Immigration: Mongrel and proud

I have been an immigrant and I'm about to marry an immigrant, so I am unashamedly in favour of immigration. While the main parties keep trying to prove that they will be tougher on immigration than anyone else, I can tell you that being an immigrant is already more than tough enough, and instead of just looking at numbers and statistics, how about remembering that immigrants are people, with families and feelings.

I am one of the many millions of UK citizens that have taken advantage to the freedom of movement within the EU. One thing the 'immigration debate' often forgets is that it goes both ways. Imagine you or someone you're close to migrated and they faced the same over the top, hostile press and politics that have taken over the UK. Leaving behind family and friends, missing out major events, living without an established support network is hard enough as it is.

Current Visa rules destroy families for no good reason. Don't fall in love with a foreigner unless you want years of unfair bureaucracy. To bring your husband or wife to the country you have to earn above £18,600 a year. Even if your partner has a better paying job, they won't take that into account. This is supposedly the salary you need in order to support a dependent. Yet it is almost 50% more than someone working full time for minimum wage earns. Surely the minimum wage should provide enough to support a life?

As for 'they took our jobs!', bullshit. Speaking from experience I can tell you that elsewhere, as in the UK, low paid, zero hour, shitty jobs are overwhelmingly done by immigrants. The few natives who give it a go rarely last long. On the other end of the scale are highly qualified people, enriching their chosen destination with knowledge and skills that are needed.

They put pressure on the NHS? Very few people come here solely for treatment. The vast majority of 'health tourists' are actually people living, working and paying tax here. Now, thanks to the hysteria created by UKIP, migrants from outside the EEA will have to pay a 'health surcharge' on top of the stupidly high Visa fee. For non-students this is £200 a year, giving them access to the NHS. So when my soon to be wife applies for her next Visa, she'll have to pay an extra £500 to continue to use the NHS, even though in a year and a half she'll have paid more NI than I have in my entire life. Absolutely ridiculous. Not to mention the thousands of doctors and nurses that have migrated here who will now have to pay for the very service they provide!

Immigration drives wages down? No, greedy bastards drive wages down. Hundreds of firms are caught paying below the minimum wage each year. Why hundreds, year after year? Because the fines they receive are so pathetic that it's worth the risk. The government could raise the minimum wage to a living wage, but would rather just leave it up to the companies. Increasing the minimum wage to a living wage would greatly raise the quality of life of millions of people, reduce the benefits bill by billions (more working people currently receive benefits than ever before, because employers know that they can keep wages low and the government will top them up) and bring in more tax.

Housing shortage? The major causes are landlords building up huge portfolios, charging sky high rents, and buildings being allowed to be left abandoned for years. Limit rents, limit the number of properties than one landlord can own, take back abandoned buildings and redevelop them for social housing and the shortage would be a lot shorter.

Some would have you believe that everything from traffic jams to climate change is caused by immigrants, but it is uncaring governments, putting money before people and the environment that is the true danger to society.

Immigration brings new ideas, skills, thinking, food, art and love. This country has seen wave after wave of immigration throughout history, from the Vikings to the Romans, make it what it is today. We are mongrels. We should be proud of that.


Extra reading:
As migrants we leave home in search of a future, but we lose the past - Gary Younge
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/24/migrants-leave-home-future-past-borders?CMP=share_btn_tw

Britain’s criminally stupid attitudes to race and immigration are beyond parody - Frankie Boyle
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/20/britain-criminally-stupid-race-immigration?CMP=share_btn_tw

Minimum wage: 37 firms named for failing to pay rate
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30822565

Easter weekend reading

There's so little going on this weekend that the media has resorted to making up 4th-hand accounts of conversations. Here's some articles actually worth reading:

Opinion:

Politics was once about beliefs and society. Now it’s a worship of money - Armando Iannucci
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/08/armando-iannucci-money-at-heart-of-politics-general-election-2015?CMP=share_btn_fb

If parties are funded by big business instead of average people, who are they going to act in the interests of? (Not a problem the Green Party has..)

It’s a great time to push for change in politics - Armando Iannucci 
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/18/2015-general-election-enough-fatalism-push-for-change?CMP=share_btn_tw

'...now is the best time in a generation to go out and vote. With such a fragmented system on offer, nothing is inevitable....
No politician voted into office is going to take the number of people who didn’t vote into account; what they will do is heed the number who voted, but not for them, if that number is overwhelming.
This time round, the day after the election, party leaders are going to look at the numbers – how many voted and how many didn’t vote for them. If both those figures breach certain tipping points then, irrespective of the number of seats won, and regardless of the make-up of the new House of Commons, the political agenda will have changed utterly.'

I didn’t leave the Labour party – it left me - Jack Monroe
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/19/leave-labour-party-green-party

'In fact, I had quietly left some weeks beforehand, and run away to look for the living wage, the social housing, the repurposing of abandoned buildings, free education and the NHS. I had left the Labour party to find the values that I thought that it once stood for, and I found them, in the Greens.

Like greeting old friends, I embraced the importance placed on a national health service, on public transport, on sustainable energy, on fair pay for fair work. Here you were, all the time.'

Enough of the dry politics of numbers. We need to discuss values and vision -Will Hutton
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/22/britains-economic-recovery-end-obsession-with-debt-reduction?CMP=share_btn_fb

'Britain’s national debt is comfortably affordable today – even moderate, by historical standards. To present it as economic enemy number one is just wrong.'

Local news:

Library of Birmingham cuts weekend opening to six hours
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-32146016?SThisFB&fb_ref=Default

Spend almost £200m on building the biggest public library in Europe and less than 2 years later run out of money to run it, meaning halving of opening hours and staff. How has this been allowed to happen?

News:

Lords accuse Tories of ‘burying’ review that cleared EU of interference
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/28/lords-accuse-tories-burying-eu-powers-review?CMP=share_btn_fb

Government spend millions on investigating how far Brussels' powers really go into British life. Find out that they're not a problem. Try to hide the evidence.

The rise of DIY dentistry: Britons doing their own fillings to avoid NHS bill
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/03/rise-of-diy-dentistry-britons-doing-own-fillings-to-avoid-nhs-bill?CMP=share_btn_tw

There's still NHS dentists around?

Costa Rica goes 75 days powering itself using only renewable energy
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/costa-rica-goes-75-days-powering-itself-using-only-renewable-energy-10126127.html

Proof of what's possible if you put the effort in.

France decrees new rooftops must be covered in plants or solar panels
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/20/france-decrees-new-rooftops-must-be-covered-in-plants-or-solar-panels?CMP=share_btn_fb

A fellow European country doing something sensible while we sit around in denial? Yep, sounds about right. Go France!

Virgin Care among firms with lucrative NHS deals and a tax haven status
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/mar/21/ow-lucrative--deals-go-to-firms-that-use-tax-havens?CMP=share_btn_fb

The biggest privatisation in NHS history: why we had to blow the whistle - Kate Godfrey
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/16/nhs-privatisation-biggest-history-staffordshire-cancer?CMP=share_btn_fb

Just depressing. And why the Tories must be stopped and Labour kept a very close eye on. Screw 5%, there should be no profit made from cancer or end-of-life care.

Nigel Farage would axe 'much of' race discrimination law
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31846453?fb_ref=Default

UKIP - not racist, they just want the option...