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genuinegirly · 04-26-2010, 04:41 AM

Do you see immigration issues in Britain?
How do they compare to those in mainland Europe?
Will the recent influx into Britain change its place in the world economy?
How have you seen immigration change policy?
What political parties are favored by those who support immigration?
How does one gain British citizenship, anyway?

In Britain, Immigration is Political Landmine - NYTimes.com

Quote:

On the Sceptred Isle, Immigration Is an Issue Fit for Whispers
By JOHN F. BURNS
LONDON — In a general election where the unexpected surge of the Liberal Democrats has put all the usual calculations about the contest between Labour and the Conservatives in flux, there has been a morbid familiarity to the campaign of one party that cannot hope to be part of the jockeying for power many pundits foresee after the ballots are cast on May 6.

The British National Party, inheritor of the ideological mantle of Oswald Mosley’s Union of Fascists in the 1930s, can realistically hope to win only one London-area constituency among the 650 House of Commons seats — if even that. But opinion polls suggest that the party will attract significantly more of the popular vote than the seven-tenths of 1 percent it won in 2005.

The party’s rise, such as it may be, can be traced to the same issue — the rapid increase in nonwhite immigration, particularly from the Muslim world — that has recently empowered far-right parties across Europe, notably in France. Britain’s counterpart to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the demagogic French politician who reached a runoff for the presidency in 2002, is Nick Griffin, a soberly suited, 51-year-old Cambridge-educated graduate in history and law.

Mr. Griffin is a fringe politician. But in this election, more than in any other in memory, popular anxiety about the rapid rise in immigration in the 13 years of Labour rule is the ghost at the banquet. It is a political reality strong enough, according to opinion polls, to influence votes in dozens of constituencies, but one that the major parties can afford to address only in the most modulated of keys, and then, usually, only when others raise it on the campaign trail.

To understand that, it is enough to recall Enoch Powell. Forty-two years ago, Mr. Powell, a prominent Conservative, made a speech saying Britain “had to be mad” to admit 50,000 immigrants a year, mostly then from British islands in the Caribbean. He likened the consequences to the “tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic,” the 1968 race riots in America. A classicist, he indulged his passion for ancient history. “I am filled with foreboding,” he said. “Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ ”

Mr. Powell was promptly sacked from the Conservatives’ shadow cabinet; he left the party and wandered in the political shadows until his death in 1998. His “rivers of blood” speech has stood ever since as a warning to mainstream politicians of the fate of those who raise the immigration issue with overwrought language, particularly with a racist tinge. In 2005, many people thought Michael Howard, then the Conservative leader, crossed the line with his tough language on immigration, further dooming his party to its third straight loss to Labour.

Small wonder, then, that the prime ministerial contenders trod warily when a nonwhite woman in the audience raised the issue at the second of three televised election debates on Thursday.

To nobody’s surprise, each of the three emphasized the need to curb migrant inflows. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat, urged an amnesty for the million or so illegal immigrants estimated to have lived in Britain for 10 years or more, to “get them out of the hands of criminal gangs,” balanced by stricter border controls; Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for Labour, said new identity cards for foreign residents and a points system for immigration applicants had begun to cut the numbers; David Cameron, the Conservative, advocated a cap on entrants from outside the European Union, “to get it down radically.”

But their competing policies were less notable than the care the three took to avoid any shade of prejudice. “The first thing to say,” Mr. Cameron said, “is that we have benefited from immigration; and people who come here and live legally, we should be incredibly warm and welcoming and hospitable and build a strong and integrated country. I think it’s really important to say that, first up.”

One party leader not invited to the debates was Mr. Griffin, though he wrenched the debate back down to street level on Friday when he unveiled the B.N.P.’s election manifesto. It called for “absolutely no further immigration from any Muslim countries, as it presents one of the most deadly threats to the survival of our nation.” Mr. Griffin said Britain was “full up,” and it was time to “close the doors.”

What has given the issue new political weight is the scale of immigration during Labour rule. Extrapolations from government figures suggest that looser regulations adopted in Tony Blair’s early years as prime minister have led to a net inward migration of about two million people since 1997, with a peak of 330,000 in 2007. Many new arrivals have come legally from East European nations in the European Union, notably Poland. But by far the most non-Europeans have been Muslims, who historically have been slower to assimilate than other immigrants.

The numbers may seem modest to Americans, who saw Congress struggle during the George W. Bush years — and fail — to agree on a plan to deal with a backlog of 12 million undocumented immigrants. But by the measure of available space, Britain’s two million new immigrants pose a challenge of at least comparable scale. Britain, with 62 million people, is already one of the most heavily populated countries in the developed world; new settlers put pressure on schools, hospitals, public housing and a welfare system that are bending under the strain.

Drawn by Europe’s most generous welfare system, and by the status of English as the global lingua franca, illegal immigrants have shown inexhaustible resourcefulness in breaching the border controls of an island nation that Shakespeare vaunted as an oceanbound redoubt — “This sceptred isle ...This other Eden ...This fortress built by nature for herself ...This happy breed of men, this little world,/ This precious stone, set in the silver sea.”

One of the country’s most powerful newspapers, The Daily Mail, has made a staple of the system’s failures — of Afghans and Albanians and Iraqis and others stowing away in trucks and astride the wheel assemblies of freight trains shuttling through the Channel tunnel; of tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers who evade deportation for years; of illegal migrants who murder and rape, then emerge from prison and win court orders that let them stay in Britain because their wives and children live here.

All this has left advocates of keeping Britain’s doors open with a hard sell. The official estimate of the foreign-born population — 11 percent — contrasts with the 1 percent historians give as the average for 1,000 years before major immigration from the Caribbean began in the 1950s.

To people like Mr. Griffin, all this is grist to the mill. As he presented his election manifesto, his aides warned that the failure to curb Muslim immigration would lead, perhaps as early as midcentury, to a Britain that is an Islamic republic.

While only a small minority appear to believe that, many think the country has begun a historic transformation that will make the Britain of the future profoundly different than it has been up to now. If that, too, was a specter raised by Mr. Powell back in 1968, he must be given some responsibility for making it a prospect too thorny, at least in this election, for the mainstream politicians of our age to engage.

I had no idea that there were waves of immigrants coming to Britain. With the expensive cost of living and seeming lack of jobs, it would be the last place I'd think to flee. I'm hoping that some of our British and European members will have some insight to throw our way.