Immigration: too many too fast

The worst among our citizens and politicians are eager to depict illegal immigrants as criminals, potential terrorists and alien invaders. Recent demonstrations in the USA should have changed that view. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants – both legal and illegal – walked out of work and marched in cities across America. "Moms", dads and children demonstrated peacefully, many waving US flags. The focus of their protest was the strict immigration bill currently in Congress, which would criminalise illegal migrants, and reinforce the Mexican border. But the marchers also carried a powerful wider message on behalf of America's 12 million illegal workers (80% of whom are Hispanic). These immigrants, weary of silent servitude, are speaking up for something simple: a chance to work to become citizens, with all the obligations and opportunities that go with it.

The marchers have made their point but it may not change much. Rather, it seems to have polarised American public opinion: support for the cause is growing, but so is public concern about immigration. The conservative Republicans who backed the controversial bill in Congress are digging their heels in, and Latinos don't yet have much political power – illegals, obviously, can't vote, and only 39% of America's 41 million Hispanic citizens are registered. The next step will be to register these voters, to convert the energy of protest into political clout.

Here in the UK, the scandal of the foreign prisoners released without facing deportation is a natural result of one of New Labour's least publicised policies namely its commitment to high levels of immigration. The statistics speak for themselves: In 1997 there was a net immigration into Butain of 26,000. In 2004 (the most recent figure availible), the net figure was 342,000. Take the outflow of immigrants out of the equation and that means 582,000 new citizens – the equivalent of seven parliamentary constituencies – legally arrived here in the UK in 2004 alone. Such an influx puts a strain on schools, housing authorities, the NHS and the legal system. The 300% increase in foreign prisoners over the past ten years actually speaks well for the behaviour of immigrants, given that net immigration has soared by 1,400%. I completely believe that immigrants are a good thing for the UK, as can be demonstrated with reference the USA, and provides enormous benefits but a very fast increase of anything tends to be a bad idea.

What has Bush Achieved?

Professor Steve Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania says it's easier to cheat democracy than Las Vegas. This is a fact which Bush must know all to well as six years into his presidency it is difficult to think of a single, substantial foreign policy initiative that Bush has pursued that did not involve war, or the threat of it. There is good reason for this. It is the one area in which America reigns supreme, accounting alone for 40% of the global military expenditure and spending almost seven times the amount of its nearest rival, China.

Yet greatness eludes him. For if the last six years have proved anything, it is the limitations of military might as the central plank of foreign policy. Indeed as a previous post indicates Bush now faces record low approval ratings and Iraq's former interim prime minister, lyad Allawi, warned this week that his country was on the brink of collapse.

"If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is," he said on the third anniversary of the American-led invasion. Allawi argued that there was no other way to describe the sectarian violence that he said was claiming 50 to 60 lives every day.

President Bush denied that Iraq had descended into civil war, but suggested that American soldiers might have to stay in the country after he'd left office in 2009. The decision about whether to withdraw troops, he said, would be made by future presidents and future
governments of Iraq. Bush was speaking after US forces launched one of the biggest offensives since the 2003 invasion – an assault involving 1,500 soldiers on insurgents in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Iraq was meant to become a beacon of democracy and freedom in the Middle East. Instead it's a bloodbath. Sunni insurgents mount car bombings and assassinations daily. Shia death squads are kidnapping, torturing and executing Sunnis. Since the desecration of the Shia shrine at Samarra last month, the carnage has increased dramatically. Three years on we can see more clearly than ever that the invasion of Iraq has been an unqualified disaster.

Those people who supported the campaign must be honest enough to admit that this is not how things were meant to turn out. Let's just admit that Iraq has been a catastrophic failure. It could hardly have been otherwise: the invasion was based on a series of premises that were totally mistaken – if not downright fraudulent. We were told that Iraq had WMD. It didn't. We were told that it was a haven for anti-Western terrorists. It wasn't – but it certainly is now. We were told that it would make us safer. Quite the reverse. Instead, we now share with the US the enmity of the Arab and Muslim world, and terrorist attacks against our two countries are frequently justified by the invasion. It was meant to bring democracy. Assuming the central  government survives, the majority of voters are likely to favour an authoritarian Shia regime.

British and American forces in Iraq now face a grim prospect. If the situation continues to deteriorate – as seems all too likely – the choices are stark. Either the Coalition sits back and watches the chaotic unravelling of Iraq, with sectarian militias acting to defend their own communities and attack others, or it tries, probably in vain to enforce a managed partition, decentralising political authority to the Shia in the south, the Kurds in the north, and the Sunnis in the centre.

Poverty in Britain: is it still a problem?

When Labour pledged to abolish child poverty by 2020 economists were astounded. It couldn’t be done, they said – and perhaps they had a point.  The Office of National Statistics’ annual poverty figures, published this week, show that 700,000 children have so far been lifted out of poverty – falling short of Labour’s initial target of one million.

Although the statistics are encouraging, relying on capitalism to alleviate the situation doesn’t seem to work. Fans of the free market have always argued that the trickle-down effect would eventually make everyone wealthy. But the gap between rich and poor is growing bigger all the time. There are now 793 billionaires around the world, of whom the top three possess more wealth than the 600 million poorest people put together. In London alone, there are 23 billionaires, each of whose bank accounts grows by £20,000 an hour. Yet the Government is too frightened of the middle classes to raise the top level of tax. It’s hardly a triumph of Labour principles.

Fair trade isn’t really that fair

Fair trade isn’t really fair at all It’s Fairtrade fortnight – that time when the middle classes fill their shopping trolleys with every “fair trade” product from coffee to cosmetics in an effort to relieve their feelings of guilt. Yet “fair trade’s” real influence is far from benign. A combination of economic illiteracy and do-gooder foolishness has created a monster that threatens the prosperity of the poorest producers. Fair trade schemes work by setting minimum prices at which packagers and importers buy goods from producers. Nothing wrong with that in theory; in practice, however, it encourages affluent producers to stay in the market, kicking the ladder away from the poorest who are unable to make a niche for themselves by undercutting. This is apparent in Mexico, a relatively affluent developing country which now produces a quarter of all fair trade coffee – a disaster for the poorest producers such as Ethiopia. Is fair trade is beginning to bear a suspicious likeness protectionism?

India: Bush, business, nukes and creeping globalisation

You have to wonder why George W. Bush hasn’t visited India before. This is a place, after all, where people actually like him. Back home his ratings are in the low 40s, but here 54% think well of the US president and 71% feel good about America (as opposed to barely 20% in Pakistan). And they’ll feel better still after Bush’s visit as he was closed a deal with the Indian Prime Minister, that allows India to import civilian nuclear technology.

Both Pakistan and India became illicit nuclear powers in 1998 as their long-running stand-off over control of Kashmir appeared ready to blow. But the deal brings to an end an embargo that began in 1974 and became even tighter eight years later when India declared it had the bomb. So now India will not only be a legitimate member of the nuclear club, it will be able to build the atomic power stations it needs to fire its booming economy.

This is a terrible deal precisely because it has been so soft on India. He pledged to support their energy program despite their not having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as required by both U.S. and international law. The whole point of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was to reward countries that renounced nuclear weapons by letting them import the sensitive technologies needed to provide domestic energy. To now backtrack on this sends out entirely the wrong signal to other nuclear hopefuls like South Africa, Turkey and South Korea. He has also told Pakistan, India’s chief adversary, they will be receiving no such bonanza.

“I explained that Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories. So as we proceed forward, our strategy will take in effect those well-known differences.” Bush said at a news-conference.

Pakistan is no doubt being punished for the sins of A.Q. Khan, the godfather of Pakistan’s nuclear program, who was responsible for the world’s largest nuclear proliferation black market.

The underlying reason for the deal is that it makes economic sense for both sides. Nuclear power will reduce India’s rising demand for oil, so easing pressure on the global oil price; US nuclear firms will profit hugely from selling the technology. The only surprise is how long it has taken. Since 1991 when India opened to market forces and brought to an end its long tradition of industrial protectionism, annual growth in India has been 7%, every third IT expert in the world is now Indian, and many of them work in America. Non-Resident Indians are the most successful group in the US.

Every sixth firm in Silicon Valley is run by them. But not all become US citizens. What we’re now witnessing is a huge exodus of Non-Resident Indians from America back to the home country. Those who have done so form India’s new and totally Americanised elite. They live in gated communities and celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving and Halloween. They network in golf clubs; the females socialise at the gym and get together to watch Oprah Winfrey on TV. Such people are changing the way India thinks, the way it works. These are the kind of people with whom George W. Bush and America can do business: neoliberals, who demand the creation of laissez-faire capitalism by promoting the privatization of the Indian economy and the weakening of trade and business regulations.

The views of Vandana Shiva, Amartya Sen and Arundhati Roy although popular now, will slowly but surely be drowned out.

UN damns Guantanamo

The United States came under pressure to close Guantanamo Bay prison recently following a scathing UN report into the detention camp. In the study – based on interviews with detainees’ lawyers, former inmates and written exchanges with US officials – five UN special envoys accuse the US of violating a host of human rights, including the ban on torture and arbitrary detention. Most of the camp’s 500 inmates have been held for four years without trial. The UN rapporteurs said the US should either charge inmates or free them without further delay.

In one of the strongest remarks yet by a British Cabinet minister, Peter Hain said he would like to see the camp closed. But Tony Blair only went as far as saying the prison was an anomaly that would have to be dealt with sooner or later. The White House dismissed the UN report as a rehash of old allegations.

However, America is demeaning itself with its refusal to understand the world’s dismay over Guantanamo. The White House dismissed the UN report by complaining that the authors never visited the camp, but that’s because they were barred from interviewing inmates. Why should they collude with an administration that so obviously has something to hide? The US is eroding the moral authority of the West but unfortunately, Washington shows no sign of giving up its camps. It recently completed the construction of Camp Five, a state-of-the-art prison block modelled on a federal penitentiary in Indiana, and work is under way on a second structure at a cost of $31m. Camp X-Ray, where the first arrivals were held in makeshift, open-air structures, now lies abandoned. The US authorities have started holding military commissions to try detainees accused of war crimes, but that is likely to involve only a small percentage of inmates, lawyers also say that only 8% of the inmates have been classified as al-Qa’eda fighters.

To support this process the Department of Defence has put all of the released documents on the Guantanamo detainees on-line here and here. Many Guantanamo detainees are in despair, fearful they will never leave, whereas others are baffled. Abdur Sayed Rahman, a self-described Pakistani villager … says he was arrested at his modest home in January 2002, flown off to Afghanistan and later accused of being the deputy foreign minister of that country’s deposed Taliban regime.

“I am only a chicken farmer in Pakistan,” he protested to American military officers at Guantanamo. “My name is Abdur Sayed Rahman. Abdur Zahid Rahman was the deputy foreign minister of the Taliban.”

How flimsy is the evidence against some of them? Consider this:

Another Saudi, Mazin Salih Musaid al-Awfi, was one of at least half a dozen men against whom the “relevant data” considered by the annual review boards included the possession at the time of his capture of a Casio model F-91W watch. According to evidential summaries in those cases, such watches have “been used in bombings linked to Al Qaeda.”

Many of those who initially made incriminating statements have recanted claiming the statements were obtained through torture:

The files are replete with retractions. Detainees who had confessed to having ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban or terrorism frequently told the tribunals that they had only made those admissions to stop beatings or torture by their captors.

“The only reason for my original statements is because I was tortured when I was captured,” said a former mechanical engineering student from Saudi Arabia who was accused of training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. “In Kabul, an Afghan interrogator beat me and told me they would kill me if I didn’t talk. They shot and killed someone in front of me and said they would do the same if I didn’t cooperate.”

Like most people in the US, I had no qualms about the camp initially. In the wake of the massacre of 9/11, the distinction between an enemy combatant and a prisoner of war seemed an irrelevant legal nicety. But never did I imagine that detainees would still be languishing in the camp in legal limbo four years later. Surely even security hawks can see that this is both morally wrong and strategically counter-productive. Donald Rumsfeld says inmates can’t be released because they might revert to doing bad things against America. But what difference would 500 or so bad guys make when in Iraq alone active insurgents number at least 20,000, and when the very existence of Guantanamo is among the terrorists’ most potent recruiting agents.

The welfare state is stirring up racism

If Labour wants to alleviate racial tensions in this country it must reconsider the principles on which today’s welfare state is based. The current system is essentially charitable, in that it uses means testing to target money at those most in need. This seems fair, but it stores up poisonous resentment on the ground, as shown by a new study of some of London’s poorest communities, The New East End. The study describes how working-class families who could once count on making their way to the front of the housing queue through patience and good behaviour now find themselves leapfrogged by applicants in greater need, often recent immigrants. This has had disastrous consequences for race relations: the individuals most likely to lose out on housing were far more inclined to be racist. The study found that Bangladeshis who had lived in the area for 30 years or more also resented housing being given to what they saw as undeserving new entrants. Means testing is not so fair after all, when it works for the minority and succours racism.

Anti-terror Bill: a victory for bin Laden?

What a parliamentarian our PM is! At Question Time last week Tony Blair mustered all his oratorial wiles to persuade MPs to pass a Bill outlawing the glorification of terror. His arguments brilliantly combined naivety and cynicism. His cause was stupid, unworkable, unpleasant, and wrong. And yet he won the day.

In vain Opposition MPs pointed out that the law against incitement to murder already provides for the prosecution of people such as Abu Hamza, or placard-carriers calling for the slaughter of unbelievers. In vain they objected that glorification is a perilously vague term: juries, insisted the Blair, would know it when they saw it. In any case, he added, there was a principle at stake: if MPs voted against the Bill, they would send a massively counter-productive signal to the world. The Bill was duly passed, by a margin of 38 votes.

Alas, how inadequate the defenders of our liberty have proved to be. Osama bin Laden’s greatest achievement was not the destruction of the Twin Towers, or the franchising of Islamic terrorism. It was to strike at the West when its leaders were so callow, so unread, so unversed in the democracies they sought to lead. Tony Blair is, like George Bush, a typical child of the Sixties: ignorant, arrogant and with an awesome sense of entitlement. The glorification legislation is quintessentially Blair: both piffling and dangerous. No would be terrorist will pay it the slightest notice, but a sacred principle of British democracy – freedom of thought – will have been lost. Anyone who celebrates the Easter Rising or makes the case for Basque separatism will, in theory, be liable to prosecution. Blair insists that common sense will prevail, but that is never a sensible assumption under which to pass laws that may last for hundreds of years. Thus, by increments, is our liberty lost – and bin Laden’s victory assured.

The toxic ship causing a dreadful stink

What an utter fiasco, as I reported in a previous post the French aircraft-carrier Clemenceau was decommissioned in 2002, but it was so full of asbestos and other toxic waste that it couldn’t be safely dismantled. So the French defence ministry had the hulk towed to an Indian yard, where nobody cares for workers’ safety. What no one anticipated, though they certainly should have, is that Greenpeace activists would kick up a terrific stink, forcing an Indian court to rule that the ship must cease docking until a risk assessment had been undertaken. Worse yet, the State Council, the highest court in France, then said it would hear a suit brought against the government by environmentalists. At this point President Chirac said enough was enough and ordered the hulk to be towed back to Toulon. This was a huge embarrassment for a leader who makes such a big deal about ecological issues, especially since he was about to go to India on a state visit. But the real culprit here is Defence Minister Michele Alhot-Mane and her officials – they stumbled from one blunder to the next, hiring cowboy contractors, ignoring European safety rules, and urging other governments to flout international laws on the movement of toxic waste – then covered up their incompetence with lies. The whole affair is pathetic and shameful, and a disaster for France’s image.

Google: can we forgive it in China?

Beijing has perfected the science of censoring the internet, with the help of software and a host of web police. We might have expected as much from a regime that brooks no opposition. But what is surprising is to see a company like Google colluding in this effort. The internet search engine has agreed to censor its new China-based service so that it excludes results on topics such as democratic reform. This craven move should alarm Google users everywhere. When a company that holds digital dossiers on millions of people decides that profits are more important than principles, we are all at risk.

However, compared with its rivals it has been far less accommodating to Beijing. Microsoft’s MSN service in China has shut down blogs touching on sensitive subjects, while Yahoo last year even helped the Chinese authorities track down the author of a pro-democracy email. He’s now serving a ten-year jail sentence. By contrast, Google refused to open its blogging and email services in China since it didn’t trust Beijing not to snoop on users. As for Google’s new search service, even in its censored form it will give Chinese users access to better information than they had before. Google also insisted on the right to alert users when information is withheld from results. That’s significant. If people know they are being brainwashed, then they are not being brainwashed.

Nevertheless, while the more-news-is-good-news argument has some merit in practice Google’s arrival in China is unlikely to have much effect, beyond providing a rival to Chinese search engines such as Baidu.com. And in the meantime, Google may be doing itself and its competitors a grave disservice. Until now, the internet has enjoyed a benign image as an open space for the public, and to help advance that ideal, governments have given such companies enormous leeway. But when Google accepts Chinese censorship, it undermines the internet’s claim to special status. The benefits of an open internet, largely free from interference, have been huge. They need not last, and will be curtailed, if the public loses faith in Google.