My tuppence-worth.
I agree that the UK Government is completely inept when it comes to immigration control (and lots of other things)...and have been for decades. I agree that we should have enough border controls to actually manage to accomplish what they were originally set up to do, but which have
never been funded enough to work efficiently. I agree that our immediate unquestioning acceptance of all EU dictat has left us wide open to an influx of EU citizens on top of immigrants from other countries...and, between the UN and EU, getting rid of illegals is well nigh impossible. I agree we are a small country which needs to be more selective and limit annual immigration...and spread immigrants we allow in around the country a bit more as well.
Corrie..France doesn't do unquestioning acceptance of EU dictat....they look for loopholes and
use them to
their benefit. I'd not be surprised if, given the French influence on EU rules and laws, they don't build in the loopholes deliberately!
The UK Government, however, wouldn't recognise a loophole if it rose up and bit them on the bum....you just have to look at the way the rich can avoid taxes and the benefit cheats are so rarely caught to see that. The UK government does PC idiocy and incompetence to the level of the useless political degrees they think entitles them to tell us how to live our lives.....and that's the difference in attitude between the two countries.
I'm
not keen, however, and I don't believe Evie would have been, on the blanket daemonisation of those incomers who take advantage of the UK Government ineptitude....and less keen on anything which differentiates between the white and non-white groups which do so.....because that smacks of racism..and some remarks on this thread are veering dangerously close to that. For example obvious non-indigenous can
only apply to non-whites...while everybody knows that British citizens come in all colours, as do all EU citizens, all American citizens etc....and all tourists. Looking non-indigenous in BNP terms does not make one automatically an immigrant, legal or illegal,
or someone on benefits. Looking indigenous in BNP terms does not make one automatically British, legal, working and not claiming benefits. I am delighted to see that so many can recognise an illegal immigrant from a legal immigrant just by looking at them, and can further recognise a British citizen..but it does rather make one wonder why you do not then report them as soon as you recognise them as illegal...and start the process to send them on their way home.
Some actual immigration figures for you all....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jun/26/non-eu-immigration-uk-statistics#dataFrom that, you can see that much of the immigration to the UK is us reaping what we have sowed from the days of the Empire until now, via wars, interference in other countries, capitalist globalism and sycophancy. The comments on that article are interesting and illuminating, too....certainly more interesting and accurate than much of the biased troch propounded in the red-tops as fact and swallowed wholesale by too many of the British public.
I have little time for any but local papers nowadays, and the article on which this thread is based is a good example why I don't read them...but it is certainly much better fun basing threads on a headline from a newspaper which wouldn't know the difference between fact and fiction..it is a tendency on all forums nowadays, tbh, and drives me nuts.
The same information from
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16643677 doesn't read quite as vituperative, does it?
It found that 371,000 migrants made claims last year, the vast majority of which were legitimate.
The research suggests workers born abroad may be less likely to claim benefits than UK nationals. *
As of February 2011, there were 5.5m people receiving working-age benefits. Some 371,000 of those were foreign nationals when they first came to the UK, representing 6.4% of the claimants.
* Almost 17% of all British nationals receive these benefits compared with almost 7% of all those classed as non-UK nationals when they first arrived in the UK.
* More than half of those receiving a benefit had in fact at some point become British citizens, meaning they had the same rights as people born British.Not quite
370,000 migrants claiming benefits