Thread: Great Britain: We are importing misery and despair

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We are importing misery and despair
By JOHN BIRD

Last updated at 09:46am on 27th August 2006

The news that more than a million new immigrants have landed on our shores since this Government came to power - including an estimated 600,000 from the old Eastern Bloc - is, quite rightly, beginning to ring alarm bells all over the country.

Why? Because this new kind of immigration bears no relationship to previous waves of new Britons who took up hard-to-fill vacancies in our factories, textile mills, hospitals and public transport systems.

This time, we are already seeing Czechs, Poles and Lithuanians sleeping rough on park benches or crammed ten-to-a-room in squalid flats. More than 40,000 are on benefits. Many hang around on street corners hoping to get black market, cash-in-hand work for a day.

Poverty generated hundreds of miles from our shores is haunting the streets of our cities and small provincial towns. This isn't immigration as we have traditionally known it. This is imported refugee-camp living.

Forty years ago, I worked in a car factory where the majority of the workforce were either Indian or Caribbean. Down the road was a far nastier place - a tyre factory where the workers came out covered in the fine deposits of rubber that got into your lungs. It was an ugly place where no Britons wanted to work. Consequently it was filled with our most recent immigrants.

But without them, the tyre plant would have closed, there would have been no profits to satisfy investors and the prosperity of Britain would have been impaired.

This new workforce was vital to our economy. Indeed, the fact immigration has often supplied the means for increasing wealth is still used as an argument in favour of our current open-door policy.

But what if Britain allowed a new kind of immigration? An immigration that brings in the needy, the helpless and the dependent?

What if we brought people into the country not to make a contribution to society but to join our homeless, to bed down in doorways and join the food queues?

What if all we could offer them was a life of soup kitchens, and, therefore, no life at all?

There are, I suppose, a range of responses from 'They are not our problem, get rid of them', to 'We must help'.

But both underline the painful reality that is beginning to turn homelessness into a pan-European issue.

For decades, we have had to get used to implementing laws created in Europe but now we are having to deal, too, with homelessness created in Europe.

The principle of free movement within the EU means we are rapidly Europeanising the needy and dependent.

Not just the poor but that part of the poor who cannot be absorbed into the workforce. Those for whom the only way out is the handout line and the doorway. And, after that, the social security office and the council house waiting list.

London's Victoria Coach Station is the doorway that offers the cheapest means of getting to the capital. For the past few years, it has been overwhelmed with Poles - many of whom are hardworking, highly trained and motivated to succeed, their presence largely applauded.

But many others come with no money, no contacts, no English and no prospects. They arrive desperate. Within a matter of hours their desperation increases as they bed down in and around the coach station.

There they begin the process of becoming refugees in a town of plenty. Surrounded by some of the most expensive property in London, they have no real option other than to become homeless and thereby begin the decline into total dependency.

But this is only the beginning. As the EU expands, we shall import even more poverty. We are already being warned that up to 350,000 Romanians and hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians will arrive here when their countries join the EU next year.

I would be astonished if we did not see a vast increase of the needy and helpless taking their chances on our streets.

Then the wretched and the dejected of Europe will become our problem. Britain will become a social dumping ground.

And all the signs are that our political masters and mistresses are willing to accept that.

While they may not be willing to contemplate the financial cost of this straight route into dependency and the handout culture, our political leaders are celebrating this new influx.

Look at all the bright new doctors, efficient nurses, tradesmen, builders and plumbers, they say.

But the politicians don
,t have to see those who come without marketable skills. Those of us who try to help the disheartened, the fallen and the troubled are already beginning to think internationally.

If you saw the damage done to people who suffer only a whiff of street life, you would not wish it on anyone. From any country.

Police Inspector Malcolm Barnard has the job of trying to reduce rough sleeping and homelessness in the centre of London.

The new European rough sleepers made a mockery of his work. He had the radical idea of returning people to their own country, rather than watch them rot on the streets of our cities.

Inspector Barnard used his budget to pay for around 150 destitute Polish people in London's West End to return to their native land. There was immediately a chorus of protest from the usual liberal fraternity.

Similarly, Westminster Council has paid for the return of 250 Polish people who were unable to provide for themselves.

They all went back willingly but from the fuss caused by the professional do-gooders you would have thought Westminster was guilty of ethnic cleansing.

I read a hard truth in a magazine recently. Immigrants going to America find it very difficult to get benefit but they find it easy to get a job. In Europe, including the UK, it is the opposite.

Handouts enslave, hold back and diminish the chances people have to fend for themselves. Benefits create an underclass who become disillusioned and angry towards the society that does the providing.

My fear is that failing Albanians, Romanians and Poles will become enslaved to the benefits system and produce children who are doomed, angry and candidates for social disruption.

This powder keg has been recently demonstrated in France, where children of immigrants brought up in suburban high-rise hells erupted in protest at their fruitless lives, an emptiness created by a welfare system designed to support them.

Alas, benefits have become a kiss of death, robbing the poor of all chance of breaking free of dependency. And, as you step over the Eastern European street sleepers, shudder at the looming hand of well-intentioned State intervention. For soon there will be Government programmes for all these arrivals.

Jobs will be created to administer to them. And another group of dissatisfied people will be cursing the day they took the poisoned chalice of State aid. Their children will curse even more.

I fear these do-gooders who make careers of enslaving people and make our country more wretched and our poor the most wretched of all. Theirs is a recipe for social disaster.

We must stop the free flow of the desperate to our shores, for their own good. It can be done. The Government must impose limits on future immigration. It is no fun being a long-term state dependant in the UK.

And it is no fun for taxpayers to see their money so badly used.

This sounds familiar.....

Excellent article and it sounds similar to what is happening in the US. It's also happening in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and most European countries. Have I left anyone off this list?

The main solution, that is likely to not occur, are for leaders of third world nations to share the wealth they hog from their poor citizens. These leaders also needs to stress birth control to their nations. China took drastic measures in this direction. The one child rule sounds cruel, but desparate situations call for desparate measures.

When immigrants - legal or illegal - go to richer foreign countries, they have more children than is economically feasible and I've read they are more likely to have more children in the richer nations they migrate to since they can - as in the US - gain US citizenship for their children as well as free medical.

Overpopulation is the scourge of all the world's immigration problems. Too many people; too few resources.

America just like these other countries cannot take in the poor of the world or we will be poor ourselves. Look at what is happening now, most of the middle class is struggling with rising taxes and bills it is just a matter of time before this class becomes the poor. The gumball theory is correct if this continues we will be a third world country.