Immigration: we need a conversation, not a bidding war. Is it wrong for all the main political party leaders to start sounding tougher on immigration because Ukip is doing quite well in the polls in its current role as the protest party? Of course not. What are protest parties for if not to shake up the major parties when voters suspect they're not listening hard enough to their concerns? The real surprise is that it has taken so long for Ukip to reach the 16% national rating recently registered in the wake of the Eastleigh byelection – four points ahead of the Lib Dems and 12 behind the Tories – considering how bothered many voters have been about the scale of immigration since the Thatcherite policy of extending the EU into south and east Europe reached fruition when Poland and co joined in 2004.
Some people are not white; let's get over it. Poster girl: Olympic heroine Jessica Ennis helps a 'warm glow of acceptance'; but that glow needs to be more widely shared.
Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters As we say goodbye to 2012 and prepare to welcome the New Year, the UK feels like a different country to the one that many of us believed we were living in. The Census has shifted our perceptions of who we are as a people and what we mean when we ascribe a colour to nationhood. For black and minority ethnic people, the news that the country increasingly looks more like them than mos of our politicians would have us believe, has definitely provided a fillip.
It provides proof positive that the old political modalities premised on a White Us and a Non-White Them are no longer helpful in modern day Britain. Peter Hitchens: takes a different view. Labour, Conservative and Coalition governments have been guilty of treating BME citizens in exclusive rather than inclusive terms. The noise on immigration is drowning out real problems. ‘Wealthy foreigners are encouraged to come to London to spend their money, and last year they brought with them 15,745 domestic servants on overseas domestic worker visas.' Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian Can governments ever be tough enough on immigration?
Ask any canvasser and they report grim news from the doorstep: whatever the issue – housing, jobs, benefits – in these hard times the blame has been successfully diverted on to migrants for taking jobs and homes. Tighten the screw, pull up the drawbridge, cut off the attractions that draw them to the UK, but no political action is ever enough to sate the demand for tougher border defences. The government frequently takes noisy public action, even when it knows some things are far worse than useless. David Cameron to use Queen's speech to reach out to Ukip voters. David Cameron is facing calls from the right of the Tory party for tougher action on Europe and immigration. Photograph: Reuters David Cameron will try to reach out to former Tory voters who defected to Ukip in the local elections by characterising next week's Queen's speech as a concerted attempt to address their concerns over immigration and welfare .
As Tory MPs on the right of the party called for tougher action on Europe and immigration, Downing Street was preparing to launch a media blitz over the weekend to show the government is taking action in key areas highlighted by Ukip. The Queen's speech on Wednesday will contain measures to limit benefits to some immigrants with a particular focus on placing restrictions on access to the NHS . This is designed to show the government is taking action ahead of the lifting of transitional controls on citizens from Romania and Bulgaria, who will have full rights to work in the EU from next year.
The brothel worker: 'I regret not working in the sex trade as soon as I got here' Mia, a Taiwanese sex worker whom I had met while working as a housekeeper in a brothel in Stratford, east London, felt sorry for me when the manageress gave me the sack.
She offered to introduce me to Grace, another brothel owner for whom she worked regularly. Grace ran parlours in the north London suburbs of Finchley and Bounds Green, advertising them in the local newspapers and on her website. I was to discover later that Grace was well known for employing newcomers, both Chinese and Romanian. As with many Chinese-run brothels in the UK, though, she catered to a largely white male clientele. "Oriental" women (often, in reality, migrant mothers trying to provide for their families) are seen and treated as exotic (and erotic) providers of sex. A crisis over the UK's benefits bill for EU migrants? What crisis? Iain Duncan Smith's claims that Britain is a soft spot for 'benefit tourists'. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian Do migrants, especially those from within the European Union, get a better deal in Britain than they would elsewhere in the EU?
And do they therefore impose a disproportionate burden on UK taxpayers? The answer to the first question is yes, at least compared with some countries, because of the nature of the UK benefit system. Haven for the homeless. Nfused? You should be. Fair trade banana farmer.
He'd be handy on Janice's Yorkshire footpath-clearing sessions. Dominican Republic. Photograph: Alamy My month started with a busy, busy week – finding emergency overnights for Leeds asylum-seekers, path-clearing work on the North York Moors and a proper Fairtrade shop in Malton. All in five days. Hispanic Kids and the Immigration Wars.
My daughters have never met Arizona Governor Jan Brewer — and it’s likely they have never even heard her name.
That makes sense since they’re only 9 and 11. But even at their age, they’ve become familiar with Brewer’s — and her state’s — handiwork. I was born in the U.S., my wife was born in Mexico and emigrated here when she was in college, and my daughters were born in New York City. That makes them passport-carrying, natural-born, eligible-to-run-for-President Americans. Border Agency condemned over asylum and immigration backlog.
Senior UK Border Agency officials have been accused of misleading parliament after a damning report said they wrongly claimed they had dealt with a backlog of asylum and immigration claims – and that at one point more than 100,000 items of post about such cases remained unopened.
John Vine, the chief inspector of immigration, said UKBA's programme to deal with 147,000 outstanding asylum "legacy cases" – submitted before March 2007 – was far from resolved. Human trafficking: 'I never thought it could happen in this country' Mike used to pride himself on his health, running double marathons and working as a personal trainer, but now he looked painfully thin and nervous.
Sat in the bright living room of a safehouse where he lived for three months, he described having to retrain himself to eat properly after being kept in squalid conditions and forced to work unpaid for three years. He was, he said, a modern-day slave. "Before this happened I never even thought it could happen in this country, or that it could happen to men," he said. "But if you are desperate enough, anyone could find themselves in this trap. " Mike is one of hundreds of men and women who are trafficked into Britain for the profit of their unscrupulous bosses, according to a government report. The report by the inter-departmental ministerial group on human trafficking states that trafficking gangs in China, Vietnam, Nigeria and eastern Europe now pose the biggest threat. . • This article was amended on 19 October 2012. How the Tech Industry Lost an Ally on Immigration.
Last Thursday, the House took up a bill that would've helped foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities to stay in the U.S. --a measure long sought by a technology industry desperate for more high-skilled labor, something an Atlantic writer calls "the most obvious policy idea in America," and generally favored by politicos on both sides of the aisle. Nevertheless, the bill failed , with enough Democrats voting against it to torpedo the needed two-thirds majority. The bill's author, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, wasted no time making election-year hay out of the defeat, while tech industry lobbyists scolded Congress for depriving America of the brainpower it needs to stay afloat.