Immigration and the birth rate

Immigrant mothers are behind Britain’s biggest baby boom in 34 years, official figures revealed yesterday.

One in four babies delivered in this country last year were born to women from outside the UK.

Experts warned this was putting massive strain on hospitals and local services as the soaring figures show no sign of abating.

Government statistics reveal more than 160,000 babies were born last year to women from overseas.

This has pushed fertility levels in this country to the highest since 1973, with the average number of babies born to each woman up to 1.91 from 1.86 last year.

23% of all births were to immigrant mothers last year, up from 21% in 2006. In 1996, the year before Labour came to power, the figure was just 12%. As you can see, such births have, as a proportion of all births, nearly doubled in just twelve years - a literal embodiment of the present government's open door immigration policy.

As I have said many times before, it's clear that we are experiencing levels of immigration unprecedented in our history. The make-up of this country is being changed before our eyes. And yet even the bravest among our elected representatives can only bring themselves to discuss mass immigration itself, and its significant short-term impact, in the most tentative and apologetic terms, and there isn't one MP who wouldn't rather run ten miles in the pouring rain than even consider the long-term implications of this colossal demographic change. Speaking for myself, this total abdication of responsibility is one of the most enraging aspects of the whole immigration debacle.

Shock of the Day

An influx of hundreds of thousands of foreigners is fuelling social tensions in parts of the country which were totally unprepared for large-scale immigration, the Government has admitted.

Hazel Blears, the Communities and Local Government secretary, said teams of Whitehall officials were being sent to areas where there was "friction" caused by the arrival of large numbers of foreigners.

A Government study looking at the social impact of migration found that new immigrants to the UK accounted for nearly half of the population growth over the past five years.

Some 860,000 people swelled Britain's population from European Union countries, as well as Commonwealth and other states, it said.

It acknowledged that the scale of this migration had increased public concern in some parts of the country which were unused to large communities of foreigners. Schools and hospitals were often hardest hit.

The report - Managing the Impacts of Migration - A Cross-Government Approach - found large scale migration "has affected many areas with little previous experience of large migrant communities".

It said: "In some places it is the pace and scale of change which have an impact on local communities and services", while "other places experiencing significant migration for the first time may not have the institutions and programmes in place to help them manage that change."

Particular pressure was being felt in schools and hospitals, where migrants were failing to register with their local GP and instead going for basic treatment to Accident and Emergency departments in hospitals.

[...]

Miss Blears said she was sending in specialist teams to help some areas cope with the extra pressures on services.

Three experts from Miss Blears' department are starting work at Breckland district council, in Norfolk, this summer. Breckland council saw its population rise by more than 1,300 in 2005/06, almost entirely due to the arrival of immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Portugal.

Miss Blears said: "The change in the population has caused some friction and some tensions there. And they have had a few incidents. We are sending in some specialists who have a background in grassroots activism.

"They want to learn from the good things that are going on in Breckland but also help to build new relationships and make a better atmosphere in that town."

As Ronald Reagan once said, "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help'". I can't help but hear those words as I read about Blears' proposals.
After all, who exactly are these "specialists who have a background in grassroots activism"? Are they anything more than common or garden race hustlers? Does their "grassroots activism" consist of anything more than whining about "racism" to anyone who'll listen (and most who won't)? Because I find it rather doubtful that sending a trio of Trevor Phillips wannabees to Breckland is going to improve the situation.

In any case, it seems that no one in the present government is able to recall the adage, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Anyone with at least half a brain (a category which, I admit, may exclude most Labour ministers) ought to have foreseen that immigration on the unprecedentedly large scale presided over by Labour would be likely to both put pressure on public services, and create social tensions. As such, I would suggest that the obvious solution would have been to refrain from opening the borders to all and sundry in the first place. But none of this seems to have occurred to Labour. As I have previously remarked, the shortsightedness of the left when dealing with immigration and its attendant issues really is astounding.

ESL pupil numbers still rising

Official figures today revealed that one in seven pupils don't speak English as their first language - and the number of infant school pupils in unlawfully large classes has risen by more than 50 per cent in the last year.

The statistics, compiled by the The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF),show that the proportion of pupils whose first language is not English has risen to an all-time high.

In primary schools, 14.4 per cent of pupils speak another language as their mother tongue, up from 13.5 per cent in 2007, while in secondary schools the figure is 10.8 per cent, up from 10.6 per cent.

This equates to more than 800,000 pupils on the school roll with English as their second language.

As I have noted before, there are now over 1,300 schools in the UK in which the majority of pupils speak English as a second language. The number of ESL pupils has risen massively under Labour. In primary schools, for example, it has jumped from just 7.8% in 1997, to 14.4% now - an increase of 85% over eleven years. It is simply fanciful to claim that this will not have a very negative impact on the education of both native and immigrant children, at least in those classes and schools where non-native English speakers predominate, or form a significant minority. As I wrote back in December:

...if half the class is struggling with the language, then, in the first place, they themselves will find it difficult to gain the full benefit of each lesson, and, in the second place, they will occupy a disproportionate amount of their teacher's time, and retard the progress of the entire class, including those who can speak fluent English. And the problem is self-perpetuating: as a Polish immigrant mother told The Times back in May, if you have a school in which large numbers of children do not speak English, then the pressure on them to learn English is reduced, and the progress that immigrant children make with the language is slowed. After all, if you are the only non-English speaker in your class, then in order merely to socialise with the other children you will have to become fluent in English; if more than half your class speaks your language, then that requirement is removed. It must also be more difficult for individual non-English speakers to get the extra attention they need if there are twenty of them, than if there are only one or two.

There is also a significant financial issue. Teaching unions have estimated the yearly cost of educating an ESL child at £30,000. At present, the average amount spent annually on a state school pupil is £5,270. If all ESL children are receiving the support they need, then each one of them is likely to be costing the taxpayer an extra £25,000 each year. With the rapidity of the increase in the number of ESL pupils, that added expenditure quite quickly builds up. And it has to come from somewhere.

Finally, the colossal increase in the number of schoolchildren speaking English as a second language serves to demonstrate the extent to which immigration levels have ballooned under Labour. This is major demographic change - population replacement, indeed - taking place right before our eyes, and it shows no sign of stopping, or even of slowing down.

BBC bias on immigration (2)

Following on from Mark Easton's assertion that public opposition to immigration is almost non-existent, and confined only to a small group of intolerant bigots, his fellow Beeboid Kathryn Edwards has written a piece entitled "Powell's 'rivers of blood' legacy", timed to coincide with the impending fortieth anniversary of Enoch Powell's famous speech. In this, she gives us the views of a very diverse range of commentators. They are:

Elias Mattu: a first generation immigrant, Labour councillor in Wolverhampton, and director of the West Midlands Equality and Diversity Partnership. Among other comments, he denounced Powell as "an evil man". Edwards omitted to mention his party affiliation, merely describing him as "a Wolverhampton city councillor".

Dr Clive Harris: described as a "black sociologist". Edwards omitted to mention that he is closely associated with the race relations industry, through his involvement in the Afro-Caribbean Millennium Centre, and his directorship of the Centre's spin-off, the Frantz Fanon Research Unit, described as "the UK's only black-owned public policy think tank".

Rob Marris: Labour MP for Powell's old seat, Wolverhampton South West, and alleged vandal.

So, two race hustlers, one of whom is also a Labour councillor, and a Labour MP. What a very representative cross-section of the community!

On the other side of the debate, Edwards briefly mentions Nigel Hastilow, before adding that "Mr Hastilow has said he will not give interviews to the BBC about the 'rivers of blood' speech". She does not mention, however, that, as Hastilow has made clear on his blog, he refuses to appear on the BBC because of the corporation's consistent bias. And, in any event, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that, since Hastilow refused to speak to her, Edwards should have made the effort to find someone else to speak on behalf of the vast majority of people who oppose unlimited mass immigration.

The imbalance in the choice of commentators is not the only instance of bias in Edwards' article, however. Her general reporting is deliberately slanted to an anti-Powell stance. Consider the following extract, for example:

Powell, who represented Wolverhampton South West, was not the first politician in that era to find himself embroiled in such controversy.

In the 1964 General Election campaign in nearby Smethwick, supporters of the Tory candidate Peter Griffiths were reported to have circulated the slogan, "If you want a nigger for a neighbour - vote Labour".

This appears to be a rather cack-handed attempt to smear Powell by falsely associating him with the overtly racist slogan allegedly used by Peter Griffiths' supporters.

It was the Race Relations Act introduced by the Labour government in 1968 which prompted Powell's speech.

He argued it would mean "British" families losing out on matters such as housing, with immigrants being given an unfair advantage.

Why is the word 'British' in quotation marks? The clear imputation is that there are no such people as the native British.

Black sociologist Dr Clive Harris said that playing the race card at that time had proved to have "mileage" for politicians.

Here, the notion, promulgated by the race hustling Dr Harris, that Powell was "playing the race card" is repeated uncritically by Edwards, as if it was an indisputable fact. This is typical of the way in which Edwards accepts all the claims, no matter how controversial or how obviously false, that are made by her three left-wing interviewees, while barely giving any consideration whatsoever to the views of those who thought Powell was right then, or those of us who think that, with the benefit of hindsight, he was remarkably prescient. Kathryn Edwards should be proud: her whole piece is a classic of BBC propagandising dressed up as impartial reporting!

BBC bias on immigration

On the BBC website, the corporation's Home Affairs Editor, Mark Easton, has penned a rather bland piece on the debate over immigration, apparently prompted by the news that nearly two-thirds of British people believe that inter-racial violence is likely to erupt in the near future. The article itself merely rehashes themes which should be familiar to most reasonably well-informed people, and I would not mention the piece, but for the first few sentences, which provide a textbook example of the subtle bias for which the BBC is renowned:

Almost two-thirds of people in Britain fear race relations are so poor tensions are likely to spill over into violence, a BBC poll has suggested. So what does it say about race relations in Britain?

We have witnessed in Britain over the past decade a level of immigration greater than at any time in our history.

A million have recently come from Eastern Europe, but the migration to our shores has been from all parts of the globe.

Yet this extraordinary social change has been conducted with remarkably little hostility or public opposition.

Our experience is testament to the tolerance and adaptability of the British people.

Two points:

First, Easton's assertion that there has been "remarkably little...public opposition" to the colossal increase in levels of immigration that we have seen in the last decade is a blatant lie. As has been demonstrated time and time and time again, approximately 80% of the public believe that immigration levels are too high, and that they should be heavily reduced. If that is "remarkably little opposition", then I can only guess that to achieve the status of "significant opposition", the figures would have to be at least equal to Kim Jong-il's share of the vote in the last North Korean elections!
Admittedly, the public have not manifested their opposition to immigration by rioting, or by lynching immigrants. But that does not mean that opposition is any less prevalent, or any less strongly felt. Indeed, one might almost imagine that Mark Easton regards the general public with something bordering on contempt, given that he apparently believes that the British people invariably respond to anything they disagree with by getting aggressive and "hostile".

Secondly, I would be interested to learn precisely what Easton means by his statement that "our experience is testament to the tolerance and adaptability of the British people". Perhaps he simply means that the fact that the public have abstained from violence is testament to their tolerance, in the same way that Muslims were praised for their "restraint" for only rioting a tiny little bit over Fitna.
But given the close proximity of his statement about "tolerance and adaptability" to his (false) claim that there has been no significant opposition to the present levels of immigration, it is hard to avoid drawing the inference that the (alleged) acceptance of unlimited mass immigration by the British people is what proves their "tolerance and adaptability". And of course, this, almost necessarily, implies that opposition to immigration is intolerant, and indicative of an inability to adapt.
Maybe Mark Easton did not mean to imply this. Maybe he really does believe that tolerance consists of refraining from violence when you're upset or angry. But more likely, he simply regards it as axiomatic that support for mass immigration equals tolerance, while opposition to mass immigration equals intolerance and bigotry. This is the usual nature of BBC bias: not conscious or deliberate, but simply an expression of the subconscious liberal assumptions that may be shared by the overwhelming majority of Beeboids, but which are not shared by the public at large.

Thought Crime Roundup (2)

Nigel Hastilow, who, readers will probably recall, was dismissed (or at least, forced to resign), as Tory parliamentary candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis, after favourably invoking the name of Lord Voldemort Enoch Powell, has an interesting article in the Telegraph, considering Powell's legacy:

Whatever the accuracy of Powell's predictions, and however strong his language, his main argument was that the country was "undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history".

That is more true today than it was four decades ago. The level of immigration in the intervening years has been higher than Powell foresaw; the consequences are more far-reaching.

One of the most obvious is the demand for land, infrastructure and housing. Across Britain, local battles are taking place over plans to build three million more houses to accommodate our ever-expanding population.

The Government's own estimates suggest the number of people living here could climb from 60 million to 110 million in the next 75 years.

Of course we need houses for such an explosion in numbers. And roads, railways, schools, hospitals, shops and jobs. So the spiral of development twists on and on.

This will cost the taxpayer hundreds of billions of pounds and concrete over our countryside. Milton Keynes, for instance, will grow to twice the size of Birmingham. There won't be enough water - new homes there will have showers but no baths. It does not seem unreasonable to question how sustainable all this is.

And that's only the infrastructural impact; he hasn't even considered the cultural one. It does not seem unreasonable to question, say, the desirability of having millions of people in this country who support the imposition of Sharia law, either. As the number is, at present, somewhere around 800,000, that possibility is not remote; rather, it is almost inevitable. But very few politicians dare to talk about it - even Hastilow appears to have shied away from doing so.

Yet when I raised the issue, the Conservative Party was horrified. David Cameron has nurtured a politically correct, BBC-friendly, caring Conservatism which despises "nasty party" throwbacks who bang on about immigration.

In other words, a "Conservatism" bearing an uncanny resemblance to modern liberalism.

The mistake was to mention Enoch Powell.

I was told that to survive as a candidate I should confess to being "incredibly stupid" and submit future articles to Central Office first. So I resigned.

Losing the chance to become MP for Halesowen and Rowley Regis was a bitter blow. But nothing consoled me as much as the overwhelming support I received from strangers. I was inundated with letters and emails, many arguing that this is too important an issue to let go.

For many politicians, immigration is the subject which dare not speak its name.

That's why so many people feel betrayed. Their elected representatives refuse to articulate the voters' concerns with anything approximating honesty. The conspiracy of silence among mainstream politicians is calculated to drive decent men and women into the arms of extremists.

The BNP is bound to flourish when anyone who tries to discuss immigration openly is howled down by cries of "racist".

Sadly, my experience is likely to intimidate other Tory hopefuls into silence. As one of them told me: "I agree with you completely. I'm just glad it was you who said it, not me."

Here we again see the suppression of democracy and debate that I talked about in my previous post. The issue of immigration, and the numerous other issues to which it gives rise, routinely top the list of the most important issues facing the country, in polls of the general public. And yet this vitally important topic is going unmentioned by almost all politicians from the three main parties, because they know that to discuss it openly, honestly, and forthrightly, would, in all probability, be to commit political suicide. This stifling of debate, in which all three main parties, and much of the MSM, are complicit, is making a veritable mockery of our claim to have a representative democracy.

Mr Hastilow concludes with the following sentence:

And I am glad I won't live another 75 years to see the full hideous consequences of today's population explosion.

On the basis of anecdotal evidence alone, I must say that this view seems to be shared by increasing numbers of people. When people start giving up on their country in this manner, it is in large part because of the failure of the political elite to govern in a manner which inspires people with genuine long-term optimism. The failure of the politicians to respond to voters' concerns, and the rendering of widely-held political beliefs as unspeakable heresy, is a major cause of this failure.

Showing his true colours?

I see that Boris Johnson was jeered by members of the audience at a London mayoral hustings held at the Methodist Central Hall earlier in the week. Apparently the audience, which, the Evening Standard tells us, "was packed with black church groups and student and trade unions who are the natural constituency of Labour rival Ken Livingstone", was initially unreceptive to Johnson's charms, and booed and heckled as he attempted to speak, until one of the event organisers had to ask them to be quiet. Well, it's fairly typical of the left, isn't it, to try to silence their political opponents in this manner, rather than engaging them in debate.

Except that there's very little to suggest that Boris Johnson is the political opponent of these leftists. Of course, he and they are members of rival political tribes, but there's little in the way of substantive political or ideological disagreement between them. The Standard informs us that "by the end of the two-hour event...the jeers had turned to cheers as he won round much of the audience". Huzzah! But it is interesting to see how this apparent transformation was brought about; essentially, he won round the leftist-dominated audience by expressing views which they shared.

First, he treated them to a tasty morsel of welfare state socialism:

The audience began to warm to Mr Johnson after he agreed to fund the "London living wage" of £7.20 per hour for the poorest workers if elected.

Then, he added a liberal endorsement of lawbreaking:

He won over even more people when he talked about housing and agreed to a one-off amnesty for all illegal immigrants living in the capital.

Mr Johnson spoke of his own family's immigrant roots and said his Muslim great-grandfather, who fled to Britain from Turkey, would be "very proud" he was standing for Mayor of London.

The candidate said: "If an immigrant has been here for a long time and there is no realistic prospect of returning them, then I do think that person's condition should be regularised so that they can pay taxes and join the rest of society."

He even accused the present government, which has presided over the highest levels of immigration this country has ever seen, of being just too harsh towards those poor illegals:

Mr Livingstone added it was a "tragic miscalculation" by the Labour government not to have an "immediate amnesty for everybody" when it came to power in 1997.

He wobbled a bit...

However, the Tory faced jeers when he said it was not within his powers to stop the Met staging controversial dawn raids of migrant families. "I've given you as many yeses as I can, my friends," he implored his audience.

...but hit back strongly by implying that he would grant preferential treatment to people who have no right to be in the country at all:

He added that he would "look at" London Citizens' proposal to subsidise transport for failed asylum seekers in London, while Green Sian Berry and Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick backed the idea.

Taxpayer-subsidised transport for failed "asylum seekers" looks set to become a reality whoever wins. Ken Livingstone has pledged that they shall travel for free, telling the audience the heart-rending tale of how "many end up walking for miles across the capital because they are unable to afford the Tube or train fare". Yes, having to walk is indeed a terrible hardship, which no one should have to endure.

Returning to Boris Johnson: he actually concluded with a halfway decent idea:

Mr Johnson was then applauded when he repeated his pledge to scrap the Mayor's newspaper, The Londoner, and plant trees with the money saved.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Londoner is a complete waste of money, and that planting trees would certainly be a better use of the money (although tax cuts would be a still bigger improvement), I see very little reason, reviewing Johnson's comments, to support him, even against Ken Livingstone, in the mayoral election. After all, aside from their differences on the vexed Routemaster v. bendy buses question, they seem to be in perfect agreement on pretty much everything. Certainly, on the basis of his statements at the hustings, Johnson's views are firmly entrenched on the left of the political spectrum, reflecting the widespread ideological surrender of the Tory Party to the liberal-left. Either that, or he is constantly changing his message to suit his audience - hardly an admirable or desirable trait in a politician, albeit a common one.

Will you tell the liberals, or shall I? Part two

One of the statistics mentioned in my previous post was that 66% of Britons believe that immigrants undercut British workers and take their jobs. This particular belief is the one most frequently mocked by advocates of unlimited immigration, who like to depict it, usually harnessed in tandem with the straw man argument that "they take our women", as a claim made by the stereotypical crude, ignorant "white van men", who, many liberals like to believe, are the only source of opposition to immigration (aside, that is, from taxi drivers, and "racists"). As is so often the case, however, the mere fact that liberals don't want to believe it does not make it any less true (indeed, one might almost say that the probability of a statement being correct increases in direct proportion to the vociferousness of liberals in disputing it). As the Sunday Telegraph reports:

Mass immigration has been accompanied by a fall in the number of Britons with jobs, official figures show.

Since 2004, when citizens of eight central and eastern European countries were given the right to work in Britain, the number of UK-born people working here has fallen by 500,000, from 24.4 million to 23.9 million.

Over the period, the number of migrants in work, including people born abroad but now naturalised as British citizens, rose by 1.1 million - to 3.3 million. They now make up one in eight of the workforce.

The figures, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), provide the strongest evidence yet that Britons have lost their jobs to immigrants, says a leading expert on immigration.

Robert Rowthorn, a Cambridge University professor who uncovered the findings, said: "It seems hard to deny that immigration from the new EU member states has had a negative impact on the employment of UK natives."

The good professor should be careful what he says. If any lefty student groups at Cambridge should get wind of it, they might try and get him sacked!

Attitudes to immigration

A poll for Channel 4 has revealed that the public is not exactly ecstatic about the unprecedented levels of immigration that this country has been experiencing over the past ten years or so. 83% of Britons told pollsters that the country faces a "population crisis", a view shared by 58% of "settled migrants". Fifteen percent of respondents were in favour of halting immigration altogether, and fully 84% wanted to reduce it.

Why do the public feel this way? Well, it seems that many of us are not quite so enthusiastic about the myriad benefits of diversity as the liberal-left might wish. While a quarter of people believe the leftist canard that "immigration has led to a rich and varied culture in Britain", 58% say that British culture has been "damaged and diluted" by immigration. Multiculturalism seems to have been convincingly rejected too: 69% of people say that it isn't working, a view shared by 45% of settled migrants, and even 41% of recently-arrived migrants. 66% of Britons also believe that migrant workers undercut British workers and take their jobs.

There's not a lot here that's new, to be honest. The proof that the public was strongly opposed to both immigration and multiculturalism was already pretty overwhelming - this is just another shot in the cannonade of evidence. The important issue is not so much whether people have concerns and objections, as whether any government will take heed of these concerns, and act accordingly. Personally, I doubt that they will.
Responding to the Channel 4 poll, Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch said:

This is stunning confirmation that the public want to see firm and effective action to reduce the scale of immigration. It is a view shared by two-thirds of previous immigrants. The Government cannot remain in denial much longer.

Well, the first two sentences may be correct, but, alas, I fear that he underestimates the capacity of the present government to ignore any fact that does not fit their worldview. They allowed, and continue to allow, unlimited mass immigration against the wishes and without the consent of the public. I expect that they will "remain in denial" up to and beyond the next election. We can't expect any action from Labour. Meanwhile, the Tories have at least called for a limit to be imposed on immigration, but, as we all know, what they say and what they might do should they come into power may prove to be two very different things...

Will you tell the liberals, or shall I?

Ten years of record immigration to Britain has produced virtually no economic benefits for the country, a parliamentary inquiry has found.

A House of Lords committee, which is due to report next Tuesday, will call into question Government claims that foreign workers add £6 billion each year to the wealth of the nation.

It is expected to say this must be balanced against the increase in population and their use of local services such as health and education, resulting in little benefit per head of the population.

"Our overall conclusion is that the economic benefits of net immigration to the resident population are small and close to zero in the long run," the report will say.

The findings of the Lords economics committee threaten to demolish the key argument made by ministers to justify the highest levels of immigration in the country's history.

The inquiry by the committee, which includes two former chancellors and several former Cabinet ministers, is the first to try to balance the costs and benefits of large-scale immigration.

[...]

A Whitehall paper produced for the committee said average output growth over the past five years was 2.7 per cent a year and migration contributed an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of this. The Government said this indicated a contribution of £6 billion - or £700,000 a day- from foreign workers.

However, the committee's final report is expected to say the Government should have focused on the impact of immigration on GDP per head, not the economy as a whole.

David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford University, said in his evidence to the committee that the Government had excluded costs from crime, security, the race relations process, health "tourism" and imported ailments such as TB.

My own objections to mass immigration are, as I have made clear many times before, centred upon the cultural, religious, and (dare I say it?) ethnic change that it brings, and the social problems that will arise in the future as a result of these changes, as well as the essentially undemocratic way in which the political elite has foisted mass immigration upon this country, without ever seeking the consent of the public. Even if there were short-term economic benefits to be had from mass immigration, I would still say that these were outweighed by the long-term social costs. Having said that, economic factors are clearly an important consideration, so I am glad to see that the arguments of those in favour of mass immigration apparently fail on this count as well.

The latest immigration triumph

Nine illegal immigrants disappeared after they were given free train tickets by police and told to make their own way to a detention centre more than 60 miles away.

The move was described as "ludicrous", but police have defended their actions, saying they were acting on the advice of immigration authorities.

The men, who are from Afghanistan, were discovered by Cambridgeshire police under the back of a lorry in Fordham, near Newmarket.

They were apprehended by officers before being given train tickets and told by police to make their own way to an immigration facility in Croydon, Surrey.

But none of the men arrived at the centre and they have not been seen since.

Well, who would ever have thought that people who break the law in order to enter the country would be anything other than 100% keen to follow the rules once they got here? Not any of the bunglers in charge of managing (ha!) immigration, certainly.

Cambridgeshire police say they were acting under instruction from officials at the Border and Immigration Agency (BIA), a Home Office department.

But officials at the BIA denied such guidance was issued and insisted they had asked for the nine men to be held in custody so that they could be interviewed.

Frankly, I couldn't care less who screwed up this time. The fact is, that for all the efforts to pass the buck that the petty jobsworths in the police and the BIA seem to be engaging in, they are both government agencies, and specifically Home Office agencies. And it doesn't really matter to me whether Home Office Agency A was at fault, or whether the blame instead lies with Home Office Agency B - the end result is the same either way.
The fact is, that there have been far, far, far too many Home Office cock-ups over immigration already (see here, here, here, here, here, and here), with today's example just the latest in a very long line of blunders. The sheer incompetence that the government and its agencies have consistently demonstrated in their management of immigration is what really bothers me, not the question of which government agency was to blame for each specific cock-up. But, having said that, the lack of anyone willing, on this occasion or any other, to come out and admit that they got it wrong, rather than always pathetically trying to shift responsibility onto someone else, does serve to add insult to injury.

The jobs the British Bangladeshis won't do

First, read this extract from the Office for National Statistics website:

In 2001/02, among men, Bangladeshis had the highest unemployment rate in Great Britain at 20 per cent - four times that for White British or White Irish men.

[...]

The picture for women was similar to that for men, although the levels of unemployment were generally lower. Bangladeshi women had the highest unemployment rate of all at 24 per cent, six times greater than that for White British or White Irish women (4 per cent each). The rate for Indian women was slightly higher than for White women at 7 per cent.

For all ethnic groups unemployment was highest among young people aged under 25. Over 40 per cent of young Bangladeshi men were unemployed.

Now, consider the following news story:

The Home Office is being urged to ease restrictions on migrant workers entering Britain from Bangladesh, to avert a crisis in the curry industry.

Curry houses are struggling to fill thousands of kitchen staff vacancies, says the Immigration Advisory Service.

For years, many staff in the UK's 9,000 curry restaurants have been recruited directly from Bangladesh.

But restrictions on the workers have been tighter since eastern Europeans were given employment rights.

So, there are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of unemployed home-grown Bangladeshis, and yet the (publicly-funded) Immigration Advisory Service (whose head, former Tory MP and convicted fraudster Keith Best, feels that immigrants make better citizens than the native British) wants to import thousands more Bangladeshis to carry out what is, for the most part, fairly unskilled work. Not very logical, is it? Unless, of course, the IAS's aim is simply to get as many immigrants into the country as possible...

Today's illegal immigrant security breach

An illegal immigrant was able to work at the House of Commons using a fake identity pass in a serious breach of security.

The Government stands accused of a cover-up after leaked documents, obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, showed that Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, was informed immediately of the case of the Brazilian woman, a cleaner, when she was arrested at Parliament 10 days ago. Yet the Home Office confirmed the security breach - one of the most serious to affect Westminster - only after being contacted by this newspaper last night.

Elaine Chaves Aparecida was detained by police after a random check on her security pass showed that it belonged to someone else. She had been working there, since December 3 last year as the employee of a ­cleaning company, Emprise Services.

Under questioning, Miss Chaves, 31, admitted that she had run away from immigration officials at Heathrow Terminal 4 in December 2004 before she could be refused entry.

The letter from Tony Smith, the regional director of the immigration agency, admits that officials still have no idea how the Brazilian came to obtain a Commons pass or even to whom it belonged.

But, crucially, it predicts that the level of controversy will be "high" and advises ministers that they should take a "reactive approach" to the scandal.

It must be said that Mr Smith's warning was somewhat unnecessary. Advising this government (and particularly the Home Office, and especially Liam Byrne) to carry out a cover-up operation is, I think, akin to advising Derek Conway to stop being so selfless and consider his own interests once in a while.

As for Miss Chaves: I'd be particularly interested to know precisely what she meant when she "admitted that she had run away from immigration officials". Did she literally outrun them? Did she point behind them, say "look over there", and make her getaway while their backs were turned? Did she evade capture in some other, more subtle, manner? Whatever it was, it doesn't reflect very well on the immigration service. But then again, what does?

Today's Home Office Cock-up

We've had the illegal immigrant who was employed as a security guard at the Home Office, not to mention numerous illegal immigrants who were working there as cleaners, but this story really does take the proverbial biscuit. In fact, I think it takes the whole pack:

An asylum seeker with a false passport worked for almost a year processing immigration appeals, it emerged yesterday.

Eugene Tawanda Madzima landed the job at the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal Service after supposedly undergoing background checks.

Officials were tricked by a faked letter from the Home Office saying the 24-year old had permission to stay in the UK.

Madzima was so well regarded at work he even gave a staff training presentation at the AITS centre in Leicester.

He was caught only when he tried to use the forged passport to open an HSBC bank account.

As Madzima was jailed for 12 months at Leicester Crown Court for holding forged documents, Judge Simon Hammond said the situation was "staggering" and "beggars belief".

He added: "Why was he able to get a fulltime job with the Appeals and Immigration Tribunal Service, of all people, who are meant to be dealing with people seeking asylum?

"No proper checks were made and yet he must have been on their records. "

Words really do fail me. Is there anyone at the Home Office who isn't an utter buffoon (apart from the apparently rather cunning asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, that is)?

Kettle, meet pot

A government campaign will warn bosses that they face large fines and prison sentences if they are caught employing illegal migrant workers.

The Home Office will run radio and print adverts ahead of a tightening of the law on illegal labour in February.

Employers could be fined up to £10,000 for every illegal worker they negligently hire, or could face up to two years in prison.

The immigration minister said firms would have no excuse to break the law.

Liam Byrne said: "Illegal working attracts illegal migrants and undercuts British wages. That's why we're determined to shut it down.

"The message is clear for employers - we will not tolerate illegal working."

Well, I certainly don't disagree with that, and I hope that the advertising campaign, and the new laws, succeed in deterring employers from employing illegal immigrants. But I do wonder whether the government in general, and the Home Office in particular, are not being a tad hypocritical. After all, not only has their repeated failure to tackle illegal immigration probably done more to "attract illegal migrants" than anything any private company - however avaricious - could do, but they have themselves been caught employing illegal immigrants!

"Donkeys led by Donkeys"

On Wednesday, I wrote that "the government likes to have several cock-ups over illegal immigration on the go at any one time". As I now realise, "several" was something of an underestimate, as two stories over the last two days serve to demonstrate. Yesterday, it was revealed that the Border and Immigration Agency is refusing to deport any of the estimated 4,000 foreign criminals serving sentences of under one year in Britain's jails. Apparently, staff at the agency simply have "no interest" in doing so. Would that we could all avoid doing our jobs whenever we decided that we had "no interest" in them!

And today, it was revealed that since 1999 the government has granted indefinite leave to remain in Britain to approximately 100,000 illegal immigrants. This follows Tuesday's revelation that a further 165,000 illegals look set to be granted a de facto amnesty over the next few years, after Home Office staff lost their files. So, by the time our leaders have finished, over a quarter of a million illegal immigrants will have been granted the right to live in Britain. They will also have the right to bring their families over here - what will that swell the numbers to?

Admittedly, the figures will still be dwarfed by the number of immigrants (over one million in the last two years) that Labour is letting into the country legally...

The present government is useless in most respects; many and varied are its defects. But its complete inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to deal with immigration must surely rank as the most colossal of its many failures. As for the staff at the Home Office, their general incompetence is a fitting partner to Labour's inadequacy and mendacity: as a commenter (Michael Murphy) at the Daily Mail so aptly put it, they are "Donkeys led by Donkeys".

ESL pupils up 73% under Labour

On Tuesday, I wrote about the fact that English is now a minority language in 6.6% of primary schools, and 5.8% of secondary schools. Today I was looking at the BBC News website, when I came across some statistics which put these unpleasant figures in context:

The proportion of primary school pupils in England with English as a second language has risen by 73% in a decade.

Across the country the proportion is 13.5% - up from 7.8% in 1997.

The incredibly rapid increase in the number of such pupils over the past ten years is, I think, further evidence of the extent to which levels of immigration have ballooned under this present government, and of the effect which the de facto open door immigration policy pursued by Labour in particular is having on the country.

Deport Jacqui Smith!

"Illegal immigrant at Home Office", was a headline on the 'politics' section of the BBC News website this evening, and for one ghastly moment I thought that Peter Hain had been made Home Secretary. But then I remembered: Hain may be an undesirable immigrant, but, sadly, he's not an illegal.

No, the headline just referred to the latest embarrassing revelation in the story of the government's ongoing cock-up over illegal immigration. Sorry, I should have been more explicit: as the post immediately prior to this one shows, the government likes to have several cock-ups over illegal immigration on the go at any one time - the one I refer to in this instance, however, is the one involving illegal immigrants (approximately 11,000 of them, according to the latest estimate) being cleared to work in the security sector . Now, I see that among those organisations finding themselves being guarded by an illegal immigrant, was the Home Office itself:

An illegal immigrant was employed as a security guard at the Home Office, the government has admitted.

The man worked at the front desk of the department's headquarters in Westminster checking people's passes.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said problems were identified with one of the sub-contractors providing services to the Home Office.

His job would have involved checking the passes of people visiting Ms Smith, ministers and senior civil servants.

Deportation proceedings have now begun against the guard.

Maybe they should make him Home Secretary. He couldn't possibly be more useless than the current one, or any of her recent predecessors, or likely successors. Yes, make him Home Secretary, and deport Jacqui Smith (and Liam Byrne, for good measure).

The stealth amnesty for illegal immigrants

As many as 165,000 asylum seekers are to be granted an "amnesty" to live in Britain, it was revealed.

The vast bulk of the migrants are failed refugees whose files were left lying in boxes by bungling Home Office staff.

They have now been living here so long that officials have ruled that it would be a breach of their human rights to kick them out.

Ministers admitted that the first 19,000 have already been granted leave to remain under what the Tories described as a "stealth amnesty".

All will now be free to bring their relatives to Britain - and claim the full range of benefits.

As I have written at least three times already (in relation to calls for an amnesty for illegal immigrants, which is basically what we have here) these people are illegal immigrants: their very presence in our country is in violation of our laws. As such, it is simply ridiculous to say that because they have succeeded in breaking the law, and getting away with it, for an unusually long time, they should be rewarded (in this case, by being allowed to live here legally). As I wrote in July, it's rather like saying that if you kill someone and then avoid capture for ten years, then you should have all charges against you dropped, and be given a knighthood.

Furthermore, the fact that these illegal immigrants are being rewarded for breaking the law is likely to encourage more people to seek to enter Britain illegally. Thanks to the government's complete inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to do anything to limit either legal or illegal immigration, this country is already seen as a soft touch, as the number one destination for the discerning phoney refugee - as one Iranian would-be illegal immigrant, waiting at Cherbourg to nip across the channel, put it, "Britain has been our destination from the day we left our home countries". Now, because of yet more government incompetence, coupled with the excesses of the "human rights" culture, there is a further incentive to come here: stick around long enough, and you can stay forever.

English not spoken here

Further evidence of the negative impact of the present levels of mass immigration emerges with the news that there are over 1,300 British schools in which English is the first language of fewer than half the pupils. This problem is particularly prevalent in primary schools, with English being a minority language in a total of 1,143 such schools. That's roughly 6.6% of the nation's primary schools! In 569 of these schools English is the first language of fewer than 30% of pupils.
The situation in secondary schools is only marginally better - English is a minority language in 195 secondary schools (5.8% of the total number), including 83 schools in which English is the native tongue of below 30% of pupils. The situation has become so bad, that even teaching unions - hardly known as bastions of right-wing or anti-immigration sentiment - have begun to express disquiet: Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, told a House of Lords committee that the situation was "out of control".

And he is, of course, right. So far as I can see, there are three key problems with what is going on. First, and most importantly in the long-term, these astonishingly high figures - with English now a minority language in over one in twenty English schools (and there's no guessing as to the number of schools in which twenty, or thirty, or forty percent of pupils are not fluent in English) - are indicative of the extent of the demographic change that is being inflicted upon this country.
But even if we ignore that, then the immediate problems this presents are still highly significant. Consider the cost of all this, for example. Teaching unions estimate the cost of educating a non-English-speaking child at around £30,000, a sum which fairly dwarfs the £5,270 currently spent annually on an average pupil at a British state school. Indeed, with £30,000 you could send a boy to Eton, and still have a fair bit of change left over. As the above figures indicate, there's clearly rather a lot of schoolchildren (one in eight, apparently) who speak only a limited amount of English, and the money to fund their education is going to have to come from somewhere.
The other problem which teaching unions have highlighted is the deleterious effect that this has upon teaching standards. And of course, if half the class is struggling with the language, then, in the first place, they themselves will find it difficult to gain the full benefit of each lesson, and, in the second place, they will occupy a disproportionate amount of their teacher's time, and retard the progress of the entire class, including those who can speak fluent English. And the problem is self-perpetuating: as a Polish immigrant mother told The Times back in May, if you have a school in which large numbers of children do not speak English, then the pressure on them to learn English is reduced, and the progress that immigrant children make with the language is slowed. After all, if you are the only non-English speaker in your class, then in order merely to socialise with the other children you will have to become fluent in English; if more than half your class speaks your language, then that requirement is removed. It must also be more difficult for individual non-English speakers to get the extra attention they need if there are twenty of them, than if there are only one or two.

The government's response to these problem is to say that it has increased the funds available from the "Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant". Where that leaves any native British children unfortunate enough to find themselves stuck in a school where most of their fellow pupils speak English only as a second language is unclear, although "on the scrapheap" would seem a fair bet. But what this case demonstrates, once again, is the need, not for more funding in an attempt to relieve the negative effects of the government's de facto open-door immigration policy, but for the reversal of that policy, and for the imposition of very strict limits on immigration.