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Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, long thought of as one of Rishi Sunak's closest allies in Parliament, hinted yesterday at a row with the Prime Minister. He had a plan to reduce immigration ready ‘last Christmas’, he said. Why didn’t Sunak take it anywhere? Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and Paul Goodman.
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Everybody who knows nothing else about the French writer Renaud Camus knows that – as Wikipedia immediately asserts and as therefore is repeated every time he is mentioned in the press – he is ‘the inventor of the Great Replacement, a far-right conspiracy theory’. Until now, actually reading Camus has not been possible in English, so thoroughly has he been shunned by the mainstream media. Here, at last, are some of his core political essays in translation, published by a small press in America, that will make such dishonesty blatant in future. It is in that way, for good or ill, an essential publication, as few can genuinely be said to be. These are not the writings of Camus that I myself enjoy the most.
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On the night of 9 November 1938, across Germany and Austria, Jews were attacked and their synagogues and businesses set on fire. In the days that followed Kristallnacht, a scheme was put in place to save children from Nazi persecution. Known as the Kindertransport, it would, over the following ten months, bring 10,000 children to the UK. The Kindertransport – the word refers both to the means of transport and to the overarching programme – has always been regarded as a symbol of British generosity towards those in peril and seeking asylum. But it was all rather more complicated, as Andrea Hammel sets out to show.
Lampedusa, Italy The motorcade carrying Italy’s prime minister is being held up by a wild-eyed pirate. With a bushy black beard, sun-blasted face, tattooed forearms and a single earring, he stands in front of the convoy of a dozen police cars, extending a flattened palm. Blue lights flash, engines idle and somewhere behind blacked-out windows sit Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, and her important guest, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. The pirate is Giacomo Sferlazzo, leader of the protests that began on the island of Lampedusa after around 100 small boats carrying migrants arrived there on a single day in September. Really he’s a local musician, professional puppeteer and, as he describes himself, a Marxist-Leninist follower of Antonio Gramsci.
The first thing you see when you climb out of the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, Texas, is the homely site of the municipal golf course. Nine holes along the river expanded to eighteen via different tees, the pruned grass of the course is scuffed and torn from the hundreds of thousands of footsteps that have crossed it just this year, rubber soles that trekked from Central and South America to get to this godforsaken patch of green that signifies the US of A and everything it holds for the migrant who dreams of a new life. As welcomes go, it’s no sparkling torch of Lady Liberty.
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Bank on it Does the August bank holiday actually celebrate anything? – When bank holidays were first established in 1871, the August bank holiday fell at the beginning of the month, allegedly because it was an important week for cricket in Yorkshire, the home county of MP Sir John Lubbock, who introduced the parliamentary act creating bank holidays. – It was moved to the Monday after the last Saturday in August as an experiment in 1965, largely because early August coincided with the annual factory closure, and many workers were on holiday then anyway. – In 1968 and 1969 the holiday fell in September, so in 1971 it was fixed as the last Monday in August. Except, that is, in Scotland, where it remains in early August.
The temperature, at last, is starting to drop — and for Europeans that only means one thing: peak season is over. The crowds in the piazzas and on the beaches are starting to thin. And in the tavernas that were TikTokked you can finally think about getting a table. It’s time. Like the clockwork of migrating swallows — the Americans are going home. And knowing you can finally count on a breeze and far fewer strong-dollar spenders than a few weeks earlier, a stingier tipping class of European grande bourgeoisie in West London or the 8ème arrondissement — that has long since given up on July and August for the Mediterranean — is now contemplating a holiday. It’s still, however, at least conversationally, Europe season in the United States for a few more weeks.
The Western world, once so firmly grounded in Christianity and its Gospels, dogma and teachings, retains in the twenty-first century virtually nothing of them, the almost sole exception being the notion of sin and thus of guilt — not the Christian concept of them, but rather the modern liberal one. To begin with, the liberal idea of sin is collective; it is also highly selective, being limited to the West in general and the Caucasian race in particular. And it is obsessive, as much so as was the Christian version among the Calvinists of Geneva, or the neurotic anticommunism prevalent among the more single-minded and hysterical outliers on the American right during the 1940s and 1950s.
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Identity politics Sir: Your lead article (‘On board’, 12 August) highlights numerous issues related to refugees, but does not offer much in regard to why this country is a magnet for economic migrants. You state that this is a rich country. How can this be the case when government debt is 100 per cent of GDP? Further, when we cannot provide adequate services in healthcare, education and housing, why should we take in migrants who cannot make an immediate contribution to the country’s tax base? The reasons that this country is so attractive are, firstly, the English language, which we can’t do much about. Secondly, we have an easily accessible benefits system, including healthcare.
Lady Gaga’s dad is giving New York City a Million Reasons to tackle the 90,000 migrants and asylum-seekers who have descended on the city since last spring. Sixty-six-year-old Joe Germanotta is fed up with “all the mayhem” some 500 illegal migrants staying at the Stratford Arms Hotel are inflicting on his Upper East Side neighborhood, he told the New York Post “If it was like this when my girls were growing up, I wouldn’t be living in New York,” Germanotta said. According to the Post, he’s also “compiling a list of local residents’ concerns to take to lawmakers, the NYPD and the homeless services in protest.” Germanotta said the influx of migrants was carried out as a rapid “stealth operation” because “they didn’t want anybody to know what was going on.
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Small companies will face massive fines for not checking the papers of everyone they hire. Landlords will be put out of business for renting rooms to anyone without permission to be in the UK. With its Rwanda policy stalled, and with the numbers of illegal immigrants still at record highs, the government has a big new idea for trying to stem the numbers of people coming into the country. It will get small businesses to police the system. The only trouble is, that will damage the economy, and we will all suffer from that. The government’s latest big idea for controlling immigration is to make it a lot harder for anyone who is here illegally to work or find somewhere to live.
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There is nothing new under the sun. The idea of opening an asylum processing centre on the British overseas territory of Ascension Island has been knocking around for 20 years, but reports in today’s papers suggest it is suddenly all the rage again. Ministers are scrambling to find a ‘plan B’ in case the Supreme Court confirms the Appeal Court’s controversial view that the long-delayed Rwanda policy is unlawful. Way back in 2005, the Conservatives made a commitment in their manifesto that ‘asylum seekers’ applications will be processed outside Britain’. In the run up to that year’s election, Mark Reckless, then a researcher at Conservative Central Office, conducted a scoping exercise to identify a site for overseas processing. Ascension Island came out top of his list.
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Prigozhin’s example Sir: Educationalists and policy advisers have long been concerned with identifying alternative routes of upward social mobility. The career of Yevgeny Prigozhin provides an illuminating example of precisely this (‘Crime and punishment’, 1 July). Instead of spending years swotting away at A-levels and business studies degrees, Yevgeny opted for hands-on commercial experience by running a hotdog stand in a big city. He was quick to recognise the value of physical fitness in the pursuit of ambition by engaging in regular training at a local gym. Networking was always high on his agenda, and he soon became close friends with an employee of the state intelligence agency who eventually became President of Russia.
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Meet Ibrahim, from Syria. He fled Aleppo just before the bombs began to fall. A clean $4,000 in cash to a smuggler got him a fake passport and, voilà, a ticket to Europe – briefly in Greece, then in Germany (‘the people, they looked different’), now in Spain. Immigrant life was tough at first: the strange language, the alien norms, the overt racism. ‘He was not on their level. Just a refugee.’ Then a lucky break. He starred in a homemade porn video that went viral: ‘100 per cent real Arab bull.’ Next, he’s earning close to a seven-figure salary, owns a flash car and has women dripping off his arm. In Ben Judah’s illuminating depiction of modern-day Europe, almost everyone has a dream.
America! The land of the free. A place for second chances. But if you're a foreigner who wants to keep basking in the aforementioned freedom, the one thing you probably shouldn't do is write about your excessive drug use in a memoir when you're on a visa. That's the mistake made by Prince Harry, who now faces legal action that could end with his deportation back to Britain. You’d think a royal armed with the best schooling (and lawyers) money can buy would know that. But as is clear from Prince Harry’s latest debacle, hundreds of thousands of the finest British pounds in tuition will only get you so far. In his memoir Spare he wrote that he had consumed cocaine on several occasions. “Of course. I had been doing cocaine around this time.
The US economy is faltering, crime is through the roof, the border is a disaster, everyone hates the vice president and Democrats are not backing off one inch on transgenderism. Only one Republican could lose to President Joe Biden next year. But Democrats’ trump card is, well, Trump. Infallible two-step Biden re-election plan. Step one: trick Republicans into nominating Trump. Step two: that’s about it. I still don’t think Trump will be the nominee, but never underestimate Republicans’ ability to embrace the worst possible thing, especially with conservative media wildly cheerleading the worst possible thing.
Utica was once home to the American Nightmare. In the 1960s, the upstate New York city was a vibrant manufacturing hub, home to 100,000 people. Then the great unwinding began. General Electric pulled out in the early 1990s, and shortly after that the Air Force base closed. Entire streets burned as fleeing residents tried to claim insurance payouts. Families moved out as gangs from New York City moved in. Walking through the rubble in 1999, the mayor joked to an interviewer he had been having a nightmare of his own: “I dreamed I was the mayor of the city of Utica.
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After the media bigged up the expiration of America’s Covid-era Title 42, which enabled the US to block entries into the country, the anticipated stampede across the southern border doesn’t seem to have occurred. No worries, then? Behold the miracle of social adaptation. Before the handy illegal immigrant ejection seat was retired last week, illegal entries from Mexico had risen to 11,000 per day – if sustained, more than four million per year, and that’s after 2.3 million southern border apprehensions last year. The record-breaking influx had already become a stampede, and apparently people can get used to anything.
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How should Rishi Sunak govern? Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, his MPs have plenty of views on the matter at the moment – and many are keen to air them publicly. In the face of disappointing local election results, a couple of hundred members of the pro-Boris vehicle the Conservative Democratic Organisation gathered in Bournemouth over the weekend (James Heale writes about the event here) where its members reminisced about the Johnson days and critiqued Sunak. Tonight Sunak is due to host a coronation garden party for all MPs, but ahead of that charm offensive a number of ministers and MPs are heading to the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster for the National Conservatism conference.
The pandemic-era immigration policy known as Title 42 came to end alongside the nation's public health emergency Friday. Its expiry is expected to throw the southern border into further chaos. Title 42 refers to a portion of US code that gives the federal government the authority to curb migration during public health crises. The Trump administration implemented the policy to quickly eject illegal border crossers, including those who claimed asylum, amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Administration officials at the time warned that border crossers could both spread the virus to American citizens, as well as to each other if held in close quarters in detention facilities, at a time when the US was mostly prohibiting travel from other countries.
