Really? Got any figures on that?
Really? Got any figures on that?[/quote]
Seriously? Youāve never heard that these are issues in the US and UK?
MM is right, you are falling into a trap of repeating things that you donāt have real statistics for, and you are the one who is going to suffer for it.
Another good example is Australia, where relatively few numbers of refugees coming to Australia cause an enormous amount of noise and hot air to be generated!
The US letās in large numbers of refugees, and there are large numbers of illegal immigrants, but to say āit costs the economyā is a very facile statement. In fact when illegal immigration was made difficult in certain Southern states, crops were left to rot in the fields, and food producers costs went up, so itās definitely not clear if illegal immigrants are a drain or not to an economy.
Likewise in the UK, how do we know that immigration is a boon or not? What does that even mean since all immigrants are simply people moving from one place to another and have individual histories and economic contributions. Everything needs to be fact checked and not taken verbatim.
[quote=āheadhonchoIIā]MM is right, you are falling into a trap of repeating things that you donāt have real statistics for, and you are the one who is going to suffer for it.
The US letās in large numbers of refugees, and there are large numbers of illegal immigrants, but to say āit costs the economyā is a very facile statement. In fact when illegal immigration was made difficult in certain Southern states, crops were left to rot in the fields, and food producers costs went up, so itās definitely not clear if illegal immigrants are a drain or not to an economy.
Likewise in the UK, how do we know that immigration is a boon or not? What does that even mean since all immigrants are simply people moving from one place to another and have individual histories and economic contributions. Everything needs to be fact checked and not taken verbatim.[/quote]
Fair enough, I donāt have stats on hand and maybe it does not cause strain on the economy.
Really? Got any figures on that?[/quote]
Seriously? Youāve never heard that these are issues in the US and UK?[/quote]
Then you should have numbers at hand.
Yes, I have heard my entire life about welfare cheats and the like, all the while the economy has roared along until the financial sector derailed it in 2008 (no welfare cheats or marriage frauds involved).
I also recall that when debt in Canada was exploding in the 90s it was shown that welfare contributed next to nothing.
This is all a ruse by the right wing and sadly manages to suck in a lot of otherwise sensible people.
Letās also not forget that much much poorer countries in the Middle East and Africa have massive refugee burdens, sometimes amounting to millions of people!
OP, howās your Chinese? There are several Chinese - English translating/interpreting MA courses around the UK. Thereās a poplar one in Newcastle and about three in and around London. I went back to the UK four years ago (after living on Taiwan for five). My wife had to go through all the VISA shenanigans to get citizenship. In the end we came back to Taiwan (been back for three months now). The UK has changed a bit, and not for the better. My once bustling town centre has been reduced to a collection of betting and charity shops. But I lived in the north eastā¦ Hopefully London isnāt as bad.
Really? Got any figures on that?[/quote]
No figures (who cares? The right have one set and the left have another) but plenty of first hand experiences. The issue is that most immigrants, illegal and legal, settle in certain places. The strain is absolutely apparent in our health service which is free at point of contact. In south Oxford, i always got an appointment, same day. Now, I live in west Gorton (whereShameless was filmed, if anyone knows about that), a very poor area with one of the lowest life expectancies in the Uk, it takes at least ten days to see a primary care physician. TB has re-emerged in east Manchester.
Itās very much a class issue, as one might expect in the UK. Our economy is in the shit and spending on education and health is not keeping up. For all the visceral hatred of racism I have, Iām a tourist. Iām the 1% (independent.co.uk/news/uk/th ā¦ 81876.html) and my hypothetical children will never have to fight for a place in the local school that has no ESOL provision and is made up of enormous classes of mostly immigrants. I can pay for private treatment for my neck, at the place my mother gets hers done on the NHS because she lives in a āniceā part of town: thereās a six month waiting list for people where I live. Where she lives is a hugely indigenous area: there are many third + generation Asian folk where she lives. Racism comes from white people with no choices experiencing a huge slide into 70s style poverty again.
It could be argued that these situations are manipulated in order to create a hostile working class who will continue to turn towards the right, a trend thatās been in evidence since the 80s. But thereās a lot of reality there, too. Numbers are not always helpful because settlement is not evenly distributed amongst the population: the countryās poorest, most disadvantaged communities bear the brunt of the influx, because thereās a cheaper rental market for housing in these communities, as well as established populations from certain countries. Overcrowding and strain on resources simply doesnāt affect middle class communities.
Ostensibly, the purpose is to stop marriage fraud, particularly from south Asia. This happens by students coming to visa mill language schools (um, all of them, including a lot of Russell group unis, until recently), establishing residency, bringing over a āwife and childrenā, then fighting for āright to a family lifeā under EU legislation and achieving right to remain. Children have a right to be housed, so social housing stocks are now rarely available to locals.
Thereās also the under 18 trick. Any unaccompanied minor claiming asylum must be housed. Special āchildrenās homesā are being built for adult men who claim asylum as minors, so that they can be segregated from actual children yet remain on the premises of childrenās residential homes. Vulnerable children from places such as east Africa are easy prey for organised crime groups and the very people they are trying to escape from. I know about this because I have family who work with these people. This is paid for by taxes.
UKIP were ostensibly a Thatcherite party with the goal of splitting from the EU. Labour are dead in the water after Blairās pro-Iraq war stance so there is no party that can reclaim the centre right. So basically, itās going to be this way until thereās a vast amount of public spending to take the squeeze off resources, or we break with the EU and close our borders more. Arguably, itāll be much easier for middle class migrants, then.
18000 is not unreasonable. Most of you in Taiwan have an education. If you canāt net that, how will you cope anyway?
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too much of this attitude
Thereās a difference between that kind of 70s racism and concerns about strain on public services from uncontrolled immigration. The second is a class issue: the existing (and not necessarily white) working class being told by the middle class left that their concerns are not valid because they are not being experienced by the middle class. Itās an insidious way of silencing those thick racist chavs: conflating real issues with immigration with racism further demonises the working class and provides the lower middle class Labour demographic with some sort of cohesive enemy.
UKIP and the Conservative party are not as politically short-sighted as the centre left, though.
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I donāt think the salary requirement is unreasonable either. But the way it is applied makes it practically impossible to move with your spouse and children.
The requirement works like this: you (the UK spouse) need to make Ā£18,600 in the year prior to applying for the visa for your (non-UK) spouse. You also have to have a job lined up that pays Ā£18,600 a year in the UK. The visa takes up to six months to grant now (UKBA inefficiency), so youāre asking a company in the UK to offer you a job now, but you donāt want to start work for at least six months. Not going to happen.
Of course the alternative is for the UK spouse to move first, find a job, then apply for the visa. But for many people with young kids, this spell of being apart ā which could easily be nine months, and perhaps more ā is unacceptable.
I donāt think the salary requirement is unreasonable either. But the way it is applied makes it practically impossible to move with your spouse and children.
[/quote]
Thatās true. I have just been reading up on how many families have been split up because of the way the law is set out. Quite frightening.
Sure, but having an across the board rule is to prevent racism. Itās to stop trafficking of women and children, and to stop families settling on student visas and not studying, and to trying to reduce the south Asian and Chinese grey labour and slavery market which undermines employment legislation. Itās fairer than saying āno Bangladeshi men on student visas (um, ok, so they kind of do that) and no Pakistani or Chinese wivesā.
I understand itās going to be difficult for you but as you say, UKBA are horribly underfunded and they arenāt about to start operating on a case by case basis any time soon.
Edit: Taffy, I hope you donāt think Iām being a dick: Iām trying to describe some stuff and donāt have any agenda here.
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Of course thereās always a justification when draconian laws are put into place. Itās to play the anti-immigrant card and win a few votes, nothing more, nothing less.
The UK is in trouble not because of itās immigration policies but because it economy , except for the SE, is in the shit, and North Sea oil is not there to cushion the blow. Immigrants are always a handy sector to target often not being able to vote.
Also surely there should be a difference between citizens rights and residents rights.
If you are a citizen, and you want to marry somebody or bring your kids to live with you, whatās the state got to get involved with? Citizenship has rights or it doesnāt. When you start dividing citizens to say āthis lot of citizens has more rightsā because they have money or their partner is from somewhere then you know you are in trouble.
I donāt believe this crap about preventing slavery blah blah for a second. This ad says it all, get the FEELING of it. Look at the facist imagery. Itās only a short step then to put ads up looking for information on illegal immigration, informer hotline etc.
Would the implications of the Metock verdict be applicable for the UK?
Itās a lot more nuanced than that, HH. Immigrants are not being targeted, the poor are. Itās a standard Labour middle class trope that poorer people have no agency and that they are manipulated by the political right into being racist. But this middle class does not experience the effects of a squeezed education and health service, so itās easy for them to just squeal āstupid chav racists!ā The white working class doesnāt vote much either: thatās how Labour was in power for all those years.
It is absolutely evident that migrants, illegal and legal are using my local surgery and the local catholic school is made up mostly of French-speakin migrants children. You can argue til the cows come home that the problem is not that they entered the country but that the government hasnāt built another school and staffed it with ESOL trained teachers, but the effect is that the poorest locals of every ethnicity (Britain was multicultural far before the last governmentās immigration policies opened up the borders) lose out. The solution is to spend more on public services or to ration those services and to give them to those who are already here seems reasonable.
We donāt have those vans in the north: they arenāt enough of a presence to have an effect. Itās not the dominant rhetoric, itās just an easy news story.
Policies that donāt paint with broad brush strokes are expensive to administer. Not going to happen in the current economy. Maybe in the future when Labour gets back in and starts borrowing again.
Slaveryās an emotive word, for sure, but it exists. A lot of it happens through outright smuggling such as a the Morecambe cockle pickers and Vietnamese nail bars (sounds weird, but beauty salons are a perfect cover for money laundering), but women and children are trafficked in and out of Britain with marriage a cover for that. A big issue in my district is south Asian women who are brought in to work in textile factories. In southwest manchester districts such as Rusholme, Bangladeshis come in on family visas and work for free in restaurants to pay off debts.
What is the solution?
Iām just trying to fill in some of the media dots, here, and to explain the background to it all as someone who has lived in both south Oxford and east Manchester constituencies in recent times. Iām not saying āyour wives shouldnāt be allowed into the UKā, if thatās not clear or you think that Iām trolling.
Not at all! I donāt have a problem with an across-the-board rule either. I agree with the requirement to show proficiency in English. I agree with the provisions against sham marriage, forced marriage and trafficking. I agree that new immigrants should have to show that they have the potential to support themselves (or be supported) without recourse to the public purse. These are sensible and logical conditions of entry.
I am British. My daughter is British. My wife is not. I am eminently employable in the UK, I make over the required income here in Taiwan. Both my wife and I are university-educated and multilingual, with white collar jobs. As it stands, the only way someone like me can return to the country of my birth is to move back first, and spend six months to a year away from my wife and young child.* Itās not right. Itās not proportionate. The rules have been designed not to weed out the undeserving or fraudulent, but to make migration so utterly unpalatable that it deters even wholly legitimate migrants who would benefit the UK economy from moving (and even the Telegraph says immigration is an overall benefit to the economy).
There is also the issue of (perhaps unintended) sexism here. As much as we like to imagine we live in a fully equal society where responsibilities are shared, women are still in the overwhelming majority when it comes to staying at home and looking after the children. If the UK spouse is a woman, her American husband could be making six figures working for Google, who are perfectly willing to transfer him to their UK offices, and it doesnāt count for squat. She has to hand over her kids to a stranger to look after, go and find a job in the UK paying Ā£18,600 and amass the required salary slips as proof before her husband can come over. Itās ludicrous.
Iād dispute that. Of course itās an easy news story, but this kind of rhetoric is the only kind coming out of government, and even Labour is talking a tough game on immigration. UKBA officers, who have no police powers, are stopping brown people in tube stations and asking for their papers. These are trial balloons, but you can bet that there are strong voices in government to roll them out nationwide. From ministers with responsibility for health, home affairs, immigration, and the economy, to education, they are all resolutely on-message when it comes to immigration. Foreigners bad!
As for a solution: there was nothing wrong with the old rules. They were proportionate, and reasonable. The kind of immigration that is (unfairly?) limited by these harsh new regulations is a drop in the ocean anyway. For the year ending June 2012 (before the introduction of the new rules), non-EEA family migrants totalled 29,500, while 649,000 other non-EEA nationals immigrated in the same period (some of those are students or otherwise short-term). The government doesnāt even have reliable statistics on EEA migrants, but they certainly beat the non-EEA migrants at least a couple of times over. So all of these ridiculous requirements and the heartbreak caused are there to pare a few thousand off a category which, in the grand scheme of things, hardly merits a mention.
*Or show an obscene amount of cash savings. No stocks, no property. I mean, who has Ā£62,500 in cash?
Ermintrude, you are again misusing the word racism, and youāre certainly misusing the word slavery in itās common form. I fully realize you are educated and very passionate about this topic as evidenced by your comments and thatās fantastic, but do you really think itās appropriate to be lumping so many social, economic, and political issues in with loaded words like racism and slavery? Iām certainly interested in reading more and I agree with much of what youāre saying, but you may want to tread a little more carefully when throwing around those powerful words you often use flippantly. Racism and slavery arenāt actually very interchangeable with words describing social issues. They have a life of their own and can very quickly veer the conversation in directions nobody intended it to go.
Please continue, Iām finding this conversation very interesting, and shocking actually. Those laws seem tremendously unfair. I wonder if Canada is the same and whether iām going to face similar issues when itās time for me to move back to my country of birth. 
[quote=āBrentGolfā]Ermintrude, you are again misusing the word racism, and youāre certainly misusing the word slavery in itās common form. I fully realize you are educated and very passionate about this topic as evidenced by your comments and thatās fantastic, but do you really think itās appropriate to be lumping so many social, economic, and political issues in with loaded words like racism and slavery? Iām certainly interested in reading more and I agree with much of what youāre saying, but you may want to tread a little more carefully when throwing around those powerful words you often use flippantly. Racism and slavery arenāt actually very interchangeable with words describing social issues. They have a life of their own and can very quickly veer the conversation in directions nobody intended it to go.
Please continue, Iām finding this conversation very interesting, and shocking actually. Those laws seem tremendously unfair. I wonder if Canada is the same and whether Iām going to face similar issues when itās time for me to move back to my country of birth. [/quote]
Yes.
Thank you for all the the replies everyone. What perhaps I should have mentioned in my original post was that I have researched the spouse visa situation (a little bit) and am aware of the cash savings requirement. Luckily I am in the position where I have cash holdings that exceed the GBP63,000 amount so we shouldnāt need to worry about that.
However some of this money is in fixed-rate bonds so if I need to cash some of those in and hold the money in easy access accounts that would be a pitta - the rates are so low in the UK these days :aiyo:
I think that both my wife and I have resigned ourself to the fact that there could be a six month break where we donāt see each other. I will have to go back first, find a job and start the visa applications etc. Itās tough but it is a price worth paying if we can get set-up in England.
Regarding the option of going back to do a Masters in Chinese translation that is something I would rather do in Taiwan to be honest. I have looked into it but never taken it any further. I would love to get a job where I could put my Chinese skills to good use - even if the pay was low.