads are going unused. Building up cob-webs. What a waste of money...it'd be a shame to let them rot there, in a dark missile silo, all alone, bored...:smash:

PS: First target would be the UN. Then we wouldn't get told off. :laugh4:

[Redleg]

Eh...I was thinking of something a bit less panicky than drowning new-born girls or abandoning them on the side of the street. Something more carefully worked out and not too cruel...

Oh the Chinese were not panicky about doing that - it was very delibrate. You might want to check into their policy about inforcing the one child rule?

No matter how you slice it - strict population control will have a fundmental cruel aspect to it.



Although, now that you mention it, all those nuclear warheads are going unused. Building up cob-webs. What a waste of money...it'd be a shame to let them rot there, in a dark missile silo, all alone, bored...:smash:

PS: First target would be the UN. Then we wouldn't get told off. :laugh4:

That would mean a strike on New York City - hmm interesting possiblity for the three nations that have intercontential ballastic missiles and the few others that have those weapons? Not a very well though out plan you have there.

[Kaidonni]

Oh the Chinese were not panicky about doing that - it was very delibrate. You might want to check into their policy about inforcing the one child rule?

Oh, I know it was deliberate. Just that, when it comes to the drowning and the abandoning, I'd say they'd need to go back to the drawing board...

Sure, there will always be cruel aspects to population control. Gotta be cruel to be kind. But I like the idea it can be planned in a certain way that would cut out certain cruelties, limit the cruelty...there are more ways than one to crack an egg.

Oh, and that other plan...yeah...we might need to arrange tea and crumpets over a meeting to sort out the kinks. ;)

[HoreTore]

He has murdered once, therefore he is dangerous. Where you see a murdered Pakistani, I see a murdered person. Can't we have common sense and stop giving in to criminals?

So yes, it does matter. A murderer is a murderer, and I don't blindly forgive. I don't excuse people for their actions. People must be punished for their crimes. I'm so fed up of the bleeding-heart brigade. We need to protect the public from criminals who pose threats. If someone has killed once, don't give them a second chance. Keep tabs on them, control them. And revoke the priviledge to live in another country - a country must take responsibility for the criminals native to it's system, not shirk it and pass it off on to someone else.

How you can downplay murder so easily...and decide to let all sorts into the country...

One word: common sense. Two words, actually. People do things cock-eyed, and then try to jump ship and shift the blame when they screw up.

We need proper controls, and not to bow to criminals. Like I said, a country is responsible for the criminals native to its borders. It is irresponsible to shirk this and pass it off to another country. If a murderer is native to England, he/she must remain the responsibility of the English authorities. Likewise, a Pakistani murderer must remain the responsibility of Pakistani authorities in Pakistan. People can not be allowed to simply come and go as they please. Like I said, again, common sense is needed.

You missed my point completely. My statement was short though, so I'll take the blame for that.

Let's a pakistani murders another pakistani, then spends time in jail. After he's released, let's say he wants to murder someone else. In that situation, does it really matter if he's in pakistan and kills a pakistani, or if he's in London and kills a brit? That is, of course, assuming that he will murder again, most murderers are one-off affairs, serial killers are very rare.

You say that a murderer should remain under state control after he has been released. What happened to rehabilitation? Are people not considered free men after they're released from prison anymore? Let's say our pakistani who had killed someone is released from jail after 20 years, and is deemed by the criminal care to pose no threat to society. Why shouldn't he have the freedom to choose where he wants to live? Hasn't he paid his debt to society? Can't people change? Once a crook, always a crook?

[Kaidonni]

You missed my point completely. My statement was short though, so I'll take the blame for that.

Let's a pakistani murders another pakistani, then spends time in jail. After he's released, let's say he wants to murder someone else. In that situation, does it really matter if he's in pakistan and kills a pakistani, or if he's in London and kills a brit? That is, of course, assuming that he will murder again, most murderers are one-off affairs, serial killers are very rare.

You say that a murderer should remain under state control after he has been released. What happened to rehabilitation? Are people not considered free men after they're released from prison anymore? Let's say our pakistani who had killed someone is released from jail after 20 years, and is deemed by the criminal care to pose no threat to society. Why shouldn't he have the freedom to choose where he wants to live? Hasn't he paid his debt to society? Can't people change? Once a crook, always a crook?

EDIT: Edited this, because I get riled up sometimes, and then I feel bad...that and I don't want to ruin the debate going on. Sorry to anyone who read the earlier versions of this post. Oh, and I'm not trying to be sarcastic or anything when I use inverted commas around certain parts (sorry if it seemed like that, wasn't my intention).

I don't believe in freedom. We have priviledges, but not freedoms. Without responsibility, freedom is worthless. I often see freedom as a byword for doing whatever one wants with little consideration of certain consequences. Maybe it's just a word, and those things are treated as priviledges by society at large anyway, but you know me, I get fussy when it comes to wording (I'm a perfectionist).

I do not believe that burglary (sp?) is as serious as murder. Burglary usually involves inanimate objects, no matter how sentimental or irreplaceable. At least no one is killed. But murder? There must be a stigma attached to it for the rest of one's life. There must be things the individual is no longer even allowed the priviledge of, yet alone freedom, even if they have 'paid their debt to society.'

If anyone read a previous iteration of this post, I was being overly harsh and angry. But I will still take the stance that, even if the purpose of a prison is rehabilitation and not revenge (revenge can destroy people afterall, and forgiveness is said to be for the victims, not the criminal, and we all want the victims to find peace), there must be a lasting punishment. Something that reminds the murderer that they have taken another person's life, and for that, they can't simply do some time, claim they're a better person, and go on living like nothing has happened.

And yes, let's say the murderer commits another murder. Now, I'm not saying that it's any better that they kill a Pakistani than a Brit, but should they be allowed to move to another country, that is moving the responsibility to keep tabs on them to that other country. If the murderer committed the second crime in his own country, at least the fault would lie with their authorities for not having been careful enough about rehabilitating the criminal. Why should we, afterall, have to deal with their criminals? Why should we have to suffer the failures of their prison system? Likewise, we'd have no right to inflict the same upon them.

So, it is ideal to keep tabs on the murderer because of the seriousness of the offense. Maybe not put them in jail for the rest of their natural lives, but definitely not be too soft on them either. So, even if they've done their time, there need to be limitations to what they can do with their newfound 'freedom' for the rest of their lives. They were a threat once, and we should not forget that. Decent people who have little evil in themselves can do terrible things, shaking our views of them - and if terrible people can become decent, what is really stopping them from becoming terrible once again? Vigilance is what I'm suggesting. You can have your rehabilitation, you can have your guy released if he has deemed to have paid any debt to society, but let us have some rules and regulations on how they behave.

I'd liken it to grounding someone for lying to their parents. Eventually, they are no longer grounded. But they still have rules to follow, especially in light of what they did.

It is not too much to ask to keep tabs on those who have committed such serious crimes, and to limit them in certain areas. If I recall correctly, for example, in the UK, murderers aren't allowed to apply to be doctors or nurses, are they? Or something like that, anyway?

[Fragony]

The number of rapes? I think it was 5 total in 1-2 months. In a city with 500.000 inhabitants.


Nice

keep it up, but you won't

[Innocentius]

Yeah I know in Aus all the criminals immigrated in. :laugh4:

Australia (like all the countries dominated by a white population where there originally was none) is one odd example of what immigration can cause. Of course, there are too many differencies to compare European colonization of Australia with immigration of "non-Westerners" into Western Europe, but it's still a good example of what happens when an indigenous culture is faced by a foreign one. The clash is inevitable; it mustn't necessary be as dramatical (and bloody) as it was in Australia, but it gives a hint. The same goes for everything really, no matter what you do, there will always be differencies for people to fight about.


Not really, "culturalist" might be more suitable.

I buy bab from arabs, chinese food from asians, pizza from italians and spicy food from indians. Hasn't failed me yet.

To be completely honest; that, by definition, is racism. Just assuming that a certain kind of people can, while another can't, master a certain area of cooking, is bigoted. Everyone can follow a recipe, and to excel in the cooking of a certain dish only requires some practice, it's not like turks and arabs are genetically programmed to be awesome at making kebab.


There certainly is, that's one of the reasons our economy boomed when we found the oil. If we hadn't received a load of pakistani's, our economy would've stopped because of an extreme labour shortage. Getting some immigrants solved that problem nicely.

Exactly what do you mean by that? Are you suggesting that because you found some oil, you had to drill it? What gives? Sure, multinational companies would've bought the findings from "you" sooner or later, but you can't possibly mean that immigration was a way for Norway to save itself from the burden of oil drilling.

[seireikhaan]

I don't believe in freedom...
http://sensualjesus.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/braveheart.jpg

I think Mr. Gibson disagrees with you...

:wink:

[HoreTore]

To be completely honest; that, by definition, is racism. Just assuming that a certain kind of people can, while another can't, master a certain area of cooking, is bigoted. Everyone can follow a recipe, and to excel in the cooking of a certain dish only requires some practice, it's not like turks and arabs are genetically programmed to be awesome at making kebab.

No, but the employees at this place (http://www.snappys.net/viewimage.aspx?Img=ute1.jpg&ImgCom=Vi+%C3%B8nsker+velkommen!) are. Which is the only place I buy my bab, because it's been tested and tried that everyone else blow at it. Especially in the north. I think the bab-gene stops functioning above Trondheim or something...

Seriously, while they're not inherently better at it, they are better at it in practice. The reason? There are no bab-shops run by norwegians! All of them, without exception, are run by pakistani's, turks, etc etc. The norwegians who offer bab don't run bab-shops, they mostly run hamburger shops and just offer babs as an additional dish, and as such they don't put so much effort into that area. They have a wide range of stuff to offer to customers. The bab shops often make other things too, but they live on the bab, and if they stopped focusing so much on them, they'd lose costumers, as most of them come there solely for the bab.


Exactly what do you mean by that? Are you suggesting that because you found some oil, you had to drill it? What gives? Sure, multinational companies would've bought the findings from "you" sooner or later, but you can't possibly mean that immigration was a way for Norway to save itself from the burden of oil drilling.

No. Finding the oil made our economy boom. A booming economy creates a lot of new jobs. To keep the boom going, those jobs need to be filled, or else things will slow down/not boom as much as it could've. A labour shortage is a luxury problem, but it's still a problem. And the best solution is immigration.

[Redleg]

I don't believe in freedom. We have priviledges, but not freedoms. Without responsibility, freedom is worthless. I often see freedom as a byword for doing whatever one wants with little consideration of certain consequences. Maybe it's just a word, and those things are treated as priviledges by society at large anyway, but you know me, I get fussy when it comes to wording (I'm a perfectionist).

Incorrect - You have lots of freedoms depending upon where you live in the world. Some places actually have very limited freedoms - say China for examble but even there, they have some freedom.

You are right about one think though - many take what freedom they have for granted, refusing to accept the responsiblity that comes with that freedom. That however does not make it a priviledge, just a wasted freedom that will soon disappear because the people no longer desire it.

For examble driving a car is a priviledge.
Being able to say what you believe when it does not make a direct threat to another is a freedom.

The people guarntee there freedoms by their actions.

[Innocentius]

No, but the employees at this place (http://www.snappys.net/viewimage.aspx?Img=ute1.jpg&ImgCom=Vi+%C3%B8nsker+velkommen!) are. Which is the only place I buy my bab, because it's been tested and tried that everyone else blow at it. Especially in the north. I think the bab-gene stops functioning above Trondheim or something...

Seriously, while they're not inherently better at it, they are better at it in practice. The reason? There are no bab-shops run by norwegians! All of them, without exception, are run by pakistani's, turks, etc etc. The norwegians who offer bab don't run bab-shops, they mostly run hamburger shops and just offer babs as an additional dish, and as such they don't put so much effort into that area. They have a wide range of stuff to offer to customers. The bab shops often make other things too, but they live on the bab, and if they stopped focusing so much on them, they'd lose costumers, as most of them come there solely for the bab.

I understand your reasoning and don't have much to add. It was "slightly" off topic anyway.


No. Finding the oil made our economy boom. A booming economy creates a lot of new jobs. To keep the boom going, those jobs need to be filled, or else things will slow down/not boom as much as it could've. A labour shortage is a luxury problem, but it's still a problem. And the best solution is immigration.

Yes, I am all for "labour immigration" (couldn't find an English word for it, Arbetskraftinvandring in Swedish and Arbeidsinnvandring in Norwegian), which was a custom practised by most European countries after WWII until somewhere in the 60-ies where the reckless immigration of today began. Immigration to fill the holes created by differencies between supply and demand factors is very efficient economic-wise, but allowing immigration for the sake of sheer humanity (a concept which I despise, BTW) is in no way benefital for the country, let alone the economy of said country, recieving these immigrants.

[Redleg]

allowing immigration for the sake of sheer humanity (a concept which I despise, BTW) is in no way benefital for the country, let alone the economy of said country, recieving these immigrants.
This is often the same as the first type of immigrantion that you think is beneficial to said nation.

Immigration serves both sides of the migration - the economy and society of the new nation, and the economy of the immigrant. If it does not do this the immigration is doomed to failure and the associated increase in crime because man will want to survive.

[Fragony]

Either way way too complicated to let politicians handle it.

[HoreTore]

If it does not do this the immigration is doomed to failure and the associated increase in crime because man will want to survive.

One of the most laughable aspects of our immigration policy is just that. It works like this:

1. Immigrant arrives in our country.
2. Immigrant applies for asylum.
3. Immigrant gets shipped off to an "asylmottak"(not sure how to translate, sort of a transit-station).
4. Asylum application gets "worked on" for a few years.
5. Immigrant either accepted or rejected.

While he's spending those years in the "transit-station", he's not allowed to work or make money in any way. He gets a small amount from the government, but that's it. Since humans generally want to improve their situation, that leads to said immigrant working somewhere illegally. Since employers who hire such people illegally generally are crooks in other areas too, that leaves the door open for a glorious life of crime...

Instead of doing the sensible thing, which would be to put them on a fast-track education course and get them educated and working ASAP.

For example, we lack some 4000 trailer drivers alone(in addition to other fields in the transportation sector). A lot of immigrants worked as drivers in their home countries. The obvious solution would then be to teach them norwegian and how to drive in norway, and put them to work wuickly. Should be possible within 6-12 months.

But oh noes, can't do that, that would be sensible to our economy and also ruin our pure Aryan genes... Damn right-wingers.

[Fragony]

One of the most laughable aspects of our immigration policy is just that. It works like this:

1. Immigrant arrives in our country.


Ok and after that?

[HoreTore]

Ok and after that?

Take a look at your mouse: at the front, you have two buttons, and between those buttons you see a wheel. Put your finger on top of it, and move your finger towards the back of the mouse, making sure that the wheel turns. If done correctly, you should now see more of the web page(which is the name of what you're looking at), allowing you to continue reading.

[Kaidonni]

Heh...seems, from what people have said, I have mixed up freedoms and priviledges. Well, I guess there is a differentiation between what is exactly a freedom and priviledge.

Of course, that still doesn't stop people from abusing their freedoms, and refusing responsibility (as others have mentioned). I think it's down to what some people's concept of 'freedom' is, and that they just don't have any manners.

What I meant, though, was that I don't see freedoms as freedoms entirely, I still see them as priviledges in a way. People have fought and died for those things, so it's not like they come free of charge, and so should be revoked if necessary. I don't know...it just gets to me when people throw out 'it's my freedom of [insert whatever you want here]' in the hopes they can win an argument. It's like, just because it's a freedom, it's a carte blanche to go, do and say as they please.

Sorry if I riled up anyone before, of course. I suppose I'd rather think of freedoms as priviledges because of the times when people abuse them and try to shirk responsibility. Oh well...back to the main topic, I don't want to pull it off topic or anything.

[HoreTore]

I'll stop boring everyone now, though. Wonder if my plan worked...to bore everyone to death so that I could win the argument, as the sole remaining participator. LOL!

The most used debating technique in the backroom... Actually, I'd say it's the most used technique everywhere.

See the cartoon thread for another one; turning the thread into a book-discussion. That one worked wonders too.

[Adrian II]

The most used debating technique in the backroom... Actually, I'd say it's the most used technique everywhere.

See the cartoon thread for another one; turning the thread into a book-discussion. That one worked wonders too.Yeah, books are boring eh? :coffeenews:

[Kaidonni]

Haha, I editted that bit out of my post. :laugh4:

Has it worked yet? You still alive? Oh darn it, time for plan B... *readies the Purification Squads* :beam:

[HoreTore]

Yeah, books are boring eh? :coffeenews:

Well, it did kill off any discussion of the original topic...

[Adrian II]

Well, it did kill off any discussion of the original topic...I know, I know, books are killers.

[HoreTore]

I know, I know, books are killers.

Books don't kill people, people kill people.

[Adrian II]

Books don't kill people, people kill people.:book:

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

You know, if Britain closed it's borders the population would probably stop rising.

[Vladimir]

Whoops. Hate being late to the party. :blush:

[lancelot]

The 90+ age demographic is now the fastest growing age bracket in the UK...a worrying statistic.

Immigration to the UK at present is the modern equivalent of share-cropping...virtual economic slavery that benefits greedy corporate bosses who now instead of paying a decent wage for many jobs find it more economical to hire a boat load of Polish or whatever.

This problem is in turn made worse by the astronomical cost of the housing market- no wonder people are not reproducing is sufficient numbers, it is so expensive in the UK (especially in/near London) the average near London flat (2 bedroom if you are lucky) costing £250-300,000 easy (thats half a million $ to our Yankee friends)

Which ultimately means- we need those immigrants, as much as I am loathe to admit it...but this in turn is fueling resentment over the issue; and so on and on the sick little cycle proceeds.

Worker immigration is only benefitting one group of people- fat cat employers, who else does it benefit? Does the saving made on hiring cheap labour get passed onto the consumer? In theory supposedly, in reality? Like hell it does.

I think there is only one real question to ask when considering the benefits of mass cheap labour. Q: Why did all states abolish slavery- the ultimate expression of cheap labour? A: Because it was an economically ruinous enterprise that devalued the worth of other labour forces.

[Incongruous]

Why was immigration (one of the most collosal events in British History) not voted on? Or never discussed properly between govt. and public?
I mean it is an identity altering event, changes the faces of nations yet no one has ever really voted on it.

[Innocentius]

Why was immigration (one of the most collosal events in British History) not voted on? Or never discussed properly between govt. and public?
I mean it is an identity altering event, changes the faces of nations yet no one has ever really voted on it.

Because if given the opportunity to vote, the people would have voted against, perhaps not with a great majority, but still against. And if the people voted against, the Brits would be horrible racists, and the world would hate them.

Of course, the Brits have a lot of colonial history to deal with, but that's no reason their population should have to feel some sort of collective guilt and repent this with taking one more immigrants than they can even handle. Same goes with Germany, France, Spain... heck, all European countries. I, personally, can't think of any non-European countries that are trying to beg the world for forgiveness by slowly ruining their own country.

[InsaneApache]

Why was immigration (one of the most collosal events in British History) not voted on? Or never discussed properly between govt. and public?
I mean it is an identity altering event, changes the faces of nations yet no one has ever really voted on it.

Here's a thought to make you ponder......

The problem with accusing a government, or any institution or person, of incompetence is that it seems to excuse its motives.

When we say, as we should often feel the temptation to do, that the Labour administration that has governed us for the past 11 years is incompetent, we should be aware also that we are saying the following: that, but for its administrative and technical failings, it would have done well.

I do not believe this to be true. Despite the sheen of reason that Gordon Brown and, before him, Tony Blair and their chums have sought to put on all they do, this Government has had dark motives from the start.

It has followed policies deliberately that have enabled it to pursue its own political agenda - and this has always been a deeply politically motivated government in the way that Lady Thatcher's was, and that John Major's wasn't - and irrespective of some of the dire consequences that might flow from those policies.

The element of deliberation and deliberateness in what Labour has done makes an accusation of incompetence, or carelessness, seem wide of the mark. Things were meant to be this way.

Labour has pursued policies, be they social or economic, for ideological reasons: and when they fail, as so many have, it has not been because of slipshod administration. It is because that was how things were always going to work out.

I mention this in the specific context of the House of Lords report on the benefits - or lack of them - of mass immigration. The theory applies, however, to much else, immediate or not. Some feel that mass immigration happened by accident; or that Labour's economic miracle was, indeed, so miraculous that it required hecatombs of foreigners to come here and undertake it.

The second contention was paraded in an interview yesterday by the immigration minister, Liam Byrne, on Radio 4's Today programme. With one and a half million unemployed, perhaps the same again on nebulous "training schemes", and about three million on incapacity benefit - many of whom would, if asked, be fit for non-manual work - the idea that we have so small a pool of labour here that we must borrow from abroad is simply preposterous.

That does not stop Mr Byrne from saying the opposite. He must. He has to cover up for the deliberate decision taken at the time when Jack Straw was Home Secretary, and maintained (though he often protested to the contrary) by his successor, David Blunkett, that immigration controls should not be enforced.

Why was this decision taken? It was because of a doctrinally driven determination by the new Government in 1997 to destroy our national identity and to advance multiculturalism.

How funny it is now that we should have a Prime Minister - who as a member of the government at the time no doubt was busy when such decisions were made - who bangs on about "Britishness", amid the sound of the slamming of stable doors.

How amusing, too, that in the aftermath of four young British men blowing up themselves, and 52 other people, on public transport in London in 2005, many old Leftists should now decide that multiculturalism wasn't so great after all.

Mr Byrne well understands his political duty to try to minimise harmful perceptions of the awful consequences of this policy, and he sought, not especially successfully, to do that too in his interview. This process of denial is long-standing.

When eventually an immigration officer, Steve Moxon, had the courage to put his head above the parapet in 2004 and expose the lack of enforcement of controls, he was promptly sacked (as indeed was the then immigration minister, Beverley Hughes).

The Government had blithely ignored torrents of stories in the press about the inflow of "asylum seekers", who, in the days before the former Soviet bloc entered the EU, came here purely for economic reasons, and not because of any fear of persecution. Ministers - Mr Blunkett was especially good at this - started to talk about the impending mass deportation of illegal immigrants, but it never happened.

It was hard enough to find the political will to throw out those inciting terrorism and racial hatred against the indigenous Christian community, never mind removing those who were comparatively harmless.

So now, confronted with hard evidence that immigrants add a matter of pence each to our economic growth, while putting impossible strains on housing, transport and social services (and particularly in the south-east of England), Labour has to find excuses.

Mr Byrne's seemed to be that what happened was all very successful, so successful that it might have to stop. You will not hear him admit that it was a plan by Labour ideologues to shake up society, and to pursue the movement's traditional internationalism, in a cynical and determined way.

When one applies the doctrine on non-incompetence more widely, one hears other echoes. We have lived beyond our means not because economic growth has not, or will not, live up to its earlier billing, but because Mr Brown's priority was to create a client state of feather-bedded Labour voters.

Knowing it would harm economic stability, he set about printing money and borrowing excessively to put people on the public payroll, and to cushion hordes of the undeserving, Labour-voting poor with welfare benefits. This was not incompetent, however it might look: it was deliberate and stunning in its calculation.

So, too, for a further example, was education policy. A Marxist-driven philosophy of anti-elitism forced down standards: but if the level of attainment required to pass a public examination is forced down too, then, voilà! we all look much cleverer than we used to be.

The results of this only become apparent when the halfwits produced go out and try to run something, such as getting our railways repaired on time, or even Terminal 5.

Mr Brown also had a policy of making fathers redundant in families, by downgrading the state's respect for marriage, and providing a career structure for single mothers that included state-provided childcare.

Coupled with the Blairite policy of turning the police into a weapon of social engineering from one of crime fighting, he has presented us with today's under-achieving, feral youth, with its knives and guns, going around killing each other and making our cities seem like the dirtier suburbs of Los Angeles.

I know it is tempting to call these terrible things the results of government incompetence. They really are not. Mr Blair and Mr Brown between them chose to do these things, or allowed ministers and officials to do them.

They were all part of the plan for "change" (oh, how we love that word) after 18 years of Tory misrule.

We need to reflect more, indeed hourly, on how well those plans have turned out; and what should happen to those still in office who remain responsible for inflicting their bigotries and stupidities on the rest of us, under the guise of "progress"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/04/02/do0201.xml

[Tribesman]

Why was immigration (one of the most collosal events in British History) not voted on? Or never discussed properly between govt. and public?
I mean it is an identity altering event, changes the faces of nations yet no one has ever really voted on it.
What collosal event ? do you mean 1066 and them damn Norman immigrants ?
So its an identity altering event that changes the face of nations , but has always happened and countries are always changing so what is your point ?

Anyway it is dicussed and is voted on , the problem is that the parties that have a strong anti-immigrant basis generally tend to be populated by brainless morons who fail to have any policy apart from blame the foriegners for everything so they never amount to much .


The 90+ age demographic is now the fastest growing age bracket in the UK...a worrying statistic.

Yeah damn Brits with their healthcare and pensions , them old gits should do the decent thing and die at an early age like they used to ...it is neccesary for upholding tradition and quelling so called worrying statistics , 70+ is quite sufficient , everyone can applaud the old buggers for hanging on that long , but when they get past 90 its just obscene .
But anyway since the economic issue seems to be providing for the old gits can you not just raise the pension age again , or perhaps institute a cull when people go beyond the working age ?

[InsaneApache]

So its an identity altering event that changes the face of nations , but has always happened and countries are always changing so what is your point ?

While this is true Tribes it's the scale of the immigration over the last decade that's different. There weren't that many Normans/Huguenots/Flemish/Bangladeshis etc etc that settled in the UK. It's funny hearing the descendents of southern Asians talking about those 'bloody foreigners coming over here taking our jobs' it takes me back to the 60s. :laugh4:

[Adrian II]

Funny report, by the way - the report quoted in the OP. It says on page 13:



[..] it would not be right to estimate
the total contribution of all migrant workers
simply by subtracting their productive output
and numbers respectively from the numerator
and denominator of the GDP per head ratio
calculation. The integration of migrant workers
in the economy, and their ability to complement
the activities of other workers, means that the
impact on national output of a total withdrawal
of migrant labour would be likely to be very
substantial. However, quantifying this impact is
diffi cult given the lack of data in this area and
the large number of assumptions that would
underpin estimates of productive potential.
In other words, the economic contribution of migrants is 'likely' to be 'substantial', but we will simply discount it because we can't measure it. And let's subtract their productive output and numbers from GPD p/h anyway.

Idiots.

[lancelot]

Yeah damn Brits with their healthcare and pensions , them old gits should do the decent thing and die at an early age like they used to ...it is neccesary for upholding tradition and quelling so called worrying statistics , 70+ is quite sufficient , everyone can applaud the old buggers for hanging on that long , but when they get past 90 its just obscene .
But anyway since the economic issue seems to be providing for the old gits can you not just raise the pension age again , or perhaps institute a cull when people go beyond the working age ?


Take what I said out of context much?

I was not critizsing them for living too long or anything. I was simply pointing out that given this age bracket is the fastest growing it suggests that young people are not breeding in sufficient numbers...and reasons for that need a serious looking into.

For if the trend continues, the country will obviously be having difficulties in the future.

At the very least- if the ratio of old to young increases then a greater burden will be placed on the young to either care for and/or contribute taxes to cover the cost of ever increasing care for the elderly. Which in turn could have the possible outcomes of less disposable income for the young leading to further financial difficulties to put off breeding. Its quite a vicious circle that we could be facing here.

[Fragony]

In other words, the economic contribution of migrants is 'likely' to be 'substantial', but we will simply discount it because we can't measure it. And let's subtract their productive output and numbers from GPD p/h anyway.

Idiots.

:inquisitive:

What's so hard about getting data? Can't take a dump without the tax agency knowing what kind of toiletpaper you use.

[Adrian II]

:inquisitive:

What's so hard about getting data? Can't take a dump without the tax agency knowing what kind of toiletpaper you use.Exactly.

[Tribesman]

I was not critizsing them for living too long or anything. I was simply pointing out that given this age bracket is the fastest growing it suggests that young people are not breeding in sufficient numbers...and reasons for that need a serious looking into.

oh the reasons ..thats simple to look into isn't it , they are of an age of when there hasn't been a decent respectable cull of people of certain age groups through warfare to seriously dimish their numbers or a period where the prospect of going off to your death has led to copulating like rabbits because there may not be no tomorrow .
So tell me Lancelot of these worrying statistics you talk of , what proportion are women who would have missed the cull ?
Couple the dates of the culls of the male population and the breeding age of the females and where the hell do you need to seriously look ?...oh of course the improvements in the health and financial provisions as they must be relevant ...which follow the last centuries first big cull of the male population...yeah it really needs some serious looking into:dizzy2:


Take what I said out of context much?

Take what you said with relevant information and it is taken as bollox .
If you want to talk of context concerning demographics then utilise the relevant events , if not then it is bollox .

So since on looking at the subject you cannot really have been talking of anything other than the amount of old biddys claiming the pension then one must ask ..what do you have against Mrs Brady the little old lady ?

Or am I to take it that with all your talk of...
a serious looking into.
...you havn't really given it any thought or looked into it ?

Though I must say that Mrs Brady old lady is a vile creature that needs to be culled .

[Tribesman]

Ah well the good wifeen has pointed out a flaw in my position ...the bloody Irish immigrants in relation to life expectancy of the host country....so that needs further thought , though not on the male/female population front so much .

[lancelot]

oh the reasons ..thats simple to look into isn't it , they are of an age of when there hasn't been a decent respectable cull of people of certain age groups through warfare to seriously dimish their numbers or a period where the prospect of going off to your death has led to copulating like rabbits because there may not be no tomorrow .
So tell me Lancelot of these worrying statistics you talk of , what proportion are women who would have missed the cull ?
Couple the dates of the culls of the male population and the breeding age of the females and where the hell do you need to seriously look ?...oh of course the improvements in the health and financial provisions as they must be relevant ...which follow the last centuries first big cull of the male population...yeah it really needs some serious looking into:dizzy2:

I have absolutely no idea where all this talk of culls is coming from and I can barely discern your point on this regard so I am going to disregard it completely.



Take what you said with relevant information and it is taken as bollox .
If you want to talk of context concerning demographics then utilise the relevant events , if not then it is bollox .

What exactly are these 'relevant events' you speak of?



So since on looking at the subject you cannot really have been talking of anything other than the amount of old biddys claiming the pension then one must ask ..what do you have against Mrs Brady the little old lady?

My point in a nutshell was the 90+ age bracket is growing the fastest in the UK and that probably isnt a good thing for the economic (at least) well being of the country.

I dont like answering a question with a question but I am forced to ask- why exactly do you have such a problem with this line of reasoning? Do you think Im wrong with this simple notion. If so fine, Im not here to 'prove' anything, its just an opinion. I may be wrong, hell I probably am; but I dont see why you are digging me out over a simple proposition, which I dont think is that logically defunct...

And finally what is with the self-rightious, holier than thou attitude that makes you come across as a bit of a jerk? Im just here making conversation as such, not to stroke my ego by seeking arguments and proving how much smarter I am than everybody else.

If you dont like my point, thats cool, why dont you suggest something better rather than making snide comments.

So either drop the attitude or Im done with this thread...I dont come here to be belittled.

[JAG]

I don't know what is more disgusting - people who hate immigrants, disrespect their hard work and endeavor and cannot concede one bit that they create benefits to the economy. Or the people who state we should have a cap and choose precisely who we should allow in - Yes, we will have all the third worlds doctors and nurses, India's businessmen and Russia's Billionaires, but HOLD ON! You there, you the one from the Sudan, you can't come in, you are not worth it. This attitude of hating immigration and all it stands for, which is peddled by the Sun and Daily Mail - and the rest - is so easily forgotten for them, when they say - oh but we will have the nurses! It is disgraceful.

All sides of this argument, as it is shaped at the moment in the UK are absolutely morally bankrupt. I am sure when people are asked on the street how much they think net migration is in this country, they will give you figures in the millions, not knowing that the figure is at less than 300,000 - and this is the highest it has been, for understandable reasons. New nations have joined the EU and until their economies improve, their young - in particular - will come over here and work to get money and experience. What no one states however, when they are screaming about the net migration figures is that it will go back down again, settle, and most will return to their country of origin.

In the early 90's more people were LEAVING this country than entering it. We are already seeing, for the first time in 4 years, more Polish people leaving the country than entering - as their economies at home improve they will move back home. This basic point destroys the hate mongering myths of the Daily Mail. And if people really think there is no benefit to immigration, go to a working farm and see who picks the strawberries from dawn to dusk for minimum wage and who makes our goods - and think how much more you would be paying at Tesco's if it was British workers at £2 more an hour.

It is not often I will say this, but this is one issue where small business has got it right and trade unions have it wrong - listen to what small business say, they simply won't survive in this country without immigrant labour. It is not that they won't train British workers, it is that British workers won't do it! A sad fact and something which needs to be sorted in a number of ways, but it is what it is, maybe when people suddenly wonder why prices are going up and inflation is suddenly rising at a large rate - without those pesky immigrants keeping wages from spiking - maybe then people will realise the value of immigrant labour.

Man, I sound like a raving free market right winger, but it is a lie that immigrants don't help the economy. On a human, moral, economic and selfish reason everyone should love immigration not hate it. The report states how the working class gets squeezed out by immigration and get hit the most - this is not immigration or the immigrants fault, it is the fault of our SYSTEM and the way we live, not to mention the terrible policies introduced over the last 30 years and the lack - or not enough - of policies on the otherside. The working class are getting left behind not because of immigrants but because of so many other factors, and immigration shouldn't be used as a scapegoat.

However, most of the time over here you end up talking to a brick wall.

[Tribesman]

I have absolutely no idea where all this talk of culls is coming from and I can barely discern your point on this regard so I am going to disregard it completely.

Oh sorry Lance , its a bit hard to understand isn't it .

What exactly are these 'relevant events' you speak of?

Ah theres the problem , lets see eh , if someone is 90+ what would be the range of their years of birth ?


I dont like answering a question with a question but I am forced to ask- why exactly do you have such a problem with this line of reasoning?
because you throw out a statistic , claim it is worrying but do not explore the factors that create the statistic.

[Incongruous]

I think Tribes is saying that of coarse, due to massive improvements in lifestyle and healthcare, the older are staying older for longer. So of coarse as time goes on, there will be more of them. There is no scary population swing involved, merley better health.

As for those culls, were you speaking about wars and plagues and such?

[Tribesman]

Indeed Bopa spot on , if you want to use a figure for people who are becoming 90+ now one must consider not only events in the past 90 years as it is their lifetime , but as it is the statistic about people who are becoming 90+ you must also consider earlier years and people who would have become 90+ before.

But when you do that it doesn't become a worrying statistic it becomes an easily predictable and long forcastable event . Just like the future rise in that age group due to the next big population cull/birth boom is easily predictable .

Now the problem can be easily dealt with , it doesn't involve immigrants or raising taxes the pension age or anyhing like that .
These people are reaching the age they are mainly due to the improvements in health provision over their lifetime , now the health service is at a stage where hospitals are more aesthetically pleasing with big fluffy duvets , wall to wall carpeting and no overpowering stench of disinfectant .
I suggest that as more and more minor ailments are easily treatable with very minor invasive proceedures nowadays that the government should impliment a health drive to get as many of these old people into hospital as possible .....then let the superbugs do the work .~;)

[Incongruous]

Again, I ask what I feel to be a most pressing question.
Why does the Government not allow a vote on this most important of issues?
Why does everyone seem to think that it is a no go area for debate? Why do some believe it is a right of all to go where they please and live? Do the massive cultural affects have no weight at all?
Was Enoch right?

p.s If I am now going to suffer some rather stupid comments about racism, can I also recieve some info on why that is?

[HoreTore]

Why does the Government not allow a vote on this most important of issues?

Unless I'm mistaken, most western countries hold elections about every 4th year.

[Incongruous]

Unless I'm mistaken, most western countries hold elections about every 4th year.

feel witty?
Feel like you have done you're part?
Why don't you try and be constructive? Or would that require some respect for my question, and me?
You know, you do nothing but make me more confused, I thought you might explain.

[JAG]

The best and most compelling argument against allowing referendums on 'important' issues is that not only can you not state what is 'important' enough to allow 'the people' to vote on it - and who decides what 'important' is, it is in itself completely partisan and distorted. But more than this, if 'the people' are given votes on all 'important' issues you get to a situation where you are destroying the thing you are trying to protect and strenghen. By making everyone vote on all 'important' issues you trivialise issues, bring them down to sound bites and headlines rather than reasoned debate and furthermore you end up creating an atmosphere of disinterest, disrespect and apathy towards not only democracy and the 'important' issues but to the heart of society in a nation.

Basically, the more you try and force people to vote on issues all the time, the more they will say, I don't give two... Plus reasoned debate, by elected officials is how issues in democracy should work - the people are not always right.

[Fragony]

Beats me as well. I don't know how it is in England but the most vocal supporters of immigration here live in 100% white neighbourhoods, their kids go to 100% white schools. A toy for the elite.

edit, was directed at bopa

[Redleg]

Basically, the more you try and force people to vote on issues all the time, the more they will say, I don't give two... Plus reasoned debate, by elected officials is how issues in democracy should work - the people are not always right.

Actually that is not how a democracy should work. The people have to have a say in what direction their nation is going. Now politicians should do more in the reasonable debate process to inform the people, but to discount people's emotions and reasoning in order to pursue a course that goes against what the people want normally leads to conflict.

[HoreTore]

feel witty?
Feel like you have done you're part?
Why don't you try and be constructive? Or would that require some respect for my question, and me?
You know, you do nothing but make me more confused, I thought you might explain.

Again, unless I'm mistaken, parties who want a restrictive immigration policy have existed for many years in most countries. But they have not gained a lot of votes in elections, thus one must assume that the people wants immigration.

If they did not, they would vote for these far-right parties instead of the liberal centre and leftist parties. Assuming, of course, that people view immigration as an important issue.

[InsaneApache]

In the May elections I predict the BNP to do better than expected. They're pretty right wing. British jobs for British workers! Sounds uncannily familiar. :dizzy2:

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

In the May elections I predict the BNP to do better than expected. They're pretty right wing. British jobs for British workers! Sounds uncannily familiar. :dizzy2:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/extremeright ~;)

[Fragony]

BNP are scum but if I was brittish I would still vote for them because there is no decent alternative. Political party's have many problems but a lack of moral flexibility isn't one of them, if we move, they move.

[Divinus Arma]

What will you do when the population of Britain is comprised in a majority from immigrants from muslim countries who have no interest in British culture?

What will you do when your political power is eliminated by the immigrants and you no longer have a voice?

What will you do when you are the minority?

Don't pretend it can't happen.

[HoreTore]

What will you do when the population of Britain is comprised in a majority from immigrants from muslim countries who have no interest in British culture?

What will you do when your political power is eliminated by the immigrants and you no longer have a voice?

What will you do when you are the minority?

Don't pretend it can't happen.

Since most of the immigrants vote as I do, or very close, I won't mind.

[InsaneApache]

Since most of the immigrants vote as I do, or very close, I won't mind.

Haha! What a pillock. :juggle2:

[HoreTore]

Haha! What a pillock. :juggle2:

Well most of them vote for liberal parties, and everything that rids me of conservative nutjobs is good in my book.

[InsaneApache]

Well most of them vote for liberal parties, and everything that rids me of conservative nutjobs is good in my book.

So it's democracy on your terms then? Very left wing. :dizzy2:

[HoreTore]

So it's democracy on your terms then? Very left wing. :dizzy2:

Well seeing as we're allowing them inside, and we are democracies, that must mean that we want them, doesn't it?

Surely, people wouldn't be so idiotic that they vote for parties which doesn't represent their opinions? Those who are against immigration aren't stupid, are they? :dizzy2:

[Incongruous]

Well seeing as we're allowing them inside, and we are democracies, that must mean that we want them, doesn't it?

Surely, people wouldn't be so idiotic that they vote for parties which doesn't represent their opinions? Those who are against immigration aren't stupid, are they? :dizzy2:

Stop acting as if it's that easy and trying to portray anti-immigrationists as conservative hard liners. BNP would be the choice if people didn't mind the whole idea of fascism. Oh no that's rights we are all nazis and what not. Why not come to the table with more than rather witty hot air. Who in their right mind would vote for fascists?
The scary answer may be,if this question is not properly debated, a very many.

[InsaneApache]

Well seeing as we're allowing them inside, and we are democracies, that must mean that we want them, doesn't it?

Surely, people wouldn't be so idiotic that they vote for parties which doesn't represent their opinions? Those who are against immigration aren't stupid, are they? :dizzy2:

Tell that to the traditional Labour voters, the poorest of which have just had their tax doubled to fund tax breaks for the wealthy. So turkeys do vote for Christmas. :laugh4:

[HoreTore]

Stop acting as if it's that easy and trying to portray anti-immigrationists as conservative hard liners. BNP would be the choice if people didn't mind the whole idea of fascism. Oh no that's rights we are all nazis and what not. Why not come to the table with more than rather witty hot air. Who in their right mind would vote for fascists?
The scary answer may be,if this question is not properly debated, a very many.

Well then, as we are a democracy, the solution is very, very simple:

Form your own party! Not sure on the UK, but here all it takes to do that is to send a form to the public registration office, find a few dimwits to be on your party, get 1000 people to sign that list(which should be easy enough as people, given that people agree with you, in a big city I'd say a couple of hours) and send that to the election registration office. Then just wait for election day, and as the majority of the people is against immigration, you'll win by a landslide! Then you can pass laws against immigration, thus solving the problem! Woho!

This is, of course, assuming 1) the majority of the people actually is opposed to immigration and 2) that people who are against immigration are not too lazy to do something for their country.

Actually, here nr. 2 is already taken care of, as the party NorgesPatriotene(or NorwegianPatriots) is already formed, and they have only 1 point on their party program, which is to stop immigration. So, as you are correct in your assertion that people are against immigration, they will win the election next year and ban immigrants here...

[Fragony]

What will you do when the population of Britain is comprised in a majority from immigrants from muslim countries who have no interest in British culture?

What will you do when your political power is eliminated by the immigrants and you no longer have a voice?

What will you do when you are the minority?

Don't pretend it can't happen.

shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhht don't mess with the comfortable bliss that is superior morality. As I see it, if the believers want to push me in the arms of scum like the BNP it's their loss because I am nothing like these guys. Thank god you can have doubts here in the netherlands and be represented by decent people but in England the political correctness reigns surpreme, there is that and the BNP.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

As I see it, if the believers want to push me in the arms of scum like the BNP it's their loss because I am nothing like these guys.

Right on. I don't like the EU, and if the CDU wants to persist in supporting it, too bad for them - my vote goes NPD, as much as it shames me to say.

[Tribesman]

What will you do when the population of Britain is comprised in a majority from immigrants from muslim countries who have no interest in British culture?

Going by recent events they would be outnumbered by the Poles so Britain can have a good old fashioned Catholic crusade against Islam:laugh4: :laugh4: :laugh4: :laugh4:


What will you do when you are the minority?

Don't pretend it can't happen.
Thats the same rubbish as they used to say about the Irish immigrants in Britain...but the British fascists have changed their policy now , they no longer stand with a manifesto to deport all the Irish to preserve Britian .

[Louis VI the Fat]

my vote goes NPD



https://img218.imageshack.us/img218/1664/hitlernpdme6.jpg

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

pic

Yes, I know they're bad. Kind of shows how bad I think the EU is, no? However, they're not nearly as bad as the Nazi Party (for one), and for two, the CDU can have my vote back when they clean up their act for once.

Any good, moderately conservative (or even slightly liberal, at a stretch) Euroskeptic party can have my vote. It's whoever has a better chance at stopping the blue and gold.

[Watchman]

Voting the National Socialists so the Communists don't win ? Sounds like a winning...
...
...hey, waittasec...

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Voting the National Socialists so the Communists don't win ? Sounds like a winning...
...
...hey, waittasec...

It's better than the EU, not the communists. I agree with the CDU on almost every issue. Unfortunately, this is a rather major one.

I understand your theory, but the NPD isn't as bad as it's made out to be. On the other hand, like I said before, it's the lesser of two evils in my opinion. However, I would prefer a Euroskeptic moderate-Conservative Party in Germany.

Heck, I'd be willing to organize one.

EDIT: And by the way, it was a winning formula. Sounds extreme, but hear me out. I'd have a much higher chance of dying in a communist dictatorship than in a right-wing dictatorship, and I daresay most others would as well. As a result, we also got democracy in Germany.

How's that for a long run? ~;)

[Divinus Arma]

What should any people do who's nation is overrun with a tide of immigrants who have no desire to assimilate?

I take no issue with immigrants who desire to assimilate. I welcome them and extend my hand to share the table that I was only privileged to be born to. Being simply spat out of a vagina entitles me to nothing either. The sword of anti-socialism cuts both ways.

But I do desire to see the cutlure and value system that offers me incredible opportunity preserved so that others may benefit from it as well.

Populist socialism only empowers and enrichens the party elite. True opportunity is erased when responsibility is replaced with opportunism. Teach the man to fish, don't feed him.

[Banquo's Ghost]

What should any people do who's nation is overrun with a tide of immigrants who have no desire to assimilate?

I take no issue with immigrants who desire to assimilate. I welcome them and extend my hand to share the table that I was only privileged to be born to. Being simply spat out of a vagina entitles me to nothing either. The sword of anti-socialism cuts both ways.

But I do desire to see the cutlure and value system that offers me incredible opportunity preserved so that others may benefit from it as well.

Does anyone else have a vision of Sitting Bull in his tent muttering this stuff to his braves?

[Watchman]

EDIT: And by the way, it was a winning formula. Sounds extreme, but hear me out. I'd have a much higher chance of dying in a communist dictatorship than in a right-wing dictatorship, and I daresay most others would as well. As a result, we also got democracy in Germany.

How's that for a long run? ~;)Were I the teacher, I'd fail you on both the Political History and Current Events classes. :beam:


You know I really don't get the kind of finger-pointing that's going on here. "These other parties aren't populist-xenophobe enough for my tastes, so it's their fault I'm voting the Nazi Party Mk.II(tm) instead."
:inquisitive:
Gah. Persecution complexes are so unsightly coming from the well-off majority.

[Tribesman]

Does anyone else have a vision of Sitting Bull in his tent muttering this stuff to his braves?

Who is that fella quoted in Agape ? the one where the quote cuts off at the really good bit ?

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Were I the teacher, I'd fail you on both the Political History and Current Events classes. :beam:

I'm still right. Go on, you can admit it. ~;)



You know I really don't get the kind of finger-pointing that's going on here. "These other parties aren't populist-xenophobe enough for my tastes, so it's their fault I'm voting the Nazi Party Mk.II(tm) instead."
:inquisitive:

You're reading things into my post that aren't there. I have nothing against other cultures - living in Canada and Germany made me love the sheer variety. My problem lies in the European Union, not with other cultures.

And the NPD, Nazi Party Mk. II? How much about them have you read? They're nationalist, yes. However, if they were neo-Nazi in the sense everyone reads into them, they would be banned. We tried to ban them, and failed. Obviously, they're not neo-Nazi (or at least not enough) to be banned.

I'll say it again. I want a Euroskeptic Conservative Party in Germany. Not fascists.
Unfortunately, my desire to bring the EU back to what we thought it would be in the first place (free trade) outweighs my fear of over-the-top nationalism. See it as the lesser of two evils.



Gah. Persecution complexes are so unsightly coming from the well-off majority.

Ugh. Read my post. Why would I vote for them? Nothing to do with immigrants...

[Tribesman]

it's the lesser of two evils in my opinion.
damn , how did I miss that one Mars?
Its sorta like that French election a while back "vote for the crook not the fascist"

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

damn , how did I miss that one Mars?

Not a clue. ~;)



Its sorta like that French election a while back "vote for the crook not the fascist"

I really hate to make the decision. I don't believe in a few the ideals of the NPD or the CDU - these few ideals turn me off both parties. I don't know. I really don't know. Fortunately, I have time to decide by 2009.

[ICantSpellDawg]

Longest article ever - but very interesting

The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave (http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_illegal_alien.html)
Heather Mac Donald


Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing immigration law.

The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These “sanctuary policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.

Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.

But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.

It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.

I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the suspect in custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” explains Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant population.”

Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some examples:

• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th Street Gang and the “non–gang members” who sell drugs in Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country by a ring organized by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their transportation debts to the gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative that line of work is and stay in the business.

Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these non-gang “Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is assiduously silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal dealer (known on the street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.

The ordinarily tough-as-nails former LAPD chief Daryl Gates enacted Special Order 40 in 1979—showing that even the most unapologetic law-and-order cop is no match for immigration advocates. The order prohibits officers from “initiating police action where the objective is to discover the alien status of a person”—in other words, the police may not even ask someone they have arrested about his immigration status until after they have filed criminal charges, nor may they arrest someone for immigration violations. They may not notify immigration authorities about an illegal alien picked up for minor violations. Only if they have already booked an illegal alien for a felony or for multiple misdemeanors may they inquire into his status or report him. The bottom line: a cordon sanitaire between local law enforcement and immigration authorities that creates a safe haven for illegal criminals.

L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime: enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers. Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target. These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their first trip to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the street, I know I can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as an observed narcotics sale, can the cop accost him—but not for the immigration felony.

Though such a policy puts the community at risk, the department’s top brass brush off such concerns. No big deal if you see deported gangbangers back on the streets, they say. Just put them under surveillance for “real” crimes and arrest them for those. But surveillance is very manpower-intensive. Where there is an immediate ground for getting a violent felon off the street and for questioning him further, it is absurd to demand that the woefully understaffed LAPD ignore it.

The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation, and that they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course). There has never been any empirical verification that sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime victims. But in any case, this official rationale could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of immigration violators: deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status police already know.

The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown so large that public officials are terrified of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé on the 18th Street Gang, which included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of illegal-alien membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles City Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police commander warned the council: “This is going to open a significant, heated debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she declared firmly.

But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents of gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes, but such anxiety can never equal a politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the reexamination process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that allowing the department to work closely with the INS would give cops another tool for getting gang members off the streets. Trying to build a homicide case, say, against an illegal gang member is often futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Enforcing an immigration violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a witness’s life at risk.

But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening of the policy gets us into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a federal law-enforcement issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim police chief Bayan Lewis told the L.A. Police Commission: “It is not the time. It is not the day to look at Special Order 40.”

Nor will it ever be, as long as immigration numbers continue to grow. After their brief moment of truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians have only grown more adamant in defense of Special Order 40. After learning that cops in the scandal-plagued Rampart Division had cooperated with the INS to try to uproot murderous gang members from the community, local politicians threw a fit, criticizing district commanders for even allowing INS agents into their station houses. In turn, the LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By now, big-city police chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend sanctuary policies as the politicians who appoint them; not so the rank and file, however, who see daily the benefit that an immigration tool would bring.

Immigration politics have similarly harmed New York. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah? said Giuliani; just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to “terrorize people.” Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government. Six days later, several visa-overstayers participated in the most devastating attack on the city and the country in history.

New York conveniently forgot the 1996 federal ban on sanctuary laws until a gang of five Mexicans—four of them illegal—abducted and brutally raped a 42-year-old mother of two near some railroad tracks in Queens. The NYPD had already arrested three of the illegal aliens numerous times for such crimes as assault, attempted robbery, criminal trespass, illegal gun possession, and drug offenses. The department had never notified the INS.

Citizen outrage forced Mayor Michael Bloomberg to revisit the city’s sanctuary decree yet again. In May 2003, Bloomberg tweaked the policy minimally to allow city staffers to inquire into immigration status only if it is relevant to the awarding of a government benefit. Though Bloomberg’s new rule said nothing about reporting immigration violations to federal officials, advocates immediately claimed that it did allow such reporting, and the ethnic lobbies went ballistic. “What we’re seeing is the erosion of people’s rights,” thundered Angelo Falcon of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. After three months of intense agitation by immigrant groups, Bloomberg replaced this innocuous “don’t ask” policy with a “don’t tell” rule even broader than Gotham’s original sanctuary policy. The new rule prohibits city employees from giving other government officials information not just about immigration status but about tax payments, sexual orientation, welfare status, and other matters.

But even were immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary policies and start enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, the resource-starved immigration authorities couldn’t handle the overwhelming additional workload.

The chronic shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to house, aliens as they await their deportation hearings (or, following an order of removal from a federal judge, their actual deportation) has forced immigration officials to practice a constant triage. Long ago, the feds stopped trying to find and deport aliens who had “merely” entered the country illegally through stealth or fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of illegal aliens who run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious crime) or who have been deported following conviction for an aggravated felony and who have reentered (an offense punishable with 20 years in jail).

That triage has been going on for a long time, as former INS investigator Mike Cutler, who worked with the NYPD catching Brooklyn drug dealers in the 1970s, explains. “If you arrested someone you wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss and start a bidding war,” Cutler recalls. “You’d say: 'My guy ran three blocks, threw a couple of punches, and had six pieces of ID.' The boss would turn to another agent: 'Next! Whaddid your guy do?' 'He ran 18 blocks, pushed over an old lady, and had a gun.' ” But such one-upmanship was usually fruitless. “Without the jail space,” explains Cutler, “it was like the Fish and Wildlife Service; you’d tag their ear and let them go.”

But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even if a judge issues a final deportation order (usually after years of litigation and appeals), they rarely have the manpower to put the alien on a bus or plane and take him across the border. Second alternative: detain him pending removal. Again, inadequate space and staff. In the early 1990s, for example, 15 INS officers were in charge of the deportation of approximately 85,000 aliens (not all of them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual response to final orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a notice asking the deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or two to be deported, when the agency might be able to process him. Results: in 2001, 87 percent of deportable aliens who received run letters disappeared, a number that was even higher—94 percent—if they were from terror-sponsoring countries.

To other law-enforcement agencies, the feds’ triage often looks like complete indifference to immigration violations. Testifying to Congress about the Queens rape by illegal Mexicans, New York’s criminal justice coordinator defended the city’s failure to notify the INS after the rapists’ previous arrests on the ground that the agency wouldn’t have responded anyway. “We have time and time again been unable to reach INS on the phone,” John Feinblatt said last February. “When we reach them on the phone, they require that we write a letter. When we write a letter, they require that it be by a superior.”

Criminal aliens also interpret the triage as indifference. John Mullaly a former NYPD homicide detective, estimates that 70 percent of the drug dealers and other criminals in Manhattan’s Washington Heights were illegal. Were Mullaly to threaten an illegal-alien thug in custody that his next stop would be El Salvador unless he cooperated, the criminal would just laugh, knowing that the INS would never show up. The message could not be clearer: this is a culture that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry. If policing’s broken-windows theory is correct, the failure to enforce one set of rules breeds overall contempt for the law.

The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program that would allow immigration officials to complete deportation hearings while a criminal was still in state or federal prison, so that upon his release he could be immediately ejected without taking up precious INS detention space. But the process, begun in 1988, immediately bogged down due to the numbers—in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. The agency couldn’t find enough pro bono attorneys to represent such an army of criminal aliens (who have extensive due-process rights in contesting deportation) and so would have to request delay after delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be available. In 1997, the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any review of their deportability. They included 1,198 aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.

Resource starvation is not the only reason for federal inaction. The INS was a creature of immigration politics, and INS district directors came under great pressure from local politicians to divert scarce resources into distribution of such “benefits” as permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, and away from criminal or other investigations. In the late 1980s, for example, the INS refused to join an FBI task force against Haitian drug trafficking in Miami, fearing criticism for “Haitian-bashing.” In 1997, after Hispanic activists protested a much-publicized raid that netted nearly two dozen illegals, the Border Patrol said that it would no longer join Simi Valley, California, probation officers on home searches of illegal-alien-dominated gangs.

The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of politics driving the INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.” When, in the early 1990s, the prospect of welfare reform drove immigrants to apply for citizenship in record numbers to preserve their welfare eligibility, the Clinton administration, seeing a political bonanza in hundreds of thousands of new welfare-dependent citizens, ordered the naturalization process radically expedited. Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing errors in 1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and tens of thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for murder and armed robbery, were naturalized.

Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association, has won from Congress an elaborate set of due-process rights for criminal aliens that can keep them in the country indefinitely. Federal probation officers in Brooklyn are supervising two illegals—a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi citizenship—who look “ready to blow up the Statue of Liberty,” according to a probation official, but the officers can’t get rid of them. The Jordanian had been caught fencing stolen Social Security and tax-refund checks; now he sells phone cards, which he uses himself to make untraceable calls. The Saudi’s offense: using a fraudulent Social Security number to get employment—a puzzlingly unnecessary scam, since he receives large sums from the Middle East, including from millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to terrorism, so presumably he worked in order not to draw attention to himself. Currently, he changes his cell phone every month. Ordinarily such a minor offense would not be prosecuted, but the government, fearing that he had terrorist intentions, used whatever it had to put him in prison.

Now, probation officers desperately want to see the duo out of the country, but the two ex-cons have hired lawyers, who are relentlessly fighting their deportation. “Due process allows you to stay for years without an adjudication,” says a probation officer in frustration. “A regular immigration attorney can keep you in the country for three years, a high-priced one for ten.” In the meantime, Brooklyn probation officials are watching the bridges.

Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal aliens, the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that “they all come back. They can’t make it in Mexico.” The tens of thousands of illegal farmworkers and dishwashers who overpower U.S. border controls every year carry in their wake thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists who use the same smuggling industry and who benefit from the same irresistible odds: there are so many more of them than the Border Patrol.

For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal aliens is part and parcel of its inability to patrol the border, period. For decades, the INS had as much effect on the migration of millions of illegals as a can tied to the tail of a tiger. And the immigrants themselves, despite the press cliché of hapless aliens living fearfully in the shadows, seemed to regard immigration authorities with all the concern of an elephant for a flea.

Certainly fear of immigration officers is not in evidence among the hundreds of illegal day laborers who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York, in front of money wire services, travel agencies, immigration-attorney offices, and phone arcades, all catering to the local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and terrorists). “There is no chance of getting caught,” cheerfully explains Rafael, an Ecuadoran. Like the dozen Ecuadorans and Mexicans on his particular corner, Rafael is hoping that an SUV seeking carpenters for $100 a day will show up soon. “We don’t worry, because we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s illegal; I need the papers, but here, nobody asks you for papers.”

Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the government really tries to prevent illegal immigration, looms as only a minor inconvenience to the day laborers. The odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter, crossed the border at Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border Patrol spotted them, but with six officers to 16 illegals, only five got caught. In illegal border crossings, you get what you pay for, Miguel says. If you try to shave on the fee, the coyotes will abandon you at the first problem. Miguel’s wife was flying into New York from Los Angeles that very day; it had cost him $2,200 to get her across the border. “Because I pay, I don’t worry,” he says complacently.

The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of criminals and terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the sending countries or an impregnably militarized border—is to remove the jobs magnet. As long as migrants know they can easily get work, they will find ways to evade border controls. But enforcing laws against illegal labor is among government’s lowest priorities. In 2001, only 124 agents nationwide were trying to find and prosecute the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.

Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to worksite investigations, not much would change, because their legal weapons are so weak. That’s no accident: though it is a crime to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of libertarians, business lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently blocked the fraud-proof form of work authorization necessary to enforce that ban. Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free number to the Social Security Administration for employers to confirm Social Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping employers verify work eligibility would result in discrimination against Hispanics—implicitly conceding that vast numbers of Hispanics work illegally.

The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a charade. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of employers pretend to believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a worker is actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered documents are not patently phony—scrawled with red crayon on a matchbook, say—the employer will nearly always be exempt from liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find an employer guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration authorities must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost insurmountable burden. Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit documents has exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration authorities seized nearly 2 million of them in Los Angeles, destined for immigrant workers, welfare seekers, criminals, and terrorists.

For illegal workers and employers, there is no downside to the employment charade. If immigration officials ever do try to conduct an industry-wide investigation—which will at least net the illegal employees, if not the employers—local congressmen will almost certainly head it off. An INS inquiry into the Vidalia-onion industry in Georgia was not only aborted by Georgia’s congressional delegation; it actually resulted in a local amnesty for the growers’ illegal workforce. The downside to complying with the spirit of the employment law, on the other hand, is considerable. Ethnic advocacy groups are ready to picket employers who dismiss illegal workers, and employers understandably fear being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.

Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and culture that the continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the most profound is the breakdown of the distinction between legal and illegal entry. Everywhere, illegal aliens receive free public education and free medical care at taxpayer expense; 13 states offer them driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been pushed to grant illegal aliens college scholarships and reduced in-state tuition. One hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement agencies, and dozens of cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to credentialize illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush administration has given its blessing to this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns that the gaping security loopholes that the card creates make it a boon to money launderers, immigrant smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an Iranian man sneaking across the border this year, Mexican matricula card in hand.

Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal and an illegal resident by asserting that differentiating the two is an act of irrational bigotry. Arrests of illegal aliens inside the border now inevitably spark protests, often led by the Mexican government, that feature signs calling for “no más racismo.” Immigrant advocates use the language of “human rights” to appeal to an authority higher than such trivia as citizenship laws. They attack the term “amnesty” for implicitly acknowledging the validity of borders. Indeed, grouses Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something wrong and you need to be forgiven.”

Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think the U.S. owes them, not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive their kids to school,” said California assemblywoman Sarah Reyes. An immigration agent says that people he stops “get in your face about their rights, because our failure to enforce the law emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme, Joaquín Avila, a UCLA Chicano studies professor and law lecturer, argues that to deny non-citizens the vote, especially in the many California cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of apartheid.

Yet no poll has ever shown that Americans want more open borders. Quite the reverse. By a huge majority—at least 60 percent—they want to rein in immigration, and they endorse an observation that Senator Alan Simpson made 20 years ago: Americans “are fed up with efforts to make them feel that [they] do not have that fundamental right of any people—to decide who will join them and help form the future country in which they and their posterity will live.” But if the elites’ and the advocates’ idea of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be surprised if it does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of people outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.

However the nation ultimately decides to rationalize its chaotic and incoherent immigration system, surely all can agree that, at a minimum, authorities should expel illegal-alien criminals swiftly. Even on the grounds of protecting non-criminal illegal immigrants, we should start by junking sanctuary policies. By stripping cops of what may be their only immediate tool to remove felons from the community, these policies leave law-abiding immigrants prey to crime.

But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even more destructive effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs seems to be outstripping assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are learning to flash gang signals and hate the police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In New York City, “every high school has its Mexican gang,” and most 12- to 14-year-olds have already joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 18-year-old Mexican. Such pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that immigrants learn about U.S. law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it. “Institutionalizing illegal immigration creates a mindset in people that anything goes in the U.S.,” observes Patrick Ortega, the news and public-affairs director of Radio Nueva Vida in southern California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela of social ills.” It is broken windows writ large.

For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s time to decide what our immigration policy is—and enforce it

[Tribesman]

yeah an interesting article , a bit long , the short reply is , if you want more immigration officers employ more immigration officers , if you want the local police to work as immigration officers then allocate the money at the federal level to paty them for the work....either way the answer is pay more taxes if you want the service .

[ICantSpellDawg]

yeah an interesting article , a bit long , the short reply is , if you want more immigration officers employ more immigration officers , if you want the local police to work as immigration officers then allocate the money at the federal level to paty them for the work....either way the answer is pay more taxes if you want the service .

I am hopefully going to become a U.S. Customs agent.

I just got my CBP test results back today - they are unflattering. Failing is below 70 - I got an 83 (out of 100). I was hoping to do better than that since I usually do well on tests.

I spelled "Potatoes" incorrectly. Exactly in the opposite way that Quayle screwed it up. He spelled "potato" "potatoe". I spelled "Potatoes" "Potatos".

Other than that the English part was fine. I think that I am mentally retarded when it comes to math. Even simple math.

Oh well - here's hoping that the score is good enough to get me placed.

I'm not actually a racist - I think reasonable people should be responsible for fixing the border crisis. I have no personal problem with Hispanic immigrants or any other, but when the borders are open everyone suffers.


As an aside - we might not have to raise taxes for it - couldn't we save money by reducing Immigrant pressure on the system? Of course, the federal government would have less money because the people who actually pay large amounts of federal taxes would pay less because their profit margins would be decreased due to the loss of cheap scab labor. Eventually, maybe we could get the balance back.

[Watchman]

You mean like actually do something about all those unscrupulous enterpreneurs using cheap unprotected illegal-immigrant labour to cut costs and evade payments due...?