As argued previously, both globalisation and the EU Single Market have created huge instability in both trade and migration. The majority of the British people now understand that it is not racist to want to bring uncontrolled immigration back into balance, but what would the necessary immigration controls actually look like, and would they be both fair and firm as well as both effective and civilized?
In fact our existing controls are far from being either effective or civilized. Border officials are often faced with having to make ad hoc decisions which inevitably are prejudiced and subjective. That is no more fair on them than it is on the unfortunate visitor, and it paints an embarrassing picture of this country. For example not so long ago a Jamaican woman turned up at Southampton wanting to donate a kidney to her brother who was waiting for it on dialysis in hospital. The border official did not believe her story and turned her away. Leaving aside the fact that a better trained official could easily have confirmed the story by a phone call to the hospital, the possibility of such a situation should never have arisen in the first place. Then there is the case of the young man who came to this country with his parents from Germany when he was a toddler. His parents opted for him to keep a German passport as a connection with his roots, but despite the fact that he has spent all the rest of his life here he was recently told to leave. There must be a better way.
So here are a set of proposals which I believe would do the job. I have loaded them as a pdf file which you can download here. They go beyond the banner of “an Australian style points based system” and put some flesh on the bones. They are only a ‘catalytic’ proposal in that I am sure they can be improved further under peer review, but they are I hope a start.
John Poynton 