Tuesday, April 12, 2005

If anyone from any political party is listening...

Just a quick statement from a voter:

Immigration is not one of my top priorities in the forthcoming election.

It's fair to say that I couldn't care less about the swarms and whether or not they're coming into the UK.

To be honest, I can't, on the whole, tell the difference between immigrants and British citizens.

I feel lucky to be amongst a population that can choose to go and live in just about any country that it might wish. I feel excited to live in a period that is seeing the biggest shift in peoples around the world ever. I feel proud of a country which, whether through good or bad means, built up such friendly relations with people across the world that they now want to come and live in a place probably much wetter and cloudier than their own.

The current limits on immigration are adequate, whereas hysterical debate on immigration is bringing cruelty and inhumanity into our asylum system. Security is an entirely different issue to immigration.

My vote will not depend on your pathetic attempts to appeal to 'the masses': British people who are tolerant and inclusive until the media and politicians frighten them into fear of 'them'.

You'll have to do better.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

hear hear!

Jess said...

I keep reading about 'population crises' in Japan, Italy, and many other developed countries. Here in the US, there is a low-level panic on about the ageing population, social security and the workforce. And yet people would still rather pay their citizens to breed rather than invite educated immigrants! Anyone would think there is an ethnocentric bias or something!

Clare said...

Well, exactly, the same panic is here. And in secret our government know it - Bush is at the forefront (I am told) of something called Mode 4 which will completely liberalise movement of people for work and change everything.
For example, Indian companies could bid to build a hospital in London because they're costs are lower, ship their workers in to do the work and ship em out again when it's done. This of course will be cheaper for those who do the contracts such as governments. It will stimulate the economy and (the thory goes) countries like ours will move to high-level work like IT and educating one another in IT (I'm not entirely convinced that this holds in countries where educational standards are not as high as we might pretend like, say, the UK and USA).
It's going to happen. Immigration and emigration is a norm now, specially for those of you who like to marry Americans. And I don't think people mind a bit. But they might when they find their governments have been misleading them with stupid debates all along...

Anonymous said...

I'm "lucky" in that I live in one of the safest Conservative seats in the country (it's been Tory for 120 years) so I have the luxury of voting exactly how I want knowing that it won't make a bit of difference.

Unknown said...

the whole immigration policy trend now shift towards the work productivity. No one cares about the ageing population, and in fact, british men are actually moving out of UK to marry abroad and create a big gap btn the male and female population.
Home Office recently annouces a programme for overseas students who studied in the Top 50 MBA programme to come to UK and work for a year, but suspend their holiday maker programme in Malaysia in the UK for 2 years. They also stop acepting young ngerian men to wants to come to UK on a visitor visa.
Look! you see what the UK government doing?