Wednesday 28 July 2010

Flexible Cap

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, on a visit to India, was questioned on BBC Radio 4 "Today" about his immigration cap being "flexible" (and also subject to consultation with the Indian Government).
He soon resorted to expressing the need to clamp down on bogus students!
That is a clear admission that his cap is not the answer to the UK's immigration problems (or "issues", as they are called).
Having been issued visas and allowed entry, foreign and Commonwealth people like it so much here they don't want to return to their own countries......
What they do is find someone to marry......
In the run-up to the General Election in May 2010 there was a debate on Channel 4 between the 3 MPs primarily concerned with immigration, in which the then Immigration Minister Phil Woolas claimed that 60,000 people had been deported over the past year. The Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne (now Energy Minister) revealed this to be misleading - since 30,000 hadn't been deported; they had been denied entry.
Maybe most who had been denied entry would concede it was "a fair cop", but there were surely others (like my pen friend in 1965 and my girl friend in 1978) who felt (and maybe still feel) shocked and depressed by the miserable experience of making a long and expensive (return) journey all for nothing.
P.S. At about 1235 Emma rang in to BBC Radio 2's "Jeremy Vine Show" to say how hard it was to get a work visa for India. She works in Goa (which was a Portuguese colony until 1960). "They don't want us there," she said. "It's extremely hard to live there."