Immigration Bulletin

1. ONE IMMIGRANT A MINUTE ARRIVING IN BRITAIN

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23379537-details/'One%20immigrant%20a%20minute%20arriving%20in%20Britain'/article.do

1,500 foreigners arrived in Britain each day in 2005, intending to settle for at least a year

Foreign immigrants are arriving in Britain at the rate of one every minute, a startling new report reveals.

At the same time the number of UK citizens emigrating to live abroad equates to one every five minutes.

The figures emerged less than a week before Romania and Bulgaria are due join the European Union on January 1 - giving 30 million more people the right to enter and work in Britain.

The latest EU expansion is expected to unleash another huge wave of immigration similar to that seen in 2004 when eight former communist states joined the Union.

The analysis of official Government immigration statistics by the MigrationWatch think tank found that 1,500 foreigners arrived in Britain each day in 2005, intending to settle for at least a year - just over one for every minute of the day.

Today's report claims those figures are probably a dramatic under-estimate, as counting methods focus on three main airports, largely ignoring coach services and budget flights to regional airports favoured by eastern Europeans.

Officially only 65,000 eastern Europeans were classified as immigrants but the study suggests the real figure could be twice as high.

The net outflow of British citizens leaving to live abroad rose to 107,000 last year - equivalent to one Briton quitting the country every five minutes, or almost 300 per day.

The UK also experienced a net inflow of 800 foreign immigrants each day - the total of newcomers arriving to settle here, minus the number of foreigners leaving Britain after living here for a period.

Taken together those figures provide a striking illustration of the pace of change imposed on British society by population movements, with net immigration trebling in scale over the past ten years.

Despite the focus on the numbers of immigrants arriving from eastern Europe in recent years, the MigrationWatch study shows that this inflow accounts for only a fifth of total immigration, most of which comes from Africa and Asia.

The largest group of migrants were people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, who accounted for two-thirds of net immigration.

According to the Office for National Statistics Britain's population rose by 500 people per day last year, or 185,000 over the year.

That figure is slightly down on the previous year's figure of more than 220,000, but was still the second highest in Britain's history.

MigrationWatch called for tougher measures to reduce immigration from outside the EU to 'manageable and realistic levels', and to impose tougher controls on countries hoping to join the EU in future.

Chairman Sir Andrew Green said: 'The tripling of net foreign immigration in the past 10 years has largely resulted from what the Government likes to call 'managed migration' routes, such as principally work-related migration and family reunion.

'Firm action is long overdue to limit immigration from non-EU countries which are the main source of this immigration. '

Sir Andrew claimed the Government had not thought through the consequences of record immigration levels, and the true costs were only now becoming apparent.

'They have been trying their best to obscure what is really happening by pretending that this mass immigration is a success, even though it is the result of Government miscalculation and neglect.

'But the strains in terms of schools, health and housing refuse to go away - not to mention the impact on the employment prospects of British people as the unemployment numbers steadily increase.'

Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, said: 'We have warned the Government time and again that immigration can be a real benefit to this country only if it is properly managed, taking into account its effect on the economy, public service infrastructure and social cohesion.

'So far the Government's estimates have been absolutely woeful.'

Ministers are refusing even to guess how many people will flock to Britain once Romania and Bulgaria join the EU next Monday.

In 2004 they predicted that some 13,000 a year would arrive from the eight new member states, but since then an estimated 600,000 have arrived.

Home Secretary John Reid has announced measures which he claimed will control numbers, but critics point out that Romanians and Bulgarians will enjoy free movement in and out of Britain, with no limits on those coming as self-employed workers or as working students.

2. SANGATTE'S CRIMINAL GANGS NOW HOLD KEY TO REACHING BRITAIN

Sangatte's criminal gangs now hold the key to reaching Britain

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1978408,00.html

Tomorrow, in the bitter cold of early morning, the men will leave the culverts, the thin sleeping bags under plastic sheets stretched over drains, the makeshift camp in woods and, before the police arrive to round them up, walk into the centre of the city.

They will pass the morning hunched around burning wooden freight pallets on waste ground between a canal and railway tracks. At noon a charity will hand out cold pasta, bread and bananas. The afternoon will drag by until, on a dockside near the lighthouse with the waves of the Channel slapping freezingly against the concrete seawall, a second meal will be handed out by a second charity. The men will eat a few hundred yards from the ferries that will eventually bring many of them, illegally, dangerously and expensively, to the UK and then will disperse for another frigid night.

'This is not a life,' sniffed Noor, a 17-year-old Afghan. 'This is just survival. But I've come so far I cannot stop now.' Noor, who arrived in Calais last Thursday after a journey that started
in Pakistan six months ago, knows that many of those wrapping their cheap jackets around them and stamping their feet in the chill will be gone in 24 hours. The thought is both comforting and frightening. A score or so of his companions will have been arrested, a couple taken to hospital with hypothermia, some may eventually be deported by French authorities - but a dozen or so will have made it across the Channel:

'I don't know how long I will be here. I am sick of this life, but I have nowhere else to go.'

No one knows exactly how many of the shifting population of migrants reaching Calais achieve the 'promised land' of the UK, but interviews last week with NGO workers, administrators and law enforcement officials revealed that, despite the battery of security measures now in place, somewhere between 200 and 350 slip through each month.

'Around 70 or 80 migrants cross the Channel each week,' said Jean-Claude Lenoir, of the Association Salam. 'One hundred crossed in a single night in early November.'

Four years ago, a Red Cross-run centre at the village of Sangatte on the outskirts of Calais was closed by the hardline French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy at Britain's behest. At its busiest, it housed more than 1,000 migrants waiting to cross the Channel. An estimated 65,000 stayed there on their way to Britain. The centre has disappeared, as have the lurid headlines its existence provoked, but the problem has not.

'The situation is now as bad as before, but is just less visible,' said Jacky Verhaegon, of the French charity Catholic Help, who has been working with migrants in Calais for six years, 'The centre was shut down, and that led to a dip in numbers, but now they are as high as ever. Yet there are no facilities for the migrants. They just hang around in the streets, sleeping where they can, washing when they get the chance.'

Verhaegon was talking in his charity's Calais office, where around 50 destitute, homeless young migrants can shower and shave each day. Almost all are young Afghans, plus a few migrants from north and east Africa. 'We come from everywhere and are all going to one place:
England, inshallah,' said Mohammed Beg, 18, from Kabul, whose father, a surveyor, works for a foreign NGO in the city.

The composition of the migrants has changed with world politics, according to observers. The old Sangatte centre saw large numbers of Kurds and Kosovans. Now, along with the Afghans, increasing numbers of east Africans are arriving as wars grip Sudan, Somalia and, intermittently, Eritrea.

The influx from Africa has meant more women. Monique Delannoy, a nurse with Medecins du Monde, says that few female migrants risk the police sweeps in Calais, remaining instead scattered in isolated woods or on beaches around the town. Between April and September, doctors working for the NGO in Calais saw 96 women, seven of whom were pregnant, and 80
children. Local government statistics reveal that a fifth of the 500 migrant juveniles logged this year in the city come from sub-Saharan or east Africa and almost half are girls.

'There at least a hundred women living in appalling conditions out in the countryside around Calais, hiding out from the police, surviving on virtually nothing,' Delannoy said. 'There were three families living in a hut they had built on a dock, but it was bulldozed a week or so ago
and now we don't know where they have gone.'

According to Delannoy, most women are waiting while husbands or brothers negotiate with the agents to get them across the Channel: 'Some will no doubt be left behind if the price is too high.'

Crossing the Channel is a highly organised, highly lucrative criminal business. Gang wars have broken out - leading to a death in September - between groups running the racket. According to security officials, the days of mass rushes to board lorries travelling in the right direction are over. Now migrants are unlikely to try to board a lorry, train or boat themselves, waiting instead for agents, to whom they or their families pay large sums, to get them across.

Sitting with a dozen boys round the fires on the Quai de Moselle was Dani, 26, from Eritrea. She had travelled from her home town of Asmara to Sudan before flying to Holland. 'I had religious problems and there was fighting in my homeland,' she said. She was vague about her route
to Calais, unable to name cities she had been ferried through. Now she was waiting for an agent to arrange transport to the UK. She wanted to go to Britain because English was the only language she spoke, she said haltingly.

For Afghans such as Noor, the journey across two continents is frightening, dangerous and insecure. He grew up in a refugee camp outside the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar but, having lost everything in the continued fighting in his homeland, his family was unable to return to Afghanistan. As an Afghan with only refugee status in Pakistan, Noor was unable to go to a local university to fulfil his ambition to study to be an accountant. After several attempts to obtain a UK visa at the embassy in Islamabad, he persuaded his father to sell the family shop to pay $10,000 to a people trafficker.

'The trafficker told me he could get me to Turkey legally,' said Noor. 'In fact, he left us in Iran. I spent weeks crammed into a tiny room with 20 other clandestine migrants. Another agent took us across the mountains, but we were attacked by guards with dogs and scattered. I spent a week with no food in the hills on the frontier before crossing, then five months living rough on the streets of Istanbul. But always I dreamed of England. I just want to study. ' Like Dani, Noor stressed that, as he spoke only English, he needed to get to the UK to fulfil his dreams of education and a good job: 'In France, I would be lost.'

Arrested by Bulgarian border guards after an abortive attempt to leave Turkey on foot, badly beaten by soldiers during a month in a Turkish prison, Noor reached Greece in an overcrowded speedboat on a dangerous midnight crossing. It took three weeks of attempts, living in a
makeshift camp by the coast, to smuggle himself on to a ferry into Italy. In Paris he met someone he had known in Pakistan who had been deported from the UK a few months before, but had made his way back to France to try again.

'I am determined, ' Noor said, his voice cracking. 'How can I go back and face my family if I fail? My father gave everything for me to get to England.'

A wall on the Quai de Moselle is covered in graffiti in curling Urdu, Arabic and Pashto script. One key question for Shawfiq Khan Niazi, Jamal Shah 'from Islamabad', Ahmad Ahmadzai Afghan, Raza Ghanyaz and all the others who have scrawled their names across its face is, why
not just remain in France? Why such determination to get to the UK?

One answer lies in colonial history - the linguistic and familial links are the legacy from Britain's south-west Asian imperial adventure - but another lies in the degree to which Britain has become mythologised as a sort of attainable US-style liberal economic and social paradise. For
one group of Eritreans, the UK was attractive because 'it is easier to work on the black market there and you earn more money than in France'.

Others were convinced, erroneously, that education and housing were more accessible than in Europe and asylum easier to obtain. In fact, France accepted 18 per cent of asylum seekers between 2000 and 2005 whereas the UK accepted 17 per cent. 'Look at how the French treat us here,' said Waqa, a 15-year-old Afghan. 'The police arrest us and throw tear gas bombs in our tents and there is no help from the government at all. Britain must be better than here.' In fact, says Verhaegon the aid worker, Eritreans stand a very good chance of getting asylum in France if they apply. South-west Asians are less likely to be successful.

Local authorities blame the UK for the problem. The communist mayor of Calais no longer comments on the issue - 'Everything has already been said a thousand times,' said a spokesman - but his chief adviser, Bernard Baron, told Le Monde that the real culprit was the 'outlaw social policy of the British'.

Such rows make little different to the few hundred global transients semi-stranded on the docksides of a grim, grey, northern European port. By five o'clock in the evening, the thin light of a winter's days is dimming and the migrants huddle closer round their fires. The Eritreans
have found some cans of strong lager and are shouting and singing raucously. The younger, quieter Afghans pull closer together around their own bonfire. Noor indicates his tattered clothes and the dead rats and rubbish on the ground: 'Look what I have become, look how I
live. This is not what I dreamed of.'

A short history

· The Red Cross refugee centre in a Sangatte hangar opened in 1999 and housed 67,000 migrants over three years.

· In December 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett and French counterpart Nicholas Sarkozy made a deal to close it.

· As part of the deal, Britain agreed to take 1,023 people from the camp whether they were refugees or not.

3. RECORD ILLEGAL IMMIGANT LANDING IN ITALY

http://www.workpermit.com/news/2006_12_26/italy/record_illegal_immigrants_sicily.htm

Nearly 650 illegal immigrants crammed in a 25-meter, old and leaky fishing boat, reaching the Italian island of Sicily on 19 December and sparking criticisms of the center-left government's immigration policies.

The 648 immigrants, 21 of whom were women and seven children, declared themselves as Egyptian nationals. They were taken to migrant processing centers on Sicily to determine their identities.

Their boat, first spotted by Italian fishermen about 42 kilometers south of the Italian island on the afternoon the day before, was towed into the port of Licata shortly after midnight by the Italian Coast Guard. Italian authorities had dispatched a dozen ships to intercept it.

A number of the illegal immigrants jumped into the water when they saw the rescuers approaching, risking the capsizing of the boat, officials said.

Thousands of would-be immigrants reach Italy illegally each year after crossing the Mediterranean Sea on, often unseaworthy boats. The southern Italian island of Lampedusa, just over 200 kilometers to the southeast, received more than 10,000 illegal migrants in the first six months of this year, according to authorities

But Tuesday's was one of the biggest single landings in recent history and prompted criticisms from Italy's centre-right opposition parties.

‘Safety has gone bankrupt: the umpteenth landing of 600 illegal immigrants proves that the messages of compliancy issued by our government encourage smuggling,’ Maurizio Gasparri of the right-wing National Alliance party said.

‘The government's immigration policies are irresponsible, ‘ Roberto Cota of the anti-immigration Northern League party said. ‘It is doing everything possible to encourage illegal immigrants to come here, including imprudent ministerial announcements and vote chasing.’

Compared to the previous centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi, Prodi's centre-left administration has taken a softer stance towards immigration in the belief that foreign workers are needed to take up jobs that Italians no longer want.

This summer, for instance, the government approved the arrival in Italy of an extra 350,000 non-EU workers. The government is also considering shortening the time it takes foreign residents to be granted Italian citizenship.

The European Union has recently agreed on several plans to cooperate with African nations to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. During the summer, a marine border patrol called Frontex was established, which is likely now to receive a larger, more permanent mission along with
increased funding and more equipment. Job centers will be established in African nations to attempt to allow a larger volume of legal immigration, and several aid packages have been developed to assist local economies.

Speaking on 18 December, the United Nations' International Migrants Day, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said Italy should favor integration but should also stop immigrants from reaching the country illegally.

Spain and France, both targets for illegal entry into Europe, have been working with Italy for over a year now to increase participation by the entire Euopean Union and the European Economic Area to to cooperate in creating comprehensive solutions to these problems.

4. WILL IMMIGRATION BLEED BULGARIA OF ITS PEOPLE?

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2287183,00.html

Bulgarian towns are shrinking, and the birth rate is falling rapidly. Now Bulgarians are worried that even more of their young people will leave after the country joins the EU on Jan 1.

The young have left town and most factories are closed but many Bulgarians in places like Belogradchik wonder whether membership of the European Union will be any help.

Most of the people who fled the northwestern town after the fall of communism in 1989 went to the EU, a bloc which Bulgaria and neighboring Romania will join on January 1.

In the past 17 years Belogradchik' s population has fallen from 11,000 to 6,500, according to deputy mayor Angel Dzhuninski.

Many streets are nearly deserted and fields lay fallow.

The town's biggest employer, a manufacturer of phones for the Russian market, now employs only 100 people compared to 2,600 in communist times.

‘It will be a problem to bring home the young people who are now working in Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain, Austria and the Czech Republic,’ said Dzhuninski.

Many went to Western Europe on three-month tourist visas and stayed on to work clandestinely in farming, hotel and construction business or as home nurses.

The owner of a small inn, Parvoletka Mladenova, said most of the migrants are doing the dirty and low-qualified jobs that wealthy Europeans do not want.

‘Friends, a couple who were a doctor and a nurse, went to care for elderly people in Greece,’ she said.

The Bulgarian Academy of Science estimates that more than one million people have sought work abroad since 1989, when the country's population was nine million. The mass emigration of young women has aggravated a demographic crisis.

Between 1990 and 2004 the population slumped by 1.2 million to 7.76 million people, according to official census data.

Bulgaria has one of the world's lowest birth rates with a ratio of 1.2 children per mother in child-bearing age. Its child mortality rate is 12.3 per thousand, compared to the European average of 4.5 per thousand.

Parliament approved this year a plan to encourage births. It offers longer and better-paid maternity leave and improved childcare, allowing young mothers to get back to work soon after giving birth.

At Mezdra, another small northwestern Bulgarian town, half of the 30,000 population has gone in the past 15 years, Mayor Ivan Asparuhov said.

But unemployment has been halved to 11 percent thanks to restructuring in the textile, brewing and quarrying industries and the arrival of tourism.

More babies are being born and ‘we are opening new kindergartens’ but some 400-500 young people are leaving the region every year to seek better jobs, Asparuhov said.

Last Wednesday, Germany became the latest EU nation to restrict the number of Bulgarian and Romanian workers that will be allowed for two years after January 1.

Sweden and Finland are the only members of the pre-2004 EU to openly say they will not restrict Bulgarian workers.

5. BRITAIN SHOULD BAR DOCTORS WITH POOR ENGLISH - CORONER

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23379092-details/Britain%20should%20bar%20doctors%20with%20poor%20English,%20says%20coroner/article.do

Britain should ban European doctors with poor English from practising in Britain, a coroner said Thursday.

Dr. Paul Knapman, coroner of Westminster in London, recorded a verdict of misadventure on a man who died as his French doctor struggled to make himself understood to an ambulance operator.

‘The telephone call between the doctor and the London Ambulance Service took rather longer than would be expected, mostly due to the linguistic difficulties of the doctor being understood,’ Knapman said.’I say that this is a case of misadventure.’

Knapman said he would write to the Health Secretary, the government's senior health official, asking her to review legislation that allows any doctor from European Union member countries to work in Britain, regardless of their English.

Many other European countries insist that doctors speak their languages adequately before they can practise.

In 1981, the then Conservative government abolished a language test for doctors from elsewhere in Europe and doctors have not had to prove an ability in English since then.

But doctors from outside Europe still have to take a test.

‘Any doctor from any (European Union) state such as France, Latvia or Lithuania can enter the United Kingdom and practise medicine privately,’ Knapman said.

‘He has to show no ability to speak English to a standard acceptable to ambulance personnel, to referring hospital doctors, or to referring cases.’ ‘He may practise in anesthetics in a private hospital or do private cosmetic operations.’

6. EAST EUROPEANS DRIVING ASIANS OUT OF WORK

http://www.dailyindia.com/show/95115.php/East-Europeans-driving-UK-Asians-out-of-work

Asian labourers in Britain have recently been claiming that the increasing number of workers from Eastern Europe, and especially those from Poland, are driving them out of business.

In fact, the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has already called for better ‘integration systems’ to be put in place.

A spokesman for the Institute of Race Relations, Arun Kundnani, told the British newspaper Eastern Eye that: ‘We are aware of the phenomenon. It would be too simplistic to blame the government's immigration policy, but there is an inherent bias that encourages entry (to Britain) of certain groups. ‘At the moment, the system is in favour of East Europeans’.

And that fact is, of course, the key to the whole problem, because the European Union theoretically promises free movement to the people who live within the Union to go anywhere within the Union and look for work.

Since the European Union has recently expanded, workers from the new member states, not unreasonably, want to move to where the work is and where the wages are higher. That, in reality, usually means Britain.

The problem is exacerbated, however, by the fact that the new immigrants are often willing to work for around half the local going rates and, with the market economy now prevalent throughout Europe, that means the cheapest wins.

As Arun Kundnani went on to say: ‘The realities of our voracious labour market are such that it encourages us to pursue the lowest wages and forces everyone to compete with each other. The only solution would be to bring a certain sense of collective campaigning by workers of all communities to challenge this system’.

Perhaps Mr. Kundnani is unaware that such a system already exists. It's called unionisation, and it seems that the very reasons that brought unions into being in the nineteenth century, rampant capitalism and the concomitant exploitation of workers, are, sadly, as widespread today as they were then.

But it is not just the cheapness of Polish and other East European workers that is causing concern to the Asian community, as Jas Karan Singh, president of the West London Asian Society explained: ‘People used to come to Southall to experience its unique culture and atmosphere. But these Polish people are changing all that. I was forced to move house because of their drunken fights in the middle of the night.’

Unfortunately, these problems are unlikely to be solved any time soon, and they could get even worse in the coming years as even more countries, like Bulgaria and Romania, join the European Union. What happens if and when Turkey also joins is anyone's guess. (ANI)

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