Immigration

Monday

Norman Lebrecht

Who invented the hamburger?

From our US edition

The hamburger is the perfect meal in the hand, eaten by workers on their lunch breaks, or by families who cannot afford fancy restaurants. It is the great comestible leveler, suitable alike for suburban barbecues and the front steps of tenement houses. The staple food of American democracy yields cheeseburgers, baconburgers, franchise brands, and drive-in outlets with total annual sales of five billion units. The precise origins of the patty, however, remain opaque. Nobody knows for certain who first thought of cooking a patty of minced beef and serving it inside a fresh-baked bun. The earliest use of the name was for an 11-cent dish, the ‘Hamburger steak’, served at a New York restaurant, Delmonico’s, in 1873. There is no mention of buns or relish.

hamburger

Wednesday

Alex Diggins

Bernadine Evaristo shoulders weighty themes lightly: Girl, Woman, Other reviewed

It’s a slippery word, ‘other’. Taken in one light, it throws up barriers and insists on divisions. It is fearful and finger-pointing: them, not us. But looked at in another way, it is rangy, open and expansive. It suggests horizons, not walls. That first meaning has done much heavy lifting in discussions of Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other. As the first black British woman to be awarded the prize, this was perhaps inevitable. Evaristo cuts an unmistakable dash through the ranks of past winners: they have been, on the whole, more pale and — damningly — a lot more male.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Why splitting the Home Office up makes sense

We won't see the full scope of what Boris Johnson plans to do for life after Brexit until the new year. There will be a few appointments this afternoon to replace gaps in the government, and then the Queen's Speech will introduce the legislative agenda on Thursday. But the full launch of the new government won't be until February. What we do know is that Johnson and his senior aide Dominic Cummings have got Whitehall in their sights, and are hoping to reshape government departments to make them work better. One of the biggest changes is carving up the Home Office so that it loses its responsibility for immigration and border security, with a new ministry carrying out that function.

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Jeremy Corbyn- There will be a great deal of movement

Jeremy Corbyn - 'I want a close relationship' with the EU The Labour leader was Andrew Marr's chief guest of the day. Marr began by asking for Corbyn's personal stance on Brexit, something which has proved highly elusive since the referendum result in 2016. Corbyn happily gave the Labour party's position, but once again refused to be drawn on the issue:   [embed]https://youtu.be/blSSOZYAQA0[/embed] AM: Do you want this country to leave the EU or not? JC: We're going to put that choice to the British people, and they will make that decision... I want a close relationship with the EU in the future. 'You don't know' who I'm going to negotiate with If Labour wins the upcoming election, the party plans on re-negotiating a Brexit deal with the EU.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Trevor Rene’s battle to stay in Britain

When Boris Johnson edited this magazine, it proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants — a controversial notion, but an idea he has stuck to. As London Mayor he suggested an ‘earned amnesty’: if bureaucracy had failed over many years to catch up with the 400,000 undocumented migrants in the capital, he reasoned, why not regularise their status so that they could start paying taxes and contributing to the country in other ways? When this magazine reprised the issue last week, the usual objections were recycled: why reward criminality? But the actual cases are more complicated. Trevor Rene is one such case. He was born in Dominica in 1969 when it was still a British colony, so as a child he had a British passport.

Thursday

The Spectator

The case for amnesty: why it’s time to offer citizenship to illegal immigrants

There is an unspoken truth about British life: we have two classes of citizen. The first are those born or formally settled here, who have all the rights and protections of the law. Then there are perhaps a million others who may have lived here with their families for years but without the proper documents. They can be our neighbours, work in our shops, contribute to our economy — yet they do not have the same basic protections and are far more vulnerable to exploitation. These are the so-called illegal immigrants, and it is past time to offer them amnesty. Britain has become the most successful melting pot in Europe, absorbing 2.5 million people over this decade without the far-right backlash seen in much of the continent.

Thursday

Paulina Neuding

Bomb attacks are now a normal part of Swedish life

 Stockholm Until recently no one would have thought of adding a column on bombings to the crime statistics One night last week, explosions took place in three different locations in and around Stockholm. There were no injuries this time, just the usual shattered windows, scattered debris and shocked people woken by the blast. The police bomb squad was already on its way to the first explosion in the district of Vaxholm when it had to turn around and prioritise the detonation at a residential building in the more densely populated city centre. Residents whose doors had been deformed by the shock wave had to be rescued. The third target (seemingly unrelated) was a facility belonging to a Syriac Orthodox church, which had already been bombed twice in the past year.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Priti Patel turns her back on Theresa May’s legacy at the Home Office

This afternoon's law and order theme to Tory conference did take a bit of a knock when police were called to an altercation involving one of the party's MPs, resulting in the backbencher, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, being sent home. Not long after this incident, which sent parts of the conference centre into lockdown, Priti Patel walked onto the stage and announced that 'today, here in Manchester, the Conservative party takes its rightful place as the Party of Law and Order in Britain once again'.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Boris’s no-deal immigration plan

Tomorrow the government will say what will happen to free movement in the event of a no-deal Brexit. I understand that free movement will be replaced by a three-year temporary Leave to Remain Scheme for EU nationals who arrive in the UK before 31 December 2020 and register with the EU settlement scheme. Their three years would start from December 2020. So, in other words, if you are an EU citizen who arrives in the UK in March 2020 you would be entitled to stay until at least December 2023. This is a significant change from previous government plans to end free movement on 1 November in the event of no deal. It should provide more certainty to EU nationals considering taking a job in the UK and deal with many of the problems that Fraser Nelson set out in last week’s cover piece.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

How Boris Johnson can deliver a liberal Brexit

From our US edition

For all its ferocious momentum, Boris Johnson’s government is capable of making pretty bad mistakes – as we saw with Priti Patel’s announcement that free movement of people will end with Brexit on October 31. This is a massive problem, if it hasn’t worked out what regime will replace it. As I say in this week’s UK cover story, this decision plunged millions of European Union nationals into uncertainty. The Home Office has only managed to process one million of the three million living in the country. And what would happen to the other two million on October 31? If they change jobs, how would a French baker who has lived here for 30 years distinguish himself from a French baker just off the ferry if he starts a new job?

liberal brexit boris johnson

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

The Whitney Museum surrenders to the mob

From our US edition

The mob waged war on the Whitney Museum and won. The scalp this time belongs to Warren Kanders, who owns Safariland, a manufacturer of law enforcement and military supplies, and who, until his resignation last week, was a vice-chairman at the Museum. Kanders’s great crime was that his company manufactures tear gas, a non-lethal weapon which has been used — in my view most unfortunately — at the southern border. However you feel about the border crisis — and I’ve been quite clear on my outrage here — most reasonable people should admit that in almost all cases, the use of tear gas makes it likely that lethal crowd-control tactics will not be used. This story is not really about Warren Kanders or his company, and that’s precisely the problem.

warren kanders whitney museum

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

What’s waiting in Priti Patel’s new Home Office in-tray?

Priti Patel is the new Home Secretary. This is likely to attract a fair bit of opprobrium from Boris Johnson's critics, given she is a supporter of the death penalty. Whether or not she has been given any remit to examine that particular policy issue, she has a big job on her hands. The Home Office is one of the hardest departments to run. Theresa May managed to survive it, largely by micromanaging everyone else into the dust. Her successor Amber Rudd did not, finding that obeying her boss too well led to her being implicated in the Windrush scandal. Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, May's aides in the Home Office and then in Number 10, would constantly tell friends that they were always trying to avert disaster in the department or one of its agencies.

Friday

Cole Carnick

When Mexico enforces its own laws, immigration drops

From our US edition

‘We’re holding a gun to our own heads,’ said Sen. John Cornyn in June. He was talking about President Trump’s threat to impose tariffs in order to force Mexico to crack down on illegal immigration into the Unites States. Many congressmen agreed, fearing, as establishment figures are prone to do, that Trump was risking the whole economy for some nebulous border demand. A month later, it seems Trump’s tariff gambit has worked. After Mexican officials agreed to crack down on illegal immigration to avoid US-imposed tariffs, the Department of Homeland Security reports that border apprehensions dropped from 144,278 in May to 104,344 in June — a 28 percent decrease.

mexico

Monday

James Kirkup

What Tories can learn from Theresa May’s mistakes on immigration

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is often taught to schoolchildren, who read it as a warning about the fragility of human power. Conservatives should study it now and ensure they take an opportunity to learn from Theresa May’s mistakes on immigration. If there was one issue that helped May become, for a short time, a figure of “cold command” over her party, it was immigration. As home secretary and then Prime Minister, she was the senior figure at the top of the Conservative party who consistently took the hardest line on the issue.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

End of an era

There’s been a Dimbleby on air since before I was born but last Friday saw the end of that era when Jonathan retired as chairman of Radio 4’s Any Questions after 32 years. It’s a bit like imagining life in Britain once the Queen dies. The Dimbleby family has been intertwined with the history of the BBC, and major national events, since the second world war when Richard, the father, carved out his career as a war reporter, most famously from Belsen in 1945. Mere mention of the name conjures up those Reithian values — clear reportage, an intelligent and fair-minded assessment of what’s going on, and access to that information for everyone.

Friday

Bay Buchanan

The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act is unfair for American workers

From our US edition

Republicans claim they want to put Americans first when it comes to immigration. So why are they backing another giveaway to Big Tech and foreign workers at the expense of American citizens? Several Republican senators, including Mike Lee, Tom Cotton, and Kevin Cramer, have sponsored the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act. The bill is being for a vote in the Senate by Unanimous Consent, which means skipping all debates. The bill is anything but fair. It would be another special privilege for Silicon Valley — allowing giant corporations to hire more foreign nationals instead of STEM graduates. The bill would eliminate country caps on legal immigration, which prevent one nationality from monopolizing the allocation of Green Cards.

high-skilled immigrants

Tuesday

Cockburn

Ten demands Cockburn has if he is to take the Immigration Czar role

From our US edition

Someone really doesn’t want Kris Kobach to work in the White House. The former Kansas Secretary of State, who lost a gubernatorial race in November, was in talks about joining the administration as its ‘Immigration Czar’. But, in what appears to be an attempted kneecapping, the New York Times revealed a list of 10 demands he was making were he to take the position. Three people ‘familiar’ with Kobach’s commandments confirmed them to Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni.

kris kobach immigration czar

Monday

Stephen Daisley

Scotland’s dirty little secret: we’re as anti-immigration as England

In August 2007, three months after coming to power at Holyrood, the SNP launched its National Conversation on Scotland’s constitutional future. We have been talking about little else since. Among the many national conversations postponed is one on immigration. The CBI has tried to kick-start such a discussion by warning that, within 20 years, just one third of Scotland’s population will be of working age. Given that figure is currently 64 per cent, it is an arresting claim. It is also entirely plausible. The Office for National Statistics predicts the number of working-age Scots to grow by just one per cent between now and 2041, while the pensioner population is expected to surge by 25 per cent.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Hilarity with heart

Small Island, based on Andrea Levy’s novel about Jamaican migrants in Britain, feels like the world’s longest book review. We meet Hortense, a priggish school teacher, and her cool, handsome boyfriend who survive on a pittance in the Caribbean. Then we skip back to Hortense’s childhood in a house dominated by a bullying preacher who forbids conversations at mealtime. Then we cross the Atlantic to Lincolnshire and meet a chirpy blonde, Queenie, whose auntie runs a sweetie shop. Does Queenie want a job selling sweeties? Yes, says Queenie to her auntie. All this takes ages, and it feels like a deadly earnest sociology lecture. Then a stiff young bank clerk enters the shop and asks Queenie if she’d like to go for a walk. And the show takes off.

Thursday

Geoff Hill

Back door to Britain

I was working in Johannesburg when I first got wind of the fact that Ireland has become an illegal back door to the UK. If you’re from a country such as South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Fiji or Guyana, you need, not just a passport, but a prearranged visa, obtained from the local embassy for a fee, before you can even board a plane to Britain. It takes time, your details are checked, and you need to show a reason why you’ll go home at the end of your stay. In the 1980s most African nationals could come to Britain visa-free. But worries about terrorism and crimes committed once in the UK meant that, one by one, African countries had to join the visa scheme.