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I am convinced that much of the Republican party's problem with President Obama is race/ethnicity.

Oh how ignorant.

Seriously, just because you live in Canada and speak English and I live in England and speak English does not mean we both live in the same country.

The English press & elite considered Canadian immigration policy to be xenophobic, we really mean it when we say 'open door' immigration policy.

Let us take your example of the Pakistani engineer. I assume you have this vision of immigration where your highly qualified chap is going to enrich your culture by having a great engineering career working for a big Canadian engineering firm generating lots of wealth.

The reality of open door immigration is that you get that sort of good immigration (I like that sort of immigration) but you also end up with 200,000 somalis in a decade and according to government figures 80% live in social housing over here and 50% didn't even go to school to somalia.

So in a country where low skilled jobs are being destroyed 5 times faster than they are being created, in a country with a housing crisis, in a recession with areas of 50% youth unemployment and a national 12% budget deficit do you really, really think that the answer to all ills is importing hundreds of thousands of illiterate people who need free food and housing?

We have people (immigrants) with doctorate qualifications working in our fields, while British born people without qualifications end up stuck in unemployment being supported by the state because we have a very nasty culture at work in Britain where the working class are viewed as evil, lazy, violent chavscum and immigrants the new 'noble savage'.

An average of 26,000 people per year die in Britain because they can not afford to heat their homes (the worst insulated, worst constructed and smallest homes in Europe btw) that is the highest rate in the world, worse than Siberia, Canada or Alaska.

Nobody cares if expanding companies need to recruit people with rare skills from abroad to do highly technical jobs, that is a jolly good thing lets have more of it.

But when the British government decides to eviscerate the colleges so that working class people can't train as plumbers and instead use imported labour then pour scorn and hatred on the native population it starts to take the piss.

The challenge isn't the competent people with educations and experience, its the people who are the exact opposite. I don't think many people have issues with the doctors, the engineers or the economists, so much as they have issues with the farmers with no education, no experience, no language skills and 10 kids. Look at immigration from a NPV standpoint as well, if a person represents a positive NPV then go for it, if they represent a negative NPV send them back. The problem in Europe seems to be that the negative NPV kind outnumber the other kind what seems to be 5:1.

An interesting number I found was that in Norway, out of the first "wave" of immigrants 2/3 are now on disability benefits as opposed to 1/3 in the ethnic norwegian control group.

Canada has a strict immigration policy in comparison with just about every Western European country. I remember when I was looking into moving to Canada that there was a requirement to have a job offer/an in demand set of skills, enough cash on hand to cover 3 months living expenses, plus valid health insurance. To enter most Western European countries, you need to get on a plane, boat or a car, that's it.

Exactly - this is what's happening. It's not a case of even skilled mass immigration where there's a demand for jobs, it's just a scenario of hundreds of thousands of unskilled, non-educated people being dumped on British society every year when there's nowhere near enough jobs even for UK citizens. The immigration tide continues unabated long after it's of any use. Literally anyone can come here and fade into the ether.

So, visagrunt, do you agree with dumping hundreds of thousands of unskilled, ill-educated, culturally inferior people on a country with mass unemployment where there is no work for them, and where they end up living off the state in inner-city ghettos?

Last edited by Tequila on 09 May 2012, 2:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I live in the same country as you, and I think it's a problem. Many European do- some nazi party got (I think) 9% of the votes because the Greek are getting desperate with the issues coming from mostly unemployed immigrants. I think it shows that many normal people, who actually live right within society, are not feeling that they're being heard by politicians who seem to be distracted by rhetorics and lame ideals that fail in daily life.

The whole Islam thing is a difficult taboo too. It's surrounded with controverse. Another one may me euthanasia- people seem scared for a slippery slope but also seem to strive for increasing individual freedom. I think immigration and immigrants is the main one now, though.

You're referring to Golden Dawn. They are considerably more extreme even than the UK's BNP - they are a militant far-right party, associated with attacks on immigrants and anyone who looks a bit foreign.



This is exactly it. Mainstream politicians have simply stopped listening to the people, so many people are looking at other options, whether that is the extreme left or the extreme right.

It's due to not having to do so. If people to a much larger degree demonstrated "we will not vote for people who do not represent our opinions through their actions as our representatives" then there may be a change where politicians in fact would have to listen. However, so long as people vote for the people who demonstrate time and time again that they are committed to what *they* think is right, as opposed to what the people who elected them want them to do.

A voter should technically be the "boss" of a political representative. The political representative may not agree with his boss, but he should act in accordance with the wishes of his boss or be fired. If he or she can disregard what the people who elected them want, and still get votes from those people, why bother?

Most of the reason for this is tribalism. People vote for who their parents voted for without thinking about whether they really agree with what that party actually does in parliament and elsewhere.

I don't support Golden Dawn, and I think a nazi party is highly worrying, but I do believe it reflects the frustrations of people. Especially from Greece, which is ruined.

As for Golden Dawn...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4AXJx3IzdY[/youtube]

...they seem a pretty nasty lot.

Truth, to the point evangelicals are supporting a Mormon over a Christian.

Last time I checked one of my passports still said "British Citizen." And I don't speak from a vacuum. I was educated in Britain, and when I finished my education, I had a choice between remaining there or establishing myself back in Canada. It's a luxury that few of us have, to pick and choose where we will go. But I made an affirmative choice to establish myself in Canada because it was, at the time, increasingly apparent to me that the United Kingdom was a country that was culturally unprepared for the last half of the twentieth century, let alone the twenty first.

Globalisation is a genie that will not be put back in the bottle. And for a while, in the late fifties and early sixties, it looked like Britain was ready to get on with succeeding in the new world. Then De Gaulle came along and vetoed early British attempts, and reinforced English parochialism for a generation.

So what's Britain's role in a global economy? She's certainly not the world's banker--that job's already taken. And she's not the world's factory--she can't compete in that arena. But Britain can (and does) have a vibrant service economy. But part of that economy must be the export of services; and one of the keys to that export trade is having the multicultural communities inside her borders that can build the bridges for those trading relationships. It is the bedrock of United States', Canada's, Australia's and New Zealand's trade policies--and it should be of Britain's, too.



Actually, no. My vision of immigration is based on the reality of a competitive immigration system in which immigrants are largely self-selected, and countries who required immigration to maintain population growth are faced with the competing interests of attracting immigrants and maintaining program integrity. You can't wade into a country and say, "I'll take you, you and you." No, you have to wait until they knock on the door, and then say, "Yes," or, "No." Hopefully, based on an objective set of criteria fairly assessed.

The Pakistani engineer is simply the poster boy. But I know full well the challenges behind "managing the mix."



I don't disagree--but you are beginning to get uncritical.

An immigration movement is not a single movement. Generally speaking there are at least four movements into any of the major immigrant receiving nations:

1) Independent immigrants. That is to say individuals with skills, education or capital sufficient to allow them to become self-sustaining with in the new country.
2) Family reunification. Here we have primarily sponsored family (spouses, children to be adopted)
3) Humanitarian. Convention refugees and other compelling cases.
4) Accompanying dependents. When you take the Pakistani engineer, you also take his wife and his children. Typically for every principal applicant you receive 0.8 accompanying dependents.

Other movements could include extended family sponsorships, as well as developmental movements (such as allowing foreign students to remain as permanent residents), but they are not universally seen in immigrant receiving countries.

Now we all love group 1. Those are the poster children. Half of them were probably educated here, anyway. But it's a small piece of the movement (In Canada it's probably only about 15% of our total intake). And if you don't have parts 2 and 4, then you aren't going to attract part 1.

So what you're really complaining about is not immigration per se, but rather the size and scope of your "humanitarian" movement. And the scale of people claiming to be humanitarian cases who are, really, nothing of the kind.



I don't think you are wrong in any of this. But what I note here is that your argument is entirely based on mismanagement of a system that is, at root, still potentially valuable. You don't need unskilled labour. And you need to improve the skills of your existing labour force. But an immigration system rooted in the economic needs of the country is still potentially valuable.

On the other hand, Tequila's argument seems entirely divorced from the economic needs of an emergent British economy, and has everything to do with not liking brown people who don't behave like us.

Your argument I respect. His is a load of rubbish.

There isn't an emergent British economy - that's rather the point. And we're still importing people by the hundreds of thousands who have nowhere to go job-wise who end up living on benefits. I'd say that was a pretty bad thing, wouldn't you?

I haven't got a problem with limited, controlled immigration - indeed, I'm in agreement with DC on this. I have got a problem with uncontrolled, unnecessary, complete open-door mass immigration, especially quite a fair bunch of those immigrants bring many of their - at best - questionable cultural and religious practices with them and seem to be encouraged to behave as though they're above UK law and mainstream cultural life.

If you stopped your post at, "complete open-door mass immigration," then you would have a reasonable, defensible argument.

But you just can't stop yourself, can you? You start throwing around words like, "culturally inferior" and "questionable cultural and religious practices" and you demonstrate yourself to be a bigot of the lowest order.

I'm just waiting for the post where you start complaining about, "their smelly cooking," and you will be a character in a Python sketch.

I'll take it as read then that forced marriages, gender apartheid, 'honour' violence, a relentless, fanatical touchiness over a book and a tendency to threaten violence over the slightest insult - real or perceived - is anything more than culturally par with the culture of the nations of much of Europe.

If this makes me a bigot, I'm glad to be one. And a racist. And an Islamophobe. And a filthy kuffar. Don't worry about the insults - go ahead, treat yourself. We're rather used to it. Watch as we, the long-suffering peoples of this continent, finally make our voices heard. It'll be fun.

The more Muslims that are dumped on us, the worse it will end up being for everyone who isn't a bigoted, fanatical, weirdy-beardy scripture-toting nutjob or a gun-toting thug, or the loons on the Islam-excusing left. Which is pretty much everyone with a brain and a lot without.

As reason appears to have left the building, I think we're done here now.