Monthly Archives: January 2014

Nick Robinson’s Immigration Truthspeak – An Outsider’s View

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I wrote this up while watching Nick Robinson’s “The Truth About Immigration”. After it was over, I rearranged a few things, but except for the last couple of paragraphs it was nearly all written as I watched. However, after having digested it for a minute, I think I can sum the whole thing up much more briefly.

Nick Robinson: How is it that a subject that was once taboo is now on every poltician’s lips? Why is it that the doors to Britain were flung open and what are the benefits and what are the perils of now seeking to close them?

Why is it now a major issue and what is the truth about immigration?

Shorter fisking: What Robinson covers is all old hat. See the BBC’s “White” Series for evidence that most of what he rehashes has been done before. In addition, everyone by now knows what Labour did and why. This is a dishonest discussion if one side of the issue is a strawman. Most people do not want to close the door, full stop. I suppose that makes for good TV, but it’s not honest.

What is the truth? Why is this issue now such a big deal that the BBC feels obligated to go over all this again? Aside from the obvious current event of Bulgarian and Roma(nian) immigration, Spot the missing murder of Lee Rigby with the murderer explaining himself on camera. Spot the missing no-go areas. Spot the missing imams preaching jihad. Spot the missing grooming gangs of Rochdale and Manchester. Spot the missing mass murders of 7/7.  Spot the missing discussion about how the BBC got it wrong as well, which was part of Robinson’s statement to the Mail.

I think that about sums up the BBC’s approach to the truth.

Longer version, if anyone’s interested:

So we’re expected to believe that the BBC’s original Young Conservative is straying off the reservation, are we? Sorry, no.

It’s all a big deal now, we’re told. Illegal immigrants are being told to go home. Robinson emphasized “illegal”. And what, exactly, were illegal immigrants being told until this national conversation hit an all time high? Oh, sorry, wrong national debate. I was momentarily stunned by hearing a BBC journalist use the words “illegal” and “immigrants” in the same sentence. I’m just so used to hearing them censor that word in their dishonest reporting about the issue in the US.

Notice the footage Robinson chooses to accompany that line. The police are clearly approaching someone who has just snuck across the border. This is an entirely different topic than the real concerns about immigration in Britain. By conflating the two from the outset, Robinson has already muddied the waters. Whoops, that’s a racist comment these days, isn’t it?

Nick’s Big Question: Why is it now a major issue?

Answer: Anything except third-world extremely fundamentalist Muslims coming in en masse and setting up segregated enclaves and not only maintaining those extremely fundamentalist behaviors and refusing to integrate, but causing certain local problems and then being enabled by politicians, police, and a BBC willing to kowtow to any demand in the name of political correctness and to give two fingers to their political opponents, as well as because they’re afraid.

I hadn’t even watched seven minutes of this before I could see it’s mostly a load of tired old talking points, and would ultimately be a dishonest approach to the issue. If the issues Robinson presents as the main concerns weren’t already talked about enough to be well covered, why did the BBC do that whole “White” Series a few years ago? What was “The Poles Are Coming” about, then? It was a deliberate attempt to control the national debate on this issue, and to demonize those who thought it might be a problem. If it wasn’t already a well-known concern, why was Mrs. Duffy such a story? The BBC was just as quick to paint her as a racist as any politician was.

And what about “White Girl”? That particular facet of the immigration issue was entirely absent from Robinson’s supposed truth about it. And let’s not pretend it’s not the main reason immigration is a hotter topic than ever.

Nick Robinson and the BBC think you’re all stupid. We could tell from their reactions to public complaints about Mandelapalooza, and Evan Davis more recently gave DB a hint of it: they hold you in contempt, now more than ever.

Another question – in two parts – left unanswered: If so many immigrants were needed, as Robinson states, to fill all those jobs, how many British people were unemployed at the time and why are there so many more now? Secondly, why was unlimited immigration the answer instead of training the citizens? Surely there must be a difference in cost – on several levels – between the two options. As was evident from the “The Poles Are Coming” episode, the “lazy British” Narrative has become an immutable object at the BBC. Now they don’t even think it’s worth addressing. It’s a given. Not a single moment was spent asking about  what to do with the unemployed youth in Britain.

(Side note to Nick Robinson and his producer: You really should have resisted the temptation to use the cute “boom and bust” reference there. It only highlighted how dishonest the BBC has been about that issue as well.

Other side note: I admit it’s nice to see Nick Robinson presenting politicians as being scheming and damaging rather than protecting and defending them, like he did for the Blair/Brown relationship or as the expenses scandal was at its height.)

I’ll grant that it’s good that Robinson got Labour politicians to admit how slimy they were on their policy, but if it’s just David Blunkett saying they were “on the side of the angels”, and Jack Straw saying Labour got it wrong, then the debate gets shifted to whether they were right or not, rather than how dishonest they were the entire time. Yvette Cooper was shown as trying to have it both ways, so nothing enlightening there, either.

Robinson, being of course ruled by the BBC’s requirement to remain impartial, leaves it there. For balance against three Labour politicians, two of whom essentially defended the policy without much reservation, we got Michael Howard. Oh, right, Robinson himself is supposed to count as being on the Right in this case, yeah.

The one saving grace of this entire hour was the part where Robinson showed non-white immigrants complaining about the same things that concerned the first round of complainers, meaning it can’t be called racist anymore. I know a couple people here have brought that up recently, and I imagine it would come as quite a shock to those who trust the BBC for their news on important issues. Unfortunately, it’s easy to predict that the BBC will forget all about that immediately and will be quickly back to calling it racist.

So David Cameron is putting a limit on “net immigraton” is he? How will that work out, Nick? No prizes for guessing. To make matters more pathetic, after going over the whole “We needed mass immigration to fill the jobs” theme, Robinson takes that to the next level to show that you need mass immigration to fill all those student slots at universities. Apparently, the university system will be economically threatened if you worry about the questionable student applicants and don’t let in enough proper ones.

Then we get to work permits. Um, what’s this about skills and the ability to speak English? Didn’t we meet some Eastern European kids who were picking strawberries and were told this is an example of the kind of jobs Britain vitally needs filling? Aren’t those the low-wage jobs lazy British young people won’t do, so limiting immigration to skilled workers will harm the economy? Of course that’s so, and Robinson is keen to tell you later on. He doesn’t have to come out and say it at this point, as that wouldn’t be, you know, impartial.

Then Robinson says that Cameron’s statement about allowing in skilled workers needed now (chefs in the shown example) – but he wants to train the next generation of home-grown workers – is a “blunt” message to stop hiring foreigners. Blah, blah, blah. This makes it all the more lame that Robinson didn’t flat out ask the practical question about training and unemployment I mentioned above.

Ultimately, Robinson tells us, immigration is a great net benefit to Britain. The only question now, apparently, is what’s the best plan to make it work more smoothly in future.

No. That’s not the question at all. Robinson asked at the start, why is this such a big deal now? He doesn’t dare touch the real answer.

I know why the BBC can’t touch the real answer. It’s because those of you who do want to shut the door (or at least put much more stringent limits than Cameron wants) want it shut mainly – and are talking about it more loudly than ever before, which is allegedly also what Robinson is meant to be investigating – because of the factors the BBC refused to address. So they just have to present that side of the argument as some phantasm. Everyone on camera is talking about limits, amd figuring out some common sense, not shutting it down, full stop. Yet Robinson frames that side of the argument in its extreme version. He and his producer know full well what they’re doing. This only makes it more galling that he avoided discussion of the BBC’s influence in the whole thing, after recently saying they made a “horrible mistake”.

This is a major public debate like never before because of things like the murder of Lee Rigby and the seemingly endless stream of stories about Muslim grooming gangs, not because a few Slovenians are picking strawberries for less than Wayne and Kaylee get on the dole. The primary reason it’s such a big deal now that even the BBC has to admit it is the reality of things like Tower Hamlets and Anjem Choudary, not Polish glass workers who moonlight as DJs and Bangladeshi students wearing the hijab at some hip university. That shot of the latter from the part where Robinson is discussing the need for students is almost like they’re taunting you. The only reason I’m noticing something subliminal is because I’ve been prepared to notice it. Perhaps they’re so far out of reality and intellectual honesty that they don’t realize what they’ve done.

Sure, Robinson at least briefly lays out the more general concerns along the way about too much pressure on communities and services, jobs, benefit migration, and people feel like they’re losing their own neighborhoods. But the only time Islam comes up is when he casually mentions that the Muslim population has rapidly doubled, as if it’s just another color in the rainbow.

If one thinks that the real reason unlimited immigration is such a hot-button topic right now is limited to jobs, then one will feel that Robinson has successfully opened the way for a more honest debate about the pros and cons of immigration. But it surely can’t be an honest debate if he reduces one side of the argument to some people wanting to “shut the door once again”. He doesn’t present anyone as saying they want the polar opposite of unlimited immigration, so why the reductio ad absurdum for only one side?

“Perhaps it’s time to have that open and frank discussion we’ve really never had.”

If only. And this documentary avoided that frank discussion at every turn. The BBC can now claim to have successfully addressed the issue, but they will only be lying to themselves, and to you. So where was the part where Robinson talked about how the BBC got it wrong? Where was the part where Robinson discussing how and why the BBC made a “horrible mistake” in suppressing concerns about unlimited immigration? The BBC has more influence on the national debate of every issue than any politician or political party could ever hope to achieve in their wildest dreams. Blaming politicians and I guess the media in general ignores the very real influence and deliberate policy the BBC had on the issue over the last decade, and still has now. This documentary is evidence of their desire to influence it.

“Echo Chambers” – An Alternative To The BBC Feature

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Last November, the BBC website created the “Echo Chambers” feature, and assigned one of their experienced editors and journalists, Anthony Zurcher to curate it. The mission statement as he originally stated it is this:

Welcome to Echo Chambers, a new blog about opinion and commentary in the United States and around the world.

The purpose of this blog is to discover and present quality opinion journalism wherever it may be – to find value amid the noise. We’ll unearth interesting material and underreported views from the BBC, on the world’s newspaper opinion pages, and in think tank reports, magazines, blog posts and scholarly journals. The venue isn’t important; the content is.

A condensed version of this is permanently in the upper right corner of the Echo Chambers page.

Unscrambling the noise of the global debate, from social media to scholarly journals, Kansas City to Kathmandu.

As has been pointed out many times, I’m not a professional journalist and so cannot understand the arcane arts, but to me, this means that the blog is meant to make some sense of the chatter on both sides of an issue. After all, we’ve been told countless times by journalists and defenders of the indefensible that this blog is just a Right-wing echo chamber, and we often complain that the BBC functions as a Left-wing echo chamber. We all know the drill about Fox News or the Guardian, each often described as an echo chamber for their own side of the political spectrum, and intellectually lazy people who want to stifle debate simply dismiss any point made or evidence offered from either as invalid, simply due to the source, relieving the accuser of the need to address the actual point itself. Media in both the US and UK have become highly politicized, from local newspapers and obscure blogs all the way up to national papers and network and cable news. There’s far more opinion-mongering going on everywhere these days than actual objective newsgathering and reporting. In fact, even the top outlets like the Washington Post and the BBC are moving more and more towards opinion journalism.

One would think it’s a good idea to try and sort through the noise and attempt to distill it down to some semblance of reality, to point out merits or flaws in arguments coming from each side of an issue. The question for the BBC’s Echo Chambers feature, then, is does it meet its remit?

Zurcher’s opening mission statement was that he intends to “find value amid the noise”, and the permanent mission statement is to “unscramble the noise”. In practice, it seems that, with the exception of a weekly list of links about various topics, the installments are  mostly an exercise in Left-wing editorializing. Much of the time, Zurcher is basically presenting stuff from the mainstream Left-wing echo chamber as value in reaction to an issue which seemed to be momentarily gaining traction from the Right. His choices of who writes quality opinion is revealing. One has to give him credit for being one of the more industrious BBC journalists. He sure cranks out a lot of these in a short space of time. A list of links to my analyses of several of his pieces can be found in the comments section of this post about it by Daniel Pycock. Personally, I’m sick to death of opinion journalism, and I think it’s done far more damage to public discourse than help crystalize any ideas. But again, I’m not a professional journalist, so not qualified to judge the priest caste.

With this in mind, I’m going to try a little experiment. For the next five Echo Chambers installments (not including the next simple list of links), rather than do my usual long-winded parsing and complaining, I’m going to attempt an alternative version of what I think it says on the tin. That is to say, I’ll try to actually present a few opinion pieces on whatever topic catches Zurcher’s fancy. I won’t read his piece, just check the title and the opening lines to see what the issue is. I’ll even use his title. Then I’ll curate my own collection of “value”, adding my own brief (I promise) comments so the reader gets the idea of what I think is going on. Each one will include a link to the BBC Echo Chambers piece, and everyone can view them side-by-side and judge for themselves not so much if I’m doing a great job, but whether or not Zurcher is really doing his properly, and just how much of a Left-wing echo chamber he lives in. I may or may not link to the same things he does. Without reading it in advance, I’ll have no idea. If I do, it’s purely coincidental. This whole thing is nothing more than opinion journalism on that level anyway, and anyone who has read two or three of these things will know in which bubble Zurcher lives.

So, below is my first installment. Four more will follow as and when.

*********************

Senator Ted Cruz, still Canadian

One of the most prominent politicians on the Right these days is Ted Cruz, the Republican junior Senator from Texas. He was elected on the strength of Tea Party backing, and in these days of desperation for a fresh face is already being touted as a possible presidential candidate in 2016. Many on the Left see him as a possible threat because he is Hispanic, and identity politics is a very important tool for them. So he’ll most likely get more attention early on than a junior Senator with no experience would otherwise. Sounds familiar, somehow. Cruz is also hated on the Left because of his support for last year’s government shutdown. In other words, there’s a big target on his back.

So it was inevitable that people would start looking for something on Cruz. As it happens, he was born in Canada. His mother was a US citizen at the time of birth, so US law says he’s a citizen at birth, regardless of where he was born, even though his Cuban father was not. Cruz claims he didn’t know because he was told in his youth that he had to make some official affirmation to finalize his Canadian citizenship, and since he never bothered, he forgot all about it. It’s actually automatic, no need for him to do anything. Of course, it’s impossible to prove he’s lying.

The noise first started, really, back in March 2013, after he introduced Sarah Palin as keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). One of her main topics was gun control and the Obama* Administration’s press for more and stricter background checks in the aftermath of the mass murder of children at a school in Newtown, CT. At one point, she made quip about maybe we should have started checking his background first.

You can guess what happened next. Rick Ungar in Forbes saw support for Cruz as “Birther Hypocrisy”.

While Palin’s return to birtherism accomplished the intended laugh from the appreciative crowd, there was someone in the room who was likely not laughing.

That would be Senator Ted Cruz—the man who so glowingly introduced Ms. Palin and a man who clearly views himself as being on a populist track to the White House. He’s not alone in that regard as four percent of the votes registered in the CPAC straw poll were cast in support of Mr. Cruz, the man often referred to as the Republican Barack Obama.

Ironically, there can be little doubt that among those who expressed their support for a Cruz presidency at CPAC were attendees who continue to question the current president’s constitutional right to hold the office.

While there is no legal question about Cruz’s eligibility, it was quickly revealed that he was also a Canadian citizen, which is what happens when one is born there. So there was a call for him to renounce his Canadian citizenship, partially to make a point, and partially because many would consider it a little odd for a President to be a citizen of another country. As Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News explained in August:

What’s a birther to do? After years of haranguing Barack Obama as a non-citizen, what about Ted Cruz, who acknowledges he was born in Canada? He isn’t just a U.S. citizen. He has dual citizenship as both an American and a Canadian. Cruz says he’ll renounce his Canadian citizenship, but it’s not clear whether that’s enough to satisfy the birthers in his party who have long claimed at President Obama was born in Africa and therefore ineligible to be president. Obama was born in Hawaii. But most constitutional scholars agree that even if he had been born in a foreign country, he’s still a natural-born citizen under the terms of the Constitution because he is the child of an American parent.

Slater goes on to say that true Birthers claim – erroneously, of course – that nobody even born in a foreign country can be President. Cruz quickly promised to renounce his Canadian citizenship by the end of the year.

Steven Lubet in the Left-leaning Salon snarkily pointed out that there might be some complications in the process:

Only one of Ted’s parents was a citizen when he was born (his father is a Cuban émigré who did not take U.S. citizenship until 2005), and he therefore falls under a special section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that applies to “Birth Abroad to One Citizen and One Alien Parent.” Under that provision, Cruz only qualifies for American citizenship if his mother was “physically present” in the United States for 10 years prior to his birth, five of which had to be after she reached the age of 14. The only definitive way to prove Eleanor Cruz’s 10 years of physical presence would be with documents such as leases, school registration, utility bills or tax records.

Of course, we don’t know how rigorous the Canadians are about evidence of citizenship, but we do know that they will not be willing simply to take Ted’s word for it. Their form is very specific about requiring documentary proof, and that might be hard for Ted to come by. Could that be the reason for Cruz’s delayed renunciation? It would be pretty embarrassing to have his Application to Renounce Canadian Citizenship denied on a technicality.

In other words, in order to renounce Canadian citizenship, Cruz first has to go through a laborious record-collecting  process to prove his US citizenship. This was picked up in the Left-wing blogosphere and other outlets, and the Left thought they smelled ironic birther blood.  It’s now the new year, so naturally those who seek to undermine him are going to check up on it. It turns out he hasn’t officially done it yet, hence the noise this week. Why hasn’t he followed up on his promise? It should be a straightforward process. So are the Left-wing birthers on to something? Kelly McPartland from Canada’s National Post seems to think so.

Some immigration experts are wondering why it’s taken Mr. Cruz so long to complete the paperwork for his renunciation. “It’s not complicated at all,” said Stephen Green, an immigration lawyer in Toronto, according to the Associated Press.

Richard Kurland, a Vancouver-based immigration attorney, agreed: “Unless there’s a security issue that hasn’t been disclosed, unless there’s a mental health issue that hasn’t been disclosed, there’s no reason for anything other than a lickety-split process to occur.”

Hmmm. Well, something must be holding up the works, which is why Mr. Alexander should seize this opportunity to get involved. Ted Cruz is an American caught in the talons of Canadian citizenship. We need to set him free.

Yes, the Left-wing echo chambers like the Daily Kos are getting excited over this, but I’m having a hard time finding actual opinion pieces on it. Rather than seeing a lot of noise in the echo chambers which must be unscrambled, I’m seeing that almost everyone is pretty much reprinting the same Canadian Press/AP piece over and over, or quoting the relevant bits like McPartland has done. Wayne Slater in the Dallas Morning News is doing the same thing in his opinion piece. Is there anything in the Right-wing echo chamber about this? Not that I can find. I haven’t spent hours searching, and at this point it’s pretty clear that anything will be more speculation or a simple dismissal, repeating what’s already been said.

I suppose one way to look at this is that if the Right is silent, that means they’re afraid of the truth. Alternatively, they could simply feel that it’s already been proven that Cruz meets the definition of a natural born US citizen, especially since nobody is doubting that his mother didn’t live in the US for ten years before he was born, and don’t care about this. In other words, it’s exciting for the Left, who have only speculation to go on, and that’s about it. There’s nothing edifying either way other than the one supposition quoted by the AP. We’ll have to wait and see.

* I’m refraining from my usual formulation of “The Obamessiah” and the quasi-religious capital H in “Him”, etc., because I do that to make fun of the BBC’s reflexive worship and near religious devotion, and it’s not appropriate for what I’m trying to do here.

SHUTTING THE GATE…

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Aw, bless ’em. The BBC must have been so upset by the revelations from former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates indicating that Obama did not have faith in the merit of the administration’s strategy, despite his decision to order a “surge” in troops to the region, that it is buried in the main news portal today! See if you can find it; Hint, it’s below a Schumacher story….

Comedians will always have the last laugh, Mr Gove

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Joan Bakewell tells us politicians won’t win against the comics….

Something the BBC knows and employs to great effect on its comedy programmes:

It is an unwise man who picks a quarrel with comics. They may not be right; indeed, you may be. But they have the jokes. And that means laughter and the warm regard of the public.

 

However…

Perhaps politics is now seen by the public as so discredited that it’s time to bring on the clowns. In which case, more than a few will be in for a shock. Running the country is no laughing matter.

 

 

‘Public Opinon Is Very Incendiary On This’…..Immigration

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The census clearly shows that the decade preceding 2011 saw the greatest rise in the population in England and Wales in any 10-year period since census taking began growing by 3.7 million or 7.1 per cent. Some 55 per cent of this growth is due to immigration, immigration that primarily occurred under New Labour’s watch.

 

Interesting that the BBC has filled the airwaves all day with talk of immigration….based on Nick Robinson’s programme ‘The Truth about immigration’. and filled the right wing newspapers with his interviews…..shouldn’t all these debates be after the programme has aired….or is it all just the usual BBC trick of having a ‘news’ item which is actually no more than an extended advert for a TV programme?

Curiously, despite Nicky Campbell admitting this morning that ‘Immigration is of massive consequence to people’...and that nearly 80% of people want it reduced,  the programme is not (yet) on the ‘Featured’ section of the iPlayer, nor is it in the ‘Most Popular’, in fact I had to use the search facility to bring the programme up at all.

 

Campbell’s ‘Your Call’ this morning was based upon Robinson’s programme….and wanted your views and experiences of immigration.

The accepted orthodoxy of the programme was that immigration was good….we were constantly told that ‘studies show that immigrants have a beneficial effect upon the economy’….there was no examination of this, it was just taken as fact.

‘As a fact economists tell us that overall immigration makes us richer.’

And yet that just isn’t true…..

Limit immigration, warns House of Lords

The number of immigrants entering Britain should be capped, an influential House of Lords committee has warned.

Its analysis concludes that record levels of immigration are bringing no economic benefit to the country.

The overall conclusion from existing evidence is that immigration has very small impacts on GDP per capita, whether these impacts are positive or negative. This conclusion is in line with findings of studies of the economic impacts of immigration in other countries including the US.”

 

Even those studies that do show a benefit admit that the ‘impact is small…..positive, albeit small’

So no, not ‘all studies show immigration is economically beneficial’

 

The BBC gives the impression by not balancing any such benefit against the downsides, that the benefits are large scale.

Campbell brought on an academic whom Campbell assured us was strictly neutral and unaligned…well, no…he had a very definite bias…pro immigration.

He told us that immigration benefits us by £45 billion per annum….but oddly didn’t mention any costs….so the figure of £45 billion is just pure propaganda.

When a caller suggested that immigrants undercut wages and cost jobs his response was….‘of course it’s difficult but we live in a global economy’.

 

There is a stark contrast between what the academics and the likes of Campbell tell us and what the ‘man on the street’ who has to live day to day with the effects of mass immigration is saying.

Again and again callers told us that they’d lost out, either with very much lower wages or no jobs at all…never mind housing and access to schools and the NHS and the myriad of other problems immigrants bring but which are ignored by the BBC and Co.

The BBC’s line has been a constant mantra on all its programmes and news bulletins today that immigration is economically beneficial and that to limit immigration will therefore damage the ‘already fragile economy’ as Sheila Fogarty claimed…but the flip side, the negative effects of immigration just aren’t mentioned….or indeed whether those ‘benefits’ actually exist.

 

The very minimal, if any, benefits of immigration, are being hyped by the BBC whilst completely ignoring the social impacts and the damage to quality of life….which is in contrast to the BBC’s normal stance in which it denounces capitalism, money making, materialism and consumption and promotes as the better alternative, quality of life and the environment…hug a hoodie and a polar bear.

Campbell’s tone when talking to the different callers was markedly different….the pro-immigration callers had a much warmer reception… Campbell telling one he looked forward to hearing from him again.

 

Campbell had some interesting comments of his own to make which might inform us of his own leanings.

When a caller spoke of the ‘indigenous population’ Campbell asked:

‘What do you mean by indigenous population, we’ve had waves of immigration for years and years now?’

In other words…Campbell thinks there is no such thing as an ‘indigenous population’.

At odds to that po-immigration campaigners always tell us that the ‘indigenous population’ has nothing to worry about….there is no mass immigration…numbers have been exaggerated…it’s only say 13% of the population who are immigrants.

So…that would mean 87% are ‘indigenous’ based on that figure.

 

He went on to say ‘Public opinion is very incendiary on this,’

So the near 80% of people who want immigration controlled and brought down have an ‘incendiary’ view in Campbell’s opinion?

 

 

Sheila Fogarty also based her programme on immigration.

Here once again the BBC repeated the mantra…‘all studies show immigration is economically beneficial’…without quantifying exactly how much…or indeed questioning that at all.

However the two ‘expert’ speakers who were brought on both stated that the economic benefits were ‘small’….but such qualifications never made it to the news bulletins.

Here is the blurb from the programme which gives us a insight into the BC’s own view…which you can always judge by what it highlights:

A BBC survey suggests fewer people than ever think immigration damages the economy.

 

Depends of course who you ask…..ask someone who has a cheap plumber or nanny and they might think it’s great, ask someone with no job or a job on wages forced ever lower by cheap imported labour and the answer may well be different…but again that all ignores the social impact and the quality of life issues.

Fogarty had on Jenny Phillimore, Professor of Migration and Superdiversity from the University of Birmingham, Institute for Research into Superdiversity…supposedly another of these ‘neutral’ academics…but she was far from that…more like a campaigner than a impartial observer.

The real migration scandal in the UK are the people forced to live without any recourse to public funds. Migrant women who leave violent husbands, and women who have been trafficked into the UK to work in the sex industry, face the additional trauma of destitution, says Jenny Phillimore

 

Should an academic also be a campaigner? Can you then trust their research?

There are plenty of social scientists, says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, who never produce research results at odds with their own worldview.

“You’re just supposed to tell your peers what you found,” says John Leo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “I don’t expect academics to fret about these matters.”

 

Phillimore though does ‘fret‘ about her findings…and works to provide a solution to the problems as she perceives them to be.

She is fairly arrogant and patronising.

Phillimore thinks the problem is not the immigrants, diversity is just something you need to get used to.

The problem is people in areas which haven’t experienced mass immigration before and where there isn’t much diversity now

They are clearly stuck in their ways with their old prejudices…they are far too used to a stable society….unlike those say in Brimingham where they all happily mix together and happily welcome new immigrants because they are such a diverse society already….allegedly…funny how it is always the inner cities that ‘burn’ when racial tensions kick off.

 

Even Phillimore admits herself that previous immigrant populations don’t like immigration:

 

In other words her claim that societies with lots of immigrants are more welcoming to yet more immigration is false…a lie in fact.

 

And what of a ‘stable society‘?…isn’t that a telling remark?…immigration brings instability then…the ‘superdiversity’ means no one has any identity, no one trusts anyone, no one knows anybody…and society breaks up…as studies show.

 

The downside of diversity

A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

 

 

Phillimore goes on…the main problem is the ongoing negative rhetoric about immigration…..there are not anywhere near as many immigrants in this country as people think she claims.

In other words…shut up..you’re not allowed to talk about immigration.

 

Who then pops up on Fogarty’s show but one ‘Phil Mackie’ (around 13:10)…the BBC’s very pro-immigration journo…yes, another one to add to the long list.

Curiously his analysis was exactly the same as Jenny Phillimore’s…curious indeed…yes, it’s those ignorant rural hillbillies who are the racists….what they need is a few more black faces around to make them realise that they have nothing to fear and that a massive wave of immigrants is just the thing to improve their lives.

 

Here Phillimore admits there are problems…just that the solution is not to limit immigration but to ‘deal with it’…..keep the borders open but build more houses, schools hospitals, prisons, cough up more welfare payments, build more roads, concrete over the green and pleasant land….it’s not the number of immigrants that is the problem it’s the lack of help they receive from government and the attitudes of the ‘indigenous population’…should such a thing exist….

Time for change

In this era of superdiversity in the UK it is time for a housing and migration change of plan, says Jenny Phillimore

The census clearly shows that the decade preceding 2011 saw the greatest rise in the population in England and Wales in any 10-year period since census taking began growing by 3.7 million or 7.1 per cent. Some 55 per cent of this growth is due to immigration, immigration that primarily occurred under New Labour’s watch.

There is evidence that in some areas heavy concentrations of new migrants have restricted the availability of entry level housing, led to the development of unregulated HMOs, and pushed rents and house prices up. It is also clear that some landlords have been quick to cash-in on migrant housing demand by inflating rents, overcrowding properties, and neglecting fire safety and routine maintenance.

Some rural areas have also seen extensive changes. Rural Lincolnshire has seen some of the largest rises in the numbers of migrants of all of the UK with increases outstripping those in London and other cities. Again these increases do impact on house prices while lack of housing availability contributes to an explosion in the use of non-standard accommodation with migrants sometimes living and working in sheds and greenhouses or crammed into caravans and mobile homes. Migrants are often the victims of these problems rather than the cause but the net result is increased population density and a deteriorating environment and housing stock.

Much of the emphasis [from politicians] is upon greater controls and limits, strong action against ‘illegal’ migration and short and long-term action on intra-EU migration – the latter a clear attempt to pander to UKIP voters.Cooper fails to acknowledge that not only has the UK already become a country of immigration but, like the rest of the EU, we have entered an era of superdiversity where we have already witnessed unprecedented global movement and increase in diversity.

Movement and change are the new norms.  While we might want to slow these movements down by strengthening our borders we cannot turn back the clock.

 

TALIBAN MORE SINNED AGAINST THAN SINNING…

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The BBC have covered the story of the little Afghan girl who was detained wearing a suicide vest in southern Afghanistan, I happened to catch BBC Today early this morning, before 7am. John Humphrys introduced the item by asking the BBC correspondent IF this story could really be true. It’s as if he couldn’t believe how wicked these dark age savages really are and preferred to imply this was black propaganda deployed by the Afghan Government.

BBC: Laughable Bias Against George Osborne’s Proposed Cuts…

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Biased BBC contributor Daniel Pycock writes

“If you thought the BBC were pushing the “too far, too fast” line last time, just wait for more of their output regarding George Osborne’s planned cuts between 2014-16. Take a look at this most recent article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25617844

I count thirty four sentences in total, of which seven contain what Osborne actually said. There are another seven ‘neutral’ sentences dedicated to paraphrasing the government’s position. This means that there are another twenty sentences with which to flood the article with criticisms from: Trade Unions (loony left), the Labour Party (left), the Liberal Democrats (left) and the BBC’s own Nick Robinson (nominally a wet conservative).

Ed Balls got four sentence-paragraphs of criticism in there – more than I can remember any Shadow Conservative Chancellor getting (especially with comparable poll ratings). Nick Robinson basically rebuts everything that Osborne suggests, and only Robert Peston (in a side-box) provides some sort of supportive comment.

Now, I’m no massive fan of George Osborne (I do not support ring-fencing DfID, Health, or among other things, the perpetuation of our pensions ponzi-scheme); but I think that, given the alternatives offered, he is at least advancing a semi-respectable position regarding the national finances. See if you get that impression or not from the BBC…”