IMMIGRATION BULLETIN

1. TESCO SNUBS BRITISH JOBSEEKERS FOR POLES

http://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/content/news/story.aspx?brand=ENOnline&category=News&tBrand=ENOnline&tCategory=news&itemid=NOED10%20Jan%202007%2012%3A19%3A42%3A533

Jobseekers wanting to work at a city Tesco store have reacted angrily at claims
by the supermarket it was forced to recruit from Poland because it could not
fill the positions locally.

As previously reported by the Evening News, bosses from the Blue Boar Lane branch
in Sprowston staged a recruitment fair in Poland after being unable to find staff
in the city and five per cent of the 650 staff at the store are now Polish.

But people desperately looking for jobs in the city have contacted us claiming
that they had applied to Tesco for work, only to be told there were no vacancies
available.

Walter Green, of Plantsman Close in Norwich, said he went to the customer service
desk at the Blue Boar Lane store several times last year and was told there were
no jobs.

The 70-year-old, a trained carpenter who lives with his wife Elizabeth,68,said:
‘I applied for any job going but as they said there were no jobs I never got as
far as filling in an application form.

‘I wanted some extra money to help tide me and my wife over because the pension
here is not exactly great.

‘I was just looking for a part-time job and I would have been prepared to do
anything. I would have helped stack shelves.’

Stephen Ling, 57, of St Mildreds Road, West Earlham, filled in an application in
autumn last year to work in any position in the store.

‘They replied saying they had no vacancies to suit me,’ he said.

Mr Ling is a trained butcher and has a temporary job on a chicken farm which is
about to come to an end.

‘I feel a bit peeved. I've got nothing against the Polish, but it's the fact the
management said the local people don't want the jobs when we do,’ he said.

Elaine Berks, of Gertrude Road, Norwich, said: ‘My son and I have both tried to
get employment with the Blue Boar Lane branch and failed. What do they want-brain
surgeons? It's rubbish that they can't get suitable employees here.’

Antony Preston, who lives off Aylsham Road in Norwich, said: ‘I have been phoning
the store and calling in and I don't think the Polish people did so why aren't
they taking me on? I am really angry.’

Tesco owns 107 stores in Poland and employs more than 20,000 people there.

The UK has seen increasing numbers of Polish migrant workers ever since the
country entered the EU three years ago.

A Tesco spokesman said: ‘Without exception we try to employ locally first. That
people were looking for work does not necessarily mean Tesco was recruiting at
the same time.

‘It's great we've so much interest for work.

‘For store jobs it's always a good idea to keep an eye out there first.’

The spokesman added: ‘We would be delighted to receive local interest in the future
when positions become available.’

2.  NORFOLK POLICE LET OFF VANDALS BECAUSE THEY'RE FOREIGN

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2534997,00.html

TWO criminals caught on CCTV vandalising cars were not prosecuted because police
said they were unemployed foreigners and to bring them to justice would cost too
much.

One victim received a letter from Norfolk police saying the pair would not be
prosecuted because they were both foreign nationals with no jobs and no income
and the case was ‘not in the public interest to pursue due to the expenses
incurred in having a trial’.

The disclosure was greeted as a further example of police forces’ excessive
pandering to criminals. This weekend Derbyshire police were criticised for
refusing to release pictures of two escaped murderers because to do so might
have infringed their human rights.

The latest case involved the vandalism of at least five cars in Norwich. Two
men, aged 19 and 29, were arrested on suspicion of damaging cars but a Norfolk
police spokeswoman said that after ‘careful consideration of all the evidence’
it was decided to deal with the offenders by way of a police caution.

Barry Ferguson, 29, one of the victims of the vandals, who are in the country
legally, said he was dismayed by the decision. ‘Even though these people were
caught in the act they are getting away with wanton vandalism,’ he said.

‘I can’t believe the police have spent all this money on CCTV and then have not
bothered to charge them.

‘There would be outrage if a British person got away with this but it is being
justified in this instance because these people are foreign with no income. What
is the point of having CCTV if these crimes are ignored?’ The police spokeswoman
said: ‘Any decision is tested against the attorney-general’s guidelines. It has
absolutely nothing to do with their ethnicity or level of income.

‘This caution, whilst not a conviction, is added to their police record and can
be cited in court should they reoffend. The victims, if they wish to do so, can
pursue compensation through the civil courts.’

Norman Brennan, director of the Victims of Crime Trust, said: ‘It is only right
and proper that anyone who carries out any type of crime should face the courts.
Being jobless, foreign or anything else is no excuse for letting people off.

‘The long and the short of it is that we are making excuses for not dealing with
those who commit crime.’

3. POLES LIVING IN ABANDONED FACTORY

http://www.wigantoday.net/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=66&ArticleID=1969830


AN INVESTIGATION has been launched after Eastern European workers were found
living in a disused Wigan paintworks factory.

We can reveal eight economic migrants, who have arrived here legally from Poland
under EU rules to escape poverty in their native land, are being housed in the
former Foscolor plant, off Bickershaw Lane, Bickershaw.

Wigan Council launched an investigation after inquiries by the Evening Post and
claims by an angry neighbour that the building was being used for accommodation.
Enforcement officers made an unannounced visit to the rural site yesterday
(Thursday) and found evidence that the building was in residential, rather than
industrial, use.

They are concerned about living conditions for the Polish workers, as well as a
potential breach of planning regulations.

After talks between the council and Blakeley's Waste Management, which also owns
the neighbouring Foscolor sites, the firm has now agreed to submit an immediate
planning application for change of use in an attempt to authorise the 'hostel.'
Blakeley's boss Stephen Blakeley was said to be unavailable and no other company
spokesman was available for comment.

The company receives up to 50 lorry loads of rubbish for recycling each day but
the building concerned has not been used by the firm since around October last
year.

Yesterday, a reporter and photographer from the Evening Post were escorted off
the site and an attempt was made to stop us from taking photos of the office
building which it is said is being used as a hostel.

We were told: 'This is a private road you are on - you can't take photographs.'
There were no signs of occupation from the outside although the windows were too
dirty to be able to see through clearly. However a single bulb could be seen
alight inside the building.

The allegations came to light after Blakeley's applied for retrospective
permission for a new waste recycling building on the foundations of the old
Junction Colliery buildings.

Metro senior planner Dennis McBride visited the Blakeley's plant less than 100
yards away, in connection with the retrospective bid for a new plant.

He told planning committee councillors that he saw 'no sleeping bags or obvious
signs' of workers living at the waste firm itself. But he had not at the time
been able to check the Foscolor works nearby.

A spokesman for the council said: 'Two enforcement officers visited Blakeley's
and accessed the building on Thursday.

'They found evidence that it appeared to be under residential occupation by
eight persons, which means there has been a material change of use from its
previously approved status.

'Blakeley's have been informed about the situation and have now agreed to submit
an application seeking approval for the change of use.

'It would not be appropriate to comment on whether it would be successful at
this stage.'

However, Greater Manchester Fire Service has confirmed that there is no breach
of fire safety regulations, smoke alarms have been fitted and fire escape route
notices posted in Polish.

4. EU PLANNING EUROPE-WIDE WORK PERMIT 

http://euobserver.com/9/23226/?rk=1


A European Commission proposal for an EU green card scheme is to be
launched later this year, despite EU member states having different
rules and regulations in their labour markets.

The introduction of a US-style green card in the EU would give highly
skilled migrants easier access to the 27-member bloc.

'We are going to make a specific proposal for the admission of high
skilled workers. We foresee a green card,' a commission official told
Reuters.

'The green card would be valid in the 27 EU states, to be attractive,'
the official added.

The EU executive is to present the proposal for a directive on an EU
green card in the second half of 2007. The details are still being
hammered out.

But such a proposal could face resistance from EU member states, which
have previously fiercely opposed EU interference within their labour
markets.

Up to now Germany - which currently holds the rotating EU presidency
and which already has its own green card scheme - is one of the
countries that has spearheaded opposition to any cross-border policy on
legal migration, saying its labour market is a purely domestic matter.

To make an EU green card become a reality all EU countries would have
to agree on the scheme.

The systems of legal immigration differs from country to country in the
EU, with most allowing only limited new immigration except for family
reunification and work permits for people with specific skills and a
contract.

Even within the union, movement between some old and new member states
remains subject to restrictions.

The word 'green card' comes from the first version of the US resident
card which was printed on green paper and which gives the holder
permission to permanently reside and take employment in the US.

EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini has previously said that the
idea of a directive on the conditions of admission to the EU for highly
skilled workers -- including the possibility of an EU green card --
responds to an 'economic necessity'.

He said the US, Canada and Australia are able to attract talented
migrants while Europe continues to receive low-skilled or unskilled
labour.

6. MULTICULTURALISM UNDERMINES COMMUNITY – NOTED SCHOLAR

This article from the States describes how ethnic diversity destroys trust
between people – the necessary basis of a society that is both organised and
free. Although matters in Britain are not yet as extreme as in Los Angeles,
California, we’re well on the way.

www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_01_15/cover.html 

‘Multiculturalism doesn't make vibrant communities but defensive ones. In the
presence of diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of
diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust
people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who
do look like us.’

-Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam

It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity
social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize
as political science professor of the year, Harvard's Robert D. Putnam,
a former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing
about the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling
Alone, confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest
research discovery-that ethnic diversity decreases trust and
co-operation in communities-was so explosive that for the last half
decade he hadn't dared announce it 'until he could develop proposals to
compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it 'would have
been irresponsible to publish without that.'

In a column headlined 'Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity,'
Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of 'civic engagement,'
a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities: When the data were
adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more
people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the
loss of trust. 'They don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the
local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust
institutions,' said Prof Putnam. 'The only thing there's more of is
protest marches and TV watching.' Lloyd noted, 'Prof Putnam found trust
was lowest in Los Angeles, 'the most diverse human habitation in human
history.''

As if to prove his own point that diversity creates minefields of mistrust,
Putnam later protested to the Harvard Crimson that the Financial Times essay
left him feeling betrayed, calling it 'by two degrees of magnitude, the worst
experience I have ever had with the media.' To Putnam's horror, hundreds of
'racists and anti-immigrant activists' sent him e-mails congratulating him for
finally coming clean about his findings.

Lloyd stoutly stood by his reporting, and Putnam couldn't cite any mistakes of
fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was 'almost criminal,'
Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the spin that he
had spent five years concocting. Yet considering the quality of Putnam's talking
points that Lloyd did pass on, perhaps the journalist was being merciful in
not giving the professor more rope with which to hang himself.

For example, Putnam's line-'What we shouldn't do is to say that they [immigrants]
should be more like us. We should construct a new us'-sounds like a weak parody
of Bertolt Brecht's parody of Communist propaganda after the failed 1953 uprising
against the East German puppet regime: 'Would it not be easier for the government
to dissolve the people and elect another?'

Before Putnam hid his study away, his research had appeared on March 1, 2001 in a
Los Angeles Times article entitled 'Love Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A.' Reporter Peter
Y. Hong recounted, 'Those who live in more homogeneous places, such as New
Hampshire, Montana or Lewiston, Maine, do more with friends and are more
involved in community affairs or politics than residents of more cosmopolitan
areas, the study said.'

Putnam's discovery is hardly shocking to anyone who has tried to organize a civic
betterment project in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. My wife and I lived for 12
years in Chicago's Uptown district, which claims to be the most diverse two
square miles in America, with about 100 different languages being
spoken. She helped launch a neighborhood drive to repair the dilapidated
play lot across the street. To get Mayor Daley's administration to chip
in, we needed to raise matching funds and sign up volunteer laborers.

This kind of Robert D. Putnam-endorsed good citizenship proved difficult
in Uptown, however, precisely because of its remarkable diversity. The
most obvious stumbling block was that it's hard to talk neighbors into
donating money or time if they don't speak the same language as you.
Then there's the fundamental difficulty of making multiculturalism
work-namely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans,
Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape
a park is harder than fostering consensus among people who all grew up
with the same mental picture of what a park should look like.

For example, Russian women like to sunbathe. But most of the immigrant
ladies from more southerly countries stick to the shade, since their
cultures discriminate in favor of fairer-skinned women. So do you plant
a lot of shade trees or not? The high crime rate didn't help either. The
affluent South Vietnamese merchants from the nearby Little Saigon
district showed scant enthusiasm for sending their small children to
play in a park that would also be used by large black kids from the
local public-housing project.

Exotic inter-immigrant hatreds also got in the way. The Eritreans and
Ethiopians are both slender, elegant-looking brown people with thin Arab
noses, who appear identical to undiscerning American eyes. But their compatriots
in the Horn of Africa were fighting a vicious war. Finally, most of the
immigrants, with the possible exception of the Eritreans, came from countries
where only a chump would trust neighbors he wasn't related to, much less count
on the government for an even break.

If the South Vietnamese, for example, had been less
clannish and more ready to sacrifice for the national good in 1964-75,
they wouldn't be so proficient at running family-owned restaurants on
Argyle Street today. But they might still have their own country.

In the end, boring old middle-class, English-speaking, native-born Americans
(mostly white, but with some black-white couples) did the bulk of the
work. When the ordeal of organizing was over, everybody seemed to give
up on trying to bring Uptown together for civic improvement for the rest
of the decade. The importance of co-operativeness has fallen in and out
of intellectual fashion over the centuries.

An early advocate of the role of cohesion in history's cycles was the
14th-century Arab statesman and scholar Ibn Khaldun, who documented that
North African dynasties typically began as desert tribes poor in everything
but what he termedasabiya or social solidarity. Their willingness to sacrifice
for each other made them formidable in battle. But once they conquered a
civilized state along the coast, the inevitable growth in inequality
began to sap their asabiya, until after several generations their
growing fractiousness allowed another cohesive clan to emerge from the
desert and overthrow them.

Recently, Princeton biologist Peter Turchin has extended Ibn Khaldun's analysis in
a disquieting direction, pointing out that nothing generates asabiya like having a
common enemy. Turchin notes that powerful states arise mostly on ethnic frontiers,
where conflicts with very different peoples persuade co-ethnics to overcome their
minor differences and all hang together, or assuredly they would all hang
separately.

Thus the German heartland remained divided up among numerous squabbling
principalities until 1870. Meanwhile, powerful German kingdoms emerged on
Prussia's border with the Balts and Slavs and Austria's border with the Slavs and
Magyars. Similarly, the 13 American colonies came together by fighting first the
French and Indians, then the British. In this century, two world wars helped forge
from the heavy immigration of 1890 to 1924 what Putnam calls the 'long civic
generation' that reached its peak in the 1940s and '50s.

Half a millennium after Ibn Khaldun, Alexis de Tocqueville famously attributed
much of America's success to its 'forever forming associations. There
are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take
part, but others of a thousand different types-religious, moral,
serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very
minute. Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the
intellectual and moral associations in America.'

The transformation of economics into a technical rather than empirical field
discouraged hard thinking about co-operation. It was much simpler to create
mathematical models based on the assumption that rational individual self-interest
drove human behavior, even though that perspective could hardly explain
such vast events as the First World War, that abattoir of asabiya. In
the 1990s, the importance of civil society was widely talked up as
crucial in transitioning post-Soviet states away from totalitarianism,
but the free-market economists' prescription of 'shock therapy'
prevailed disastrously in Russia, as gangsters looted the nations'
assets.

An important contribution to the scholarly revival came in
Francis Fukuyama's 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of
Prosperity. Fukuyama raised the hot-potato issue that Americans,
Northwestern Europeans, and Japanese tend to work together well to
create huge corporations, while the companies of other advanced
countries, such as Italy and Taiwan, can seldom grow beyond family
firms. (As Luigi Barzini remarked in The Italians, only a fool would be
a minority shareholder in Sicily, so nobody is one.) Fukuyama prudently
ignored, though, the large swaths of the world that are low both in
trust and technology, such as Africa, Latin America, and the Middle
East.

As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late
1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of
trips south of the border raised questions. Venturing onto a Buenos
Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists.
Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers
painted on the pavement, but only about one in three Argentineans
followed that custom. Another third straddled the stripes, apparently
convinced that the idiots driving between the lines were unleashing
vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the maricón lanes
altogether and drove wherever they wanted.

The next year, I was sitting on an Acapulco beach with some college friends,
trying to shoo away peddlers. When we tried to brush off one especially
persistent drug dealer by claiming we had no cash, he whipped out his
credit-card machine, which was impressively enterprising for the 1970s.
That set me thinking about why we Americans were luxuriating on the Mexicans'
beach instead of vice-versa. Clearly, the individual entrepreneurs pestering
us were at least as hardworking and ambitious as we were. Mexico's
economic shortcoming had to be its corrupt and feckless large
organizations. Mexicans didn't seem to team up well beyond family-scale.

In America, you don't need to belong to a family-based mafia for
protection because the state will enforce your contracts with some
degree of equality before the law. In Mexico, though, as former New York
Times correspondent Alan Riding wrote in his 1984 bestseller Distant
Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, 'Public life could be defined as
the abuse of power to achieve wealth and the abuse of wealth to achieve
power.'

Anyone outside the extended family is assumed to have predatory
intentions, which explains the famous warmth and solidarity of Mexican
families. 'Mexicans need few friends,' Riding observed, 'because they
have many relatives.' Mexico is a notoriously low-trust culture and a
notoriously unequal one. The great traveler Alexander von Humboldt
observed two centuries ago, in words that are arguably still true,
'Mexico is the country of inequality. Perhaps nowhere in the world is
there a more horrendous distribution of wealth, civilization,
cultivation of land, and population.'

Jorge G. Castañeda, Vicente Fox's first foreign minister, noted the
ethnic substratum of Mexico's disparities in 1995:

The business or intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white
(there are still exceptions, but they are becoming more scarce with the
years). By the 1980s, Mexico was once again a country of three nations:
the criollo minority of elites and the upper-middle class, living in
style and affluence; the huge, poor, mestizo majority; and the utterly
destitute minority of what in colonial times was called the Republic of
Indians.

Castañeda pointed out, 'These divisions partly explain why
Mexico is as violent and unruly, as surprising and unfathomable as it
has always prided itself on being. The pervasiveness of the violence was
obfuscated for years by the fact that much of it was generally directed
by the state and the elites against society and the masses, not the
other way around. The current rash of violence by society against the
state and elites is simply a retargeting.'

These deep-rooted Mexican attitudes largely account for why, in Putnam's
'Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey,' Los Angeles ended up looking a lot
like it did in the Oscar-winning movie 'Crash.' I once asked a Hollywood agent
why there are so many brother acts among filmmakers these days, such as the
Coens, Wachowskis, Farrellys, and Wayans. 'Who else can you trust?' he
shrugged.

But what primarily drove down L.A.'s rating in Putnam's
130-question survey were the high levels of distrust displayed by
Hispanics. While no more than 12 percent of L.A.'s whites said they
trusted other races 'only a little or not at all,' 37 percent of L.A.'s
Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic
eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted
other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks. Some of this
white-Hispanic difference stems merely from Latinos' failure to tell
politically correct lies to the researchers about how much they trust
other races. Yet the L.A. survey results also reflect a very real and
deleterious lack of co-operativeness and social capital among Latinos.

As columnist Gregory Rodriguez stated in the L.A. Times: 'In Los
Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is
not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery, or broad-based
charity.' Since they seldom self-organize beyond the extended family,
Los Angeles's millions of Mexican-Americans make strangely little
contribution to local civic and artistic life.


In late October, I pored over the 64-page Sunday Calendar section of the L.A.
Times, which listed a thousand or more upcoming cultural events. I found
just seven that were clearly organized by Latinos. While it's a
journalistic cliché to describe Mexican-American neighborhoods as
'vibrant,' they aren't. Some of this lack of social capital is
class-related-Miami indeed has a vibrant Hispanic culture, but it's
anomalous because it attracts Latin America's affluent and educated. In
contrast, Los Angeles is a representative harbinger of America's future
because it imports peasants and laborers.

It's often assumed that low-trust societies can be fixed just by everyone
deciding to trust each other more. But that can only work if people become
not just more trusting but more trustworthy. Although most Asian-Americans
originate in low-trust cultures centered around the family, they typically
adapt well to middle-class American life because their high degree of honesty
makes them dependable neighbors and co-workers. Hispanics in America, in
contrast, have a relatively high crime rate-while their imprisonment
rate is less than half that of blacks, it is 2.9 times worse than that
of whites and 13 times that of Asians. Alarmingly, the Latino crime rate
goes up after the immigrant generation, suggesting a troubling future.
While many American-born Hispanics assimilate into the middle class,
others descend into the gang-ridden underclass.

Further, the illegitimacy rate has reached 48 percent among Hispanics(versus 25
percent among whites), and it's higher among Mexican-Americans born here
than among newcomers from Mexico. The problems caused by diversity can
be partly ameliorated, but the handful of techniques that actually work
generally appall liberal intellectuals, so we hear about them only when
they come under attack. Putnam points out one success story but draws an
unsophisticated lesson: 'I think we can do a lot to push change along
more rapidly. There was a lot of racial tension around the time of the
Vietnam War.  

.