Immigration

[andrewducker]

Leaving asylum to one side for a moment as a special case:
[Poll #1558346]

Comments

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

in similar countries (i.e. within Europe

Not sure I entirely agree with your assumption, there! Portugal and Norway are similar countries?

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I think he means economically. Both are considered developed nations, as is pretty much all of western Europe.

[andrewducker]

Everywhere except Wales.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oy! Mae Cymru yn dda iawn.
Just because you Gaels are the johnnies'-come-lately by comparison.

[andrewducker]

I'm a Gael?

All of my great-grandparents and half of my grandparents were born outside of the UK :->

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Well, you may not be a complete Gael!

[andrewducker]

It seems incredibly unlikely that I have any Gael ancestors whatsoever.

But I have been living in Scotland for (slightly) more than half my life, so I could consider myself an adoptive Gael :->

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Is there an option for "I was born in France and have lived in France for 10 years and was a student in France so why the fuck has the EU made it virtually impossible for me to live here legally simply because my parents are American?"

Give me a visa and the EU would get tax money from me for christ sakes!

[andrewducker]

That's very odd - does France not automatically give citizenship rights to people born there?

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

They keep telling me that because I didn't do a year in the French army in my 20s that I'm fucked.

[andrewducker]

Good Lord. Did they even ask you to?

I hadn't realised that France used to have military service.

Ok, yes, that sucks.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

When I was about 23 or so they sent me a letter saying I'd have to do a year in their military service before I was 25 or lose all French rights.

I checked with a lawyer who told me that if I joined the French military the American government could prosecute me for serving in a foreign army.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

*head/desk*

My god, that's stupid.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Yes but military service has been abolished since!

It was still in force when I would have been eligible (I see you're 5 years older than me), but I got around it by not living in France. I had to get my uni to sign a piece of paper saying I was studying in London. Then there was some deal about how for the next x years (10?) I'd not be able to live in France for more than a few months a year without being liable for it.

I don't know which 10 years you were in France but there should be room to wangle surely?

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I've been in France since I was 31.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

France changes the rules on citizenship every few years, depending on the government in power.

Caractacus is currently able to be French. At other times I'm not sure if she might have been.

[zz]

ideally #1, but if people can consume finite and slow/expensive-to-change local (town, region, country) resources (public funds, housing, transport, health, education, etc) from the moment of arrival, that seems impractical.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I sort of agree ... but I'd perhaps put it more that you build a tax debt if you don't immediately start paying taxes on arrival, which cover those services that you are eligible from arrival, and .. then it all turns into a mess when I consider the case of, say, large numbers of ill people making it to the UK to take advantage of the health service here with conditions that mean they can never be "revenue neutral" over the rest of their working lives.

As long as benefits are different in each country, then having paid ten years of tax in, for example, Poland, may or may not be sufficient to give you healthcare in, say, the United States.

In simple terms, *I* want to be able to live and work wherever I want to, but I can see there are dangers and pitfalls to that system.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I think it needs more context than that. I've no problem with people being allowed to live/work wherever they like, but what about claiming benefits, not integrating, creating alienating cultures within the culture they've economically migrated to or in other ways making the existing culture worse for the indigenous people of the place they've migrated to?

Not that I'm saying that indigenous people have a right to an intransient culture or that we should expect others to integrate with our culture without our culture integrating with theirs to some extent or that someone that's worked here for some amount of time isn't due to some amount of benefit if they become unemployed or fall ill or we should abandon care of children just because they're parents migrated here rather than were born here.

I guess in general I want people (indigenous or otherwise) to want to be fully functional members of society. Who want to add to society, integrate with their fellow human beings and not sponge off it. Fortunately for us we've a society that's relatively giving to those living off the state (it's not great, but you generally don't starve/end up homeless), which might attract the sort of people that don't want to work. It's a difficult situation with no answers that can be found in legislation without a good deal of people falling through the cracks.

[andrewducker]

I, my self, have a divergent culture from the mainstream of where I live. Always have done. I thus have a lot of sympathy for other people who don't want to conform to the identity of the people around them.

Having said that, I also want a cultural baseline enshrined in law (various bits of equality, freedom of speech, freedom from violence, etc.).

While I understand your worries in regards to immigrants taking more than they give, a brief bit of reading will tell you that, certainly the most recent set of immigrants give more than they take.

Most people want to work, if they can. Immigrants aren't an exception.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Why would people want to create an alienating culture in the first place? It's hardly fun.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Muslims wanting Sharia law in Britain. I was about to say "possibly a limited subset of Muslims" but surely their religion demands Sharia law and any true Muslim would want it?

I find any law that gives a woman's word half the value of a man's, alienating.

And anyone that goes to a country long term and doesn't bother learning the language would be fairly alienating. I'd feel ashamed if I moved to France and didn't bother learning French.

[andrewducker]

Only in the same way that any "true Christian" would want homosexuals stoned to death. There are a wide range of Muslims and lots of them are very happy to have secular law over the country.

"There is tremendous variety in the interpretation and implementation of Islamic Law in Muslim societies today. Liberal movements within Islam have questioned the relevance and applicability of Sharia from a variety of perspectives; Islamic feminism brings multiple points of view to the discussion. Some of the largest Muslim countries, including Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan, have largely secular constitutions and laws, with only a few Islamic Law provisions in family law. Turkey has a constitution that is officially strongly secular."

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Pardon me while I just go BANG MY HEAD AGAINST THE WALL FOR SEVERAL YEARS.

God I can't wait until this debate is over. It's bad enough during non-election times.

[andrewducker]

Well, so far 81% of people are fine with you living here. Clearly my flist likes you :->

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Yeah we like you.

(Though we should insist immigrants learn the ways of our spelling! ;)

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

As soon as you've ensured that most of the people living within Britain know how to spell, you can move on to me. ;)

[communicator.livejournal.com]

There should be free movement of labour to reflect the free movement of goods and capital, but like with fixing banking, it really needs global market reform. If a system is badly broken you can't fix it in one place only.

So I picked 1, but I don't think it's something a single country can implement in isolation.

[gravityslave.livejournal.com]

I voted for the first one, mainly because I discovered I can't even emigrate to New Zealand unless I'm a millionaire because I'm too old (at 32) to be profitable. New Zealand! I mean, come on...

[andrewducker]

Dammit - I always fancied NZ.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Last time I checked for NZ was about 8 years ago and the only 'unticked boxes' for me in the list were 'Relatives in NZ' (ok,I wasn't in the millionaire bracket, but between the 2 of us [me and my ex-hubby were equally desirable in all other respects] we could put up multiple hundreds of thousands) and I STILL couldn't pass the criteria. That's when I gave the notion up as impossible.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

In principle I'm in favour of a no borders approach. In practice I think that getting from here to there would need to be done in a controlled manner over a reasonable amount of time, so that infrastructure can be expanded where necessary.

[andrewducker]

Oh, absolutely. In some ways I think that that's what the EU is doing. It's slowly expanding, erasing borders along the way.

The big question is whether it will expand to include more countries, or whether it's hit a dead end for a while.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

People should be free to live and work wherever they like and can find someone in the other country who would like to swap with them, either temporarily or permanently.

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Damn good idea. I know two academics who would do this at the drop of a hat.

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

"be allowed to work where they are welcome X"

There is no absolute right to migrate (or to anything else). The people who own a country are the people who live in it. I cannot speak for anybody else's country.

I myself welcome economically useful or self-supporting migrants, and those who have had to flee their own toxic countries as long as they don't seek to undermine my society.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

I'd like a no borders approach, but I think it's very important that you can afford to buy/rent the land/food/services on which you'd reside in your target country.

Rocking up and expecting the existing locals to provide it for you anyway doesn't obviously seem fair unless you have a bilateral agreement that the citizens from your country would do the same for citizens in the target country (which we do within the EU although the level of civil support in countries is currently very different).

It's a shame the Daily Mail has polarised the issue by regularly finding the corner cases where the system is apparently unfair, in that any system of workable rules will have odd cases, despite there being perfectly legitimate questions to ask on the subject.

The government completely failed to plan for the level of immigration we've seen - official figures estimated 5k-13k per year, compared to 185k that actually arrived. These immigrants place legitimate increased demands on hospitals, schools, housing, transport etc. which none of the services have planned for thanks to the governments completely hopeless numbers.

Bilbo Baggins' patience began to wear thin well before the thirteenth dwarf had arrived. Does that make Bilbo a bigot?