Sunday 28 March 2010

"No Man is an Island"

The actress Emma Thompson supports the Refugee Council, and considers the Home Office stupid. (BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs, today.)
She is grateful to a judge who overrode a Home Office decision to return a "refugee" to his own country.
The Home Office is not stupid for wanting to return to their own countries people who exploit a (Cold War) Convention concerning political persecution to enable them to circumvent normal immigration controls.
Immigration officials are in an impossible position if controls are out of control. And they are not in control when there is a thriving industry (lawyers, NGOs, etc.) in opposition to them.
This confused and selfish situation is exacerbated by marriage. We are told it is in decline in the UK, but is increasingly used for immigration purposes. It is one thing for women to be able to live abroad through marriage; that is no normative reason for men to be able to occupy other peoples' territory through marriage.
These are not just academic issues. Much unhappiness ensues.

Wednesday 10 March 2010

Renegades

Migration Watch (http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/BriefingPaper/document/128) gives the number of men from India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh who came to Britain for marriage in 2003 as 5,534.
The reason they were able to do this is because Mrs. Thatcher reneged on her election promise of 1979 to restrict immigration to the UK: "We shall end the concession introduced by the Labour government in 1974 to husbands and male fiances."
One reason she reneged is because the European Commission of Human Rights declared
(13 May 1982) the case of 3 women whose husbands were not allowed to live in the UK to be admissible.
There is no mention of migration in the European Convention of Human Rights. So there is no legal reason for the EHCR's decision.
I had earlier (10 June 1977) attempted to pre-empt the issue by complaining to the ECHR that the British Government allows foreign and Commonwealth men to live in the UK through marriage even though I (and other Englishmen) often cannot live in their countries through marriage.
The ECHR's justification was "discrimination". But, by taking this stance, the ECHR supports inequality . One reason is that, through this stance, people in transnational marriages have the facility to live in two countries, whereas people in uni-national marriages (outside the European Union), as well as single people, do not have this option.
Furthermore, 255 British servicemen died in and around the Falkland Islands in 1982, and a similar number have recently died in Iraq and Afghanistan. While they were endangering themselves (and their parents grieving), foreign and Commonwealth men were (and are) taking advantage of the Conservative Government's failure to keep their promise of some 30 years ago.
Equality?.......