Britain Urges Tougher Immigration Laws

[alp227]

Source: NYT

The British authorities on Wednesday announced plans to toughen immigration laws as the government tried to regain the initiative after spectacular electoral gains last week by a populist party that wants to curb migration and leave the European Union.

The proposed changes would make it easier to deport foreigners who commit serious crimes, increase fines on companies that use illegal labor and force private landlords to check the immigration status of their tenants. Temporary migrants would also be forced to pay for some health care.

The measures were announced at the start a new parliamentary session in a speech written by the government but delivered, as British constitutional protocol requires, by Queen Elizabeth II. The address is known as the Queen’s Speech and is conducted with much ceremonial pageantry.

The speech came days after the populist United Kingdom Independence Party won about a quarter of the vote in local elections last week across different parts of the country, sending shock waves through the mainstream political parties.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/world/europe/britain-urges-tougher-immigration-laws.html

[leveymg]

1. Perhaps, they should just build a moat around their little country, instead?

Blow up the tunnel and mine the Channel! There, now you're safe from those swarthy curry-eaters!

[dipsydoodle]

2. We've already got a moat.

.

[leveymg]

3. You don't say?

[Ghost Dog]

4. Many of us have learned

to feel and to be very open to and respectful of this profoundly deep-rooted and richly, floridly diverse, multicultural world.

[leveymg]

5. Xenophobia is a global disease.

Nothing unique to the Brits - no particular insult intended, except toward the National Front and kindred yob types.

[Yo_Mama]

7. The moat they have n/t

[GetTheRightVote]

6. This nation needs to put into place similar such actions...

We need to stop being concerned about parties, Democrat or Republican and be about keeping American citizens in jobs with the hope that it will improve our economy...we should be concerned about the citizens of this country staying employed.

There are so many visa and worker programs attached to the latest Immigration bill, S744, the corporations in this country must be really pushing it big time. I know that Facebook and Microsoft are big time. Mark and Bill can not wait. Let the in-sourcing and take over of American jobs begin...how naive are people in this country anyway.

The politicians and corporations are in bed together in reaching their goals and we as the American public do not even realize the really, really bad deal that this bill is for us, the working class, along with our future generations, our children/grandchildren.

Wake up please before it is to late !!!

[pampango]

8. From the UK right: Identity, family, marriage: our core conservative values have been betrayed

This could just as easily be from the US right

When politicians address them with questions such as "How do we repair the economy?", "How do we reform our educational system?", "How do we ensure a fair deal for pensioners?", there is one word in all such questions that stands out for them, and that word is "we". Who are we, what holds us together, and how do we stay together so as to bear our burdens as a community? For conservatism is about national identity. It is only in the context of a first-person plural that the questions – economic questions included – make sense, or open themselves to democratic argument.

Our situation today mirrors that faced by Burke. Now, as then, abstract ideas and utopian schemes threaten to displace practical wisdom from the political process. Instead of the common law of England we have the abstract idea of human rights, slapped upon us by European courts whose judges care nothing for our unique social fabric. Instead of our inherited freedoms we have laws forbidding "hate speech" and discrimination that can be used to control what we say and what we do in ever more intrusive ways. The primary institutions of civil society – marriage and the family – have no clear endorsement from our new political class. Most importantly, our parliament has, without consulting the people, handed over sovereignty to Europe, thereby losing control of our borders and our collective assets, the welfare state included.

Nevertheless, it seems unaware that in the hearts of conservative voters, social continuity and national identity take precedence over all other issues. Only now, when wave after wave of immigrants seek the benefit of our hard-won assets and freedoms, do the people fully grasp what loss of sovereignty means. And still the party hesitates to reverse the policies that brought us to this pass, while the old guard of Europeanists defend those policies in economic terms, seemingly unaware that the question is not about economics at all.

In other matters, too, it is not the economic cost that concerns the conservative voter but the nation and our attachment to it. Not understanding this, the government has embarked on a politically disastrous environmental programme. For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways. Conservative voters tend to believe that the "climate change" agenda has been foisted upon us by an unaccountable lobby of politicised intellectuals. But the government has yet to agree with them, and meanwhile is prepared to sacrifice the landscape if that helps to keep the lobbyists quiet.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/11/identity-family-marriage-conservative-values-betrayed

It sure seems that conservatives in every country read from exactly the same script. It is eerie who similar this sounds to what we hear from republicans every day here.