Commonwealth

Commonwealth migrants unwelcome in Euro-Britain

Both Labour and Tories are vying with each other to introduce policies to keep coloured immigrants out of England, comments Subhash Chopra

  Some years ago a West End theatre in London staged a long-running play titled ‘No Sex Please, We Are British’. The times are a-changing: or are they?
   London’s political theatre currently has an even more gripping yarn on offer. It is a bipartisan offering, with both the Tories and Labour upping the ante. For the moment, the ruling Labour party’s Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is the political play’s director and she is determined to make it a resounding success. The main plot of this new play revolves round devising new curbs on entrants from the non-white Commonwealth. Judging by its real theme, it should be called ‘No Commonwealth migrants please, we are Euro-Brits now.’
   It is ironic that Britain should be putting on this play in the year when (non-white) India’s Kamalesh Sharma is set to become Secretary General of the 53-nation Commonwealth, the comity of nations which Britain professes to promote and expand. But the Common-wealth does not seem to matter in the current climate of Euro fever. The dramatic thrust of this new play is not on what is told in the story but on what is skilfully left out.
    The real story is about keeping out coloured migrants, yet the word colour is studiously left out of it. The huge influx of migrants over the last four years has been from the new member countries of the European Union, yet the target of exclusion are people from the coloured Commonwealth countries. Poles, Hungarians, Latvians, Lithuanians and other non-English-knowing newcomers are not ‘foreigners’. The highly skilled doctors, engineers and others from Asia and elsewhere apparently are.
   All sorts of rules to keep out migrants are being innovated. Australian-style points system, new biometric finger-printing passports, knowledge of English language as a precondition are all fair enough. But what is not fair is the prohibitive £1000 cash bond from spon-sors of visitors or guests. Apparently, the cash bond, which would be forfeited if the visitor fails to leave Britain by the visa expiry date, is to deter illegal overstayers. The move to cut the period of stay from six months to three months for relatives, tourists and other visitors conveys the message that Common-wealth visitors from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean are not very welcome.
   The Home Secretary has also proposed a tax on new migrants from non-EU countries to meet the cost of schools and health services till they become full-fledged citizens. This tax would annually yield no more than £15 million, chickenfeed financially but too costly for  UK’s reputation. The tax, if levied, is likely to be challenged in the courts because these migrants already pay for education and other public services through national insurance and income tax. This tax is particularly discrimi-natory, when survey after survey has rated these migrants as net contributors to UK’s economy.
   Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had spoken the sons-of-the-soil language last year with his ‘jobs for the British’ call has added another weapon to his party’s armoury. He said in a speech in London in February: ‘We will intro-duce a new English language require-ment for those applying for a marriage visa and planning to settle in the UK — both as part of our determination that everyone who comes here to live should be able to speak English and to make sure that they cannot be exploited.’ The operative excuse is to save spouses, mainly brides from the subcontinent, from being exploited by unscrupulous or funda-mentalist in-laws. The operative aim, sad to say, is to put one more hurdle in the way of an immigrant from the subcontinent.
The Tories call such proposals gimmicks. They want a clearly defined annual cap on the number of ‘foreigners’ to be allowed into the country, but leaving out the word ‘coloured’.
   Jacqui Smith in her enthusiasm for immigration curbs may have over-stepped the mark in February with another of her proposals to abolish the ‘grandfather clause’ in the existing visa rules, which entitles white Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians to live and work in the UK by virtue of an ancestral link — either grandparent having been born in the UK. She is already under fire from Members of Parliament for suggesting such a break affecting transcontinental cousins — a proposal which she and her party might live to regret.
   As the immigration debate goes on, with a promise of more to come, along come reports from the World Bank and the 30-nation OECD pronouncing Britain to be lucky with ‘brain gain’ from other countries even as its own graduates look for greener pastures abroad. The figures reveal that 1.1 million British graduates are living in other developed countries, 10.3 per cent of the total, while as many as 1.26 million immigrant graduates are living in the UK — a net gain of more than 100,000 graduates. Surely, a good bargain for Britain and a ‘brain drain’ from Commonwealth countries like India!

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