I have had this blog at this site for over 3 years now but the service outages lately have become just too frequent for me. The latest posts here were not accessible for about half a day yesterday and there has been a lot of that lately. So off to a new home! The same blog, just a different address.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Mr Green said it had become ‘starkly clear’ he must reduce the numbers being given permission to enter and stay in every category of immigration controls.
Long-standing impact: Immigration minister Damian Green believes that only students who will have a positive impact on the country should be granted student visas

It comes after surprise figures UK showed net migration leapt by a fifth last year, to 196,000.

Mr Green revealed his main target will be student visas. He today publishes research showing that – astonishingly – fewer than half of foreign students are undertaking degree-level courses.

Mr Green said it showed the image people had of foreign students attending the UK’s most prestigious universities – paying large tuition fees which kept many institutions afloat – was wrong.

More than 90,000 of them are in fact in the private sector at smaller colleges, offering the likes of GCSEs or vocational training. These students could now face being barred from the UK, although Mr Green says he is unlikely to impose a ‘cap’ on student numbers. Instead, he will focus on making it harder to be allowed to come here.

Mr Green said the Home Office study also revealed that a fifth of those students granted visas for a temporary stay are still here five years later, meaning they have a long-standing impact on the UK’s rapidly rising population levels.

In the 12 months to June this year, 362,015 foreign students were allowed to come and study in the UK – up 35 per cent on the previous year.

There remain huge concerns that many of them are attending so-called bogus colleges which repeatedly slipped through the net under Labour.

The clampdown on foreign students will build on the cap the Government has already announced on economic migrants.

This has sparked rows within the Coalition – particularly with LibDem Business Secretary Vince Cable, and Tory universities spokesman David Willetts. They are likely to agitate against the student crackdown as well.

But Mr Green effectively sent a message when he suggested he had little choice if David Cameron’s promise to reduce net migration to the ‘tens of thousands’ was to be met.

The Prime Minister has said he would like to go even further by returning the figure to that of the mid-1990s – when it was around 50,000.

Mr Green told the Mail: ‘We’ve announced a limit, that’s been controversial. What is transparently clear from this evidence is that the limit itself isn’t enough to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands.

‘We need to look at all immigration routes into the UK and set new rules that mean that the migrants that we get do represent the brightest and the best, and are the migrants we need.’ Mr Green added: ‘We think of this as a temporary route, but for many people it clearly isn’t.

‘Between 2004 and 2010, the number of students coming here has risen hugely, more than 300,000 student visas along with dependants were issued in the year to June 2010. ‘One can draw one’s own conclusions about what will happen long-term.

‘I want a student visa system which encourages the entry of good students to highly trusted institutions but which scrutinises much more closely or cuts out entirely those who are less beneficial to this country.’

Azad, an Iraqi Kurd, who has six convictions for violence, immediately breached the bail terms of the release by failing to appear at a police station to have an electronic tag fitted. He then breached a lifetime restraining order by making threats against his ex-partner. Police have had to move her and their son and give them a new identity because of his repeated harassment.

Azad, 34, has now been on the run for more than five months – and police admit they have no idea where he is. They are so concerned about the risk he poses to his ex-partner Tania Doherty that she has been ordered not to visit family and friends and to carry an ‘abduction pack’ with the details and DNA of her son of four, in case he is snatched.

Miss Doherty, whose new name cannot be disclosed, says she is terrified he will return to kidnap their son or hurt her family – both of which he has threatened. ‘I just cannot believe he was released,’ she says. ‘I am disgusted. ‘He has attacked me in broad daylight and threatened to kill me and members of my family. I really fear for my son.’

Azad has been convicted of a string of violent offences, as well as dangerous driving, since he arrived in Britain.

When Miss Doherty ended their relationship in 2006, he battered, harassed and assaulted her for two years. This culminated in an attack in which he beat her unconscious as she sat on a beach in Eastbourne with their son before attempting to snatch the boy.

Azad was jailed for 12 months after the attack. Following his release from prison the Border Agency tried to deport him and he was flown to Baghdad airport. But Iraqi authorities refused to accept him and he was sent back to Colnbrook immigration removal centre near Heathrow.

He was detained because he no longer had any legal right to stay in the country. When he was at first refused bail from the centre he flew into a rage, damaging a courtroom and having to be restrained by staff.

But in March this year an immigration judge decided to release him against the advice of police and the Home Office – on the grounds that detaining him was violating his human rights.

As soon as he was freed, Azad breached his bail by not turning up to be tagged and began leaving threatening messages on a phone belonging to his ex-partner, thus violating the lifetime restraining order preventing him from contacting her.

Miss Doherty says she is furious that, while Azad enjoys his freedom, she and her son are forced to live in fear. ‘Human rights are a joke as far as I’m concerned,’

Miss Doherty said. ‘Having to give my son a new name was the most upsetting part – it was like I lost a part of him. ‘I have had to move away from all my friends and family so I feel totally isolated – all because of him.’

A spokesman for the UK Border Agency said the Home Office had ‘strongly opposed’ the decision to release Azad. ‘We removed Mr Azad in October 2009, but the Iraqi authorities refused to accept him,’ the spokesman said.

‘Following his return to the UK Mr Azad was released on bail by an immigration judge. He has since absconded and we have shared his details with the police.’

Sussex Police said it had been searching for Kawa ali Azad ‘who we seek to arrest and interview on suspicion he breached a Restraining Order’.

The Immigration and Asylum Tribunal refused to discuss why one of its judges had released Azad.

Yet by far the commonest argument coming from the Left about immigration in general and about Muslim immigrants in particular is precisely that America of today IS just like the America of 100 years ago. You can read the latest such article in the NYT (by Kristof). It is an argument so hackneyed by now that he could almost have written it in his sleep. Maybe he did.

The argument is that the Irish, Italians and others who came to America in the 19th century were viewed with grave suspicion by many and suffered from discrimination but in the end blended in seamlessly with Americans of other ancestries: The melting pot.

From that Kristoff and others conclude that Muslims will eventually “melt” into a homogeneous American population also. And perhaps many will. But there are two crucial difference that will at least greatly hinder full integration:

1). In the 19th and most of the 20th century, immigrants were EXPECTED to assimilate whereas these days multiculturalism reigns and the very word “assimilate” is almost an obscenity to the Left.

2). The Italians, Irish and Poles came from CHRISTIAN backgrounds so had a considerable degree of common culture with Americans originating from earlier waves of immigration. More to the point they did not come from a culture that DESPISES Christian and post-Christian civilization, whereas Muslims do.

It is a basic imperative of Islam to attack and if possible conquer other civilizations — and they have been doing it more or less continuously ever since the conquests led by Mohammed himself. They were even attacking Christian targets at the time of America’s War of Independence and President Jefferson sent warships to combat them.

So the wave of Muslim immigrants is a wave of people whose basic teachings are hostile to America. That has never happened before and therefore makes comparisons with previous immigrant waves invalid.

The controversy over the “Ground Zero” mosque in NYC has of course brought to the fore the question of how Americans should react to Muslims in their midst. I myself, as an Australian living in the happy obscurity of a small Australian city most people have never even heard of, have no dog in that fight. I think the response to the mosque proposal is for New Yorkers and New Yorkers alone to judge. But I don’t think it is unreasonable for New Yorkers to be hostile to anything Muslim given the hostility of Islam to the West.

But Muslims are still a very small immigrant group in America and the long-standing argument about immigration to America is about Latino illegals, not Muslims. And here we see the same argument from the Left: People who arrived legally from Europe a century or so ago eventually assimilated so people who arrive illegally from Mexico (etc.) will also eventually assimilate. And no doubt many will and in fact many have already done so.

But arriving legally and arriving illegally are two very different things and Europe is also very different from Latin America. Europe is the fountainhead of modern civilization whereas Latin America is a civilizational backwater (to put it kindly). So once again there are large differences between earlier arrivals and recent ones that create considerable potential for outcomes different from what we have seen in the past.

And the omens for Hispanic illegals assimilating are not good. The children of Irish, Polish, Italian (etc.) legal immigrants became indistinguishable from other Americans but that is not so with the Hispanics. That Hispanics have a notably higher crime-rate than non-Hispanic whites is concern enough but their children are even worse, even more prone to criminality. As well as black gang-bangers America now has a proliferation of Hispanic gang bangers. Far from assimilating into the mainstream, the children of the illegals have moved even further away from it.

One of the gun dealers of Austin’s Gun Show is sentenced to 6-months at a federal work camp for selling a weapon to an undocumented immigrant. Independent firearms dealer-Paul Copeland says for years he has commonly sold handguns and antique weapons with no problems and prior to his arrest the illegal immigrant showed him what appeared to be a valid Texas driver’s license.

In January 2009, the ATF along with the Austin police department set up a sting operation targeting independent firearms dealers that were selling weapons to illegal immigrants, both inside the show and outside the Austin’s Gun Show’s parking lot.

Got that? The illegal had valid ID, yet, Copeland was the one arrested and sentenced. If Copeland had asked for more, he would have been in violation of federal “supremacy” laws, ya know. Perhaps the ATF could have arrested the illegals?

Investigators with the Austin police department believed many of the guns sold to the undocumented immigrants at the show were headed back across the Texas-Mexico border. “I guess you need ask them for their documentation too; if the police aren’t going to profile why should the common citizen have to” says Copeland. He says none of the undocumented immigrants that were asked to testify against him were arrested by federal agents.

The police are probably afraid to ask for ID and arrest the illegals, otherwise, the Obama administration will sue them.

Austin’s Federal Judge Sam Sparks sentenced Copeland to spend the next 6-months at a federal work camp followed by 2-years of probation.

And what of the illegal who purchased the gun with valid ID? No one seems to know.

There is one very effective step they could take but they are probably too centrist to do it: Deny welfare benefits to immigrants until they have made ten years of National Insurance contributions

The Government has got its policy on immigration caps wrong and should drop it in favour of a points-based system, according to the head of the business group, London First, and leading international companies.

With just days left until submissions to the Government consultation on immigration controls are due, businesses are warning caps on skilled labour could threaten the recovery and drive business abroad.

London First claims that the coalition’s plans to cap non-EU immigration will affect only 55,000 of the 567,000 migrants who came to the UK, based on last year’s figures. Those migrants are what is known as Tier 1 and Tier 2 migrants – highly skilled and skilled workers who are in many cases key employees.

“I do not think the public had these people in mind when they voted for this Government’s plan to cap immigration,” Baroness Valentine, chief executive of London First, said.

The deadline for submissions to the Migration Advisory Committee is Tuesday. London First and its members are calling for the cap on Tier 2 migrants, skilled workers, to be lifted. The group is particularly keen on inter-company immigration – where workers move between different national offices – to be uncapped.

The temporary cap on immigration, introduced earlier this summer, is due to end in April next year when permanent limits could be put in place.

The Government says it plans to reduce net immigration from the current 500,000 per year to “tens of thousands”. But London First questions how this is possible by targeting the 50,000 Tier 1 and 2 migrants that arrive each year.

A DECISION to kick a convicted sexual predator out of Australia has been overturned because the pervert loves footy and his hero is Peter Brock.

As thousands of innocent would-be migrants are sent packing each year, the rapist and paedophile is now free to walk the streets of Melbourne despite Immigration Minister Chris Evans’ decision to deport him.

The man has just been released from prison and is on the registered sex offenders’ list for the rest of his life. He served a 7 1/2-year sentence for the rape of his partner and attempted incest on his step-daughter, then 12, which a judge described as “revolting”.

But a tribunal decided the man was “virtually an Australian person”, though he was not a citizen, and that it would be unfair to deport him to his homeland of Malta.

The decision has sparked outrage and the minister is considering his options, including an appeal to the Federal Court.

The registered sex offender, who cannot be named for legal reasons and is known as DNCW, fought the decision to deport him in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which reviews ministerial decisions.

The tribunal’s senior member, John Handley, said even though the offences committed by the man were “repulsive” it would cause him “hardship” if he was deported.

He said the man had lived in Australia since he was four, with the exception of a few years when his family returned to Malta, and he had no memory of his homeland. “(He) is virtually an Australian person. He supports an Australian Rules football team. He also enjoys tennis, volleyball, badminton and soccer. He enjoys motorbike and motor car racing and his hero was Peter Brock,” Mr Handley said.

Even though DNCW described the man’s relationship with his partner in 2003 as “pretty good”, he raped her.

He then twice tried to have incestuous sex with his 12-year-old step-daughter. Mr Handley said: “The attempted incest offences, by their description alone, are revolting. “The man described himself as a father figure (to the girl). Despite her protests, he violated her on two occasions.

“(The partner who was raped) was devastated and inconsolable whilst giving evidence. I do not know of any more disgraceful or depraved conduct by a man upon a woman.”

The man also had a string of prior convictions including theft, unlawful assault, breach of an intervention order, burglary and cultivating a narcotic plant, he said.

The man had no close relatives in Malta, barely spoke the language, was not eligible for social security in Malta and would “suffer considerable hardship”, he said.

An Australian resident of 14 years who was deported to Sri Lanka forcing his elderly mother, who is a citizen, to return with him, is outraged. Edward Joseph, who was caring for his 93-year-old mother, Irene, in Box Hill until his deportation in July, was refused a protection visa even though he claimed persecution as a Tamil.

“Australia is allowing a convicted rapist to remain in the country,” he said. “If justice is what the Australian Government has given this rapist, please give my mother and I the same justice. “We are not rapists but, rather, ordinary people who have been made to suffer as a result of poor administrative decision-making of the Department of Immigration.”

The tribunal has reviewed 270 of these cases of which it has overturned more than a third of the minister’s refusals.

Justice advocate Steve Medcraft said the tribunal should “stick to backyard disputes” because, despite its senior members earning about $200,000 a year, they had no background in criminal law.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday sued a controversial and popular Arizona sheriff, alleging that his department was refusing to cooperate with an investigation into whether it discriminated against Latinos while trying to catch illegal immigrants.

The Justice Department said that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was the first local law enforcement official in 30 years to refuse to provide documents in a federal civil rights inquiry. The federal government could withhold $113 million in funding from Maricopa County if Arpaio can’t produce records demonstrating that he avoids racial discrimination.

“The actions of the sheriff’s office are unprecedented. It is unfortunate that the department was forced to resort to litigation to gain access to public documents and facilities,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division.

Arpaio contended that the lawsuit was a political move by the Obama administration, which filed another high-profile lawsuit against Arizona this summer to stop a tough new immigration law from taking effect.

“These actions make it abundantly clear that Arizona, including this sheriff, is Washington’s new whipping boy,” Arpaio said in a statement. “Washington isn’t playing fair and it’s time Americans everywhere wake up and see this administration for what it really is — calculating, underhanded at times and certainly not looking out for the best interests of the legal citizens residing in this country.”

Arpaio, who calls himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” has drawn praise and criticism for his aggressive attempts to enforce immigration laws. Most prominent are operations in which his deputies fan out across immigrant neighborhoods, stopping people for sometimes minor violations, such as jaywalking, and asking their immigration status.

Critics contend that the operations amount to racial profiling. Arpaio says his deputies only look for people breaking the law, an assertion he reiterated at a televised news conference Thursday in Phoenix. “I’m very confident that my deputies don’t racially profile,” he said.

The Obama administration last year revoked Arpaio’s authority to enforce federal immigration laws on the streets, a move that had little practical effect because the sheriff said state law allows him to continue his operations. But his battle with the federal government predates the Obama presidency.

In the summer of 2008, under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department launched a preliminary investigation into the allegations of racial profiling. In March 2009, after President Obama had assumed office, the department expanded the inquiry into a full-fledged probe.

The investigation started with what federal officials contended was a routine document request — 51 categories of material. According to the lawsuit filed Thursday, the department received only 11 pages.

The last time the Justice Department had to sue to obtain documents in a civil rights probe was during a 1978 investigation of employment practices of a sheriff’s department in Virginia.

For the last 18 months, Arpaio has publicly said he would not give federal investigators access to his jails or other facilities and dismissed the inquiry as politically motivated. His lawyer met with Justice Department lawyers in Washington last week and contended that the material the federal government requested was outside its scope of investigation.

This is not Arpaio’s first battle over documents related to possible civil rights abuses. His department faces a lawsuit from an array of civil rights groups for allegedly racially profiling. A federal judge this year found that Arpaio’s department improperly destroyed immigration-related paperwork that was evidence in that case, and approved sanctions against the agency.

Arpaio’s stance has made him popular in Arizona, the main point of entry for migrants illegally crossing the Mexican border. He was one of the most prominent backers of SB 1070, the aggressive state law mandating that police verify the status of people they stop and suspect are illegal immigrants. The main parts of the law were placed on hold in late July by a federal judge in response to the Obama administration’s suit, and the matter is expected to end up in the Supreme Court.

Legal experts said that, despite the combustible backdrop of racial politics, a brash sheriff and local defiance of Washington, Thursday’s lawsuit will turn on narrow legal matters such as what the federal government can request under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Arpaio’s stance is “more your standard, hardball litigation than it is a challenge to the authority of the federal government,” said G. “Jack” Chin, a law professor at the University of Arizona.

Both sides in the contentious immigration debate were quick to seize on Thursday’s lawsuit.

“Unless a judge can put some serious sanctions [on him], Arpaio will continue to thumb his nose at the entire justice system,” said Lydia Guzman, president of the immigrant rights group Somos America, or We Are America, which is a plaintiff in the racial profiling case against the sheriff’s office.

Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, appearing next to the sheriff at his news conference, said the lawsuit shows that federal civil rights investigators have not been able to turn up any evidence of misconduct by Arpaio’s department. “It’s simply a witch hunt,” he said.

As he usually does when challenged, Arpaio promised to forge ahead with his operations. “I’m going to continue, maybe tomorrow, to enforce all the illegal immigration laws,” he said. “I’m not going to be intimidated by the Justice Department.”

Actually, the speaker in question was Nicolas Sarkozy. But the fact that the French president’s comments could just as easily have come from the lips of prominent public figures in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands illustrates how a culturally defensive approach to immigration is shared across a significant part of the western European political spectrum, not to mention society at large.

It is a mood that, over the past 12 months, has caused Swiss citizens to vote for a ban on the construction of minarets. It has prompted the governments of France and Belgium to take steps to prohibit the wearing of face-covering veils. It has encouraged the French state to launch a crackdown on Roma migrants, following on the heels of a similar initiative in Italy.

Largely because of fears that millions of Muslim Turks might seek homes, jobs and welfare benefits in western European cities, it has caused public support to drain away for Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union. Finally, it has driven Mr Sarrazin’s newly published book, Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany does away with itself”), an anti-immigrant diatribe, to the top of the bestseller list on the German-language site of Amazon, the online retailer.

After two tumultuous years in which first Europe’s banking system and then its monetary union came close to collapse, one might think that European politicians face more pressing tasks than the suppression of new minarets, the elimination of veils or the expulsion of a few thousand Roma. But it is no coincidence that, as Europe’s economic performance has gone into relative decline in the era of globalisation, so its sensitivities on questions of identity and culture have grown more acute.

Low birth rates, ageing populations and pressure on the public finances to pay for future pension and healthcare entitlements aggravate these anxieties. Slowly but surely, the perception has arisen that the “native” cultures of France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands are at risk of being swamped by tides of immigrants who breed more than the indigenous majority and who are neither willing nor able to assimilate.

This perception, visible in the UK as well, has obvious racist foundations but does not always represent racism in its purest form. Pim Fortuyn, the populist Dutch politician who was murdered in 2002, criticised his nation’s open immigration policies partly on the grounds that many Moroccan and Turkish immigrants rejected Dutch values of social tolerance and sexual liberalism. Similar concerns about the conservative attitudes of Muslim immigrants, especially in relation to women’s rights, are visible in Sweden. All this is a rather different matter from the explicitly far-right stance of parties such as France’s National Front, with its roots in the collaborationist Vichy regime of the 1940s and its support from the embittered pied-noir colonists who returned to France after the Algerian war of independence.

Even so, Europe cannot have it both ways. On the one hand, Europeans want to protect their high living standards and their social and economic model, blending free enterprise with a generous array of state-supplied public services. On the other hand, they want to ring-fence their national cultures with controls on immigration. But Europe’s feeble demographic outlook makes the first goal incompatible with the second.

No country better exemplifies this contradiction than Germany. “The Turks are taking over Germany exactly as the [ethnic Albanian] Kosovars took over Kosovo – with a higher birth rate,” says Mr Sarrazin. “I don’t want the country of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be largely Muslim, or that Turkish or Arabic will be spoken in large areas, that women will wear headscarves and the daily rhythm is set by the call of the muezzin.”

Mr Sarrazin is preoccupied by expert models that predict a fall in Germany’s population, now about 82m, to roughly 70m by 2050 and – assuming unchanged birth rates and no more immigration – a further slump to as low as 24m by 2100. Such assumptions are doubtless open to question, but it remains a fact that Germany’s average annual ratio of eight births per 1,000 women is the lowest in the world. Crucially, however, the memory of Nazi schemes to promote motherhood continues to inhibit governments in Berlin from urging women to have more children.

In spite of these trends, Mr Sarrazin is plainly exaggerating when he forecasts a Germany dominated by mullahs, headscarves and the Turkish language. Turkish emigration to Germany has declined dramatically since the start of this century. In 2008, the latest year for which figures are available, there was actually a small net movement in the other direction.

Moreover, if it is accepted that assimilation has not proved wholly successful, much of the explanation lies in the restrictive citizenship law that Germany applied until 2000. The new law, making it easier for children born in Germany to Turks and other foreigners to acquire citizenship, has proved a promising motor of social integration.