Immigration

Reihan Salam highlights the latest pro-immigration move by Stephen Harper’s Canadian government: Canada is looking to poach Silicon Valley’s intrepid foreign up-and-comers as it launches a “first of its kind in the world” program that will grant immediate permanent residency to qualifying entrepreneurs starting April 1. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said Thursday he will head down to America’s technology heartland once the program is in place to begin recruiting the “thousands of super bright young foreign nationals,” often from Asia, who are working at technology start-ups on temporary visas and may have to go home before they’ve been able to obtain their coveted U.S. Green Card. “We see the bright,

Eric Pickles says he’s waiting for figures on how many Romanians and Bulgarians are expected to come to the UK when transitional controls on their freedom of movement expire on 31 December 2013. The problem is that the Home Office isn’t producing those figures, arguing that such an estimate would be impossible. I’ve spoken to a Home Office source, who told me: ‘There are no Home Office figures in terms of a projection of the numbers because there’s not really very much point in guess work about this because it really is just guess work. Instead, our view is that we should be focusing on the factors that are bringing

Does it matter that white Britons are now a minority in three towns or cities in this country? The latest census figures suggest that whitey is outnumbered in Leicester, Luton and Slough. I assume the reason for this is that lots of Asians have colonised these places and as a consequence many of the whites have got the hell out. They have always been fairly awful places, mind, in any case – Luton in particular. Those who welcome more and more immigration usually wave their hands and say listen, change happens, and we should welcome it – for the white people in those towns it is a chance to meet

Yes, Britain’s employment figures are strong but most of the rise in employment so far under this government is accounted for by foreign-born workers (as was 99pc of the rise in employment under Labour). The recession has not diminished employers’ appetite for immigrant workers and today’s Sunday Times magazine has a long piece asking whether there is a “fundamental difference in our attitudes to work”. It’s still one of the most important questions in Britain today: what’s the use of economic growth if it doesn’t shorten British dole queues? And should we blame these industrious immigrants; aren’t the Brits just lazy? I’d urge CoffeeHousers to read the whole thing, but

It won’t actually come as a surprise to anyone living in London that the census results from the Office of National Statistics this week showed that ‘white British’ are down to 45 per cent in the capital. There are bits of the capital whose look and feel suggests that the percentage is much higher – well, the figures are from people who filled in the census forms, which isn’t quite the same thing as the actual population. Remember that cover story in The Spectator a couple of months back, based on the premise that London was practically a city-state, radically different from most other parts of the UK? Well, this

I’m afraid that I can’t help but feel some of the comments left responding to this post go some way towards answering a question Daniel Hannan asked recently: why do right-wing parties struggle to win support from immigrants? After all, and as Mr Hannan notes, emigration is an entrepreneurial act and immigrants tend to be thrifty, hard-working types. This should, all things being equal, be fertile territory for conservatives. Except, as we know, not all things are equal and they’re certainly not equal in this case. The truth of the matter is that the conservative movement – whether in the United Kingdom or the United States – still has a

Net migration to the UK from April 2011 to March 2012 was 183,000, down by a quarter on 242,000 the year before. That’s the headline figure from today’s Office for National Statistics release, and the government is using it to claim success. Immigration minister Mark Harper said: ‘This shows we are bringing immigration back under control. Our tough policies are taking effect and this marks a significant step towards bringing net migration down from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands by the end of this Parliament.’ But it’s worth looking a bit deeper into the figures. Overall, immigration was at its lowest level since 2004 — when

The immigration lobby are getting desperately short of arguments to set against the huge costs of mass immigration. The first body blow was a House of Lords report which ‘found no evidence…… that net migration generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population’ (see abstract here). This was followed by a report from the government’s own Migration Advisory Committee which pointed out that much of any benefit goes to the immigrants themselves. (see Paragraphs 3.6-3.13 here). Then a study by the NIESR found that the contribution of the much vaunted East European migrants to GDP per head was expected to be ‘negligible’ (see Exec Summary here), indeed negative in