Posted on 02/27/2007 7:50:53 PM PST by Stoat
The number of Eastern Europeans flooding into Britain has soared to 700 a day.
Official figures show there are 579,000 Poles and other residents of the former Soviet Bloc registered to work here.
The total does not include the self-employed, children or partners of the migrants, who do not appear in the Government figures.
• Community work and tougher tests to earn citizenship
The true number is likely to stand at 800,000 - or one in every 75 people living in the UK.
It is the equivalent of a city the size of Leeds, the third biggest in the UK.
The migrants - as well as placing enormous pressure on schools and hospitals - are receiving up to £75million in benefits.
According to a Home Office report, 70,000 are receiving handouts such as tax credits, child benefit or council housing. It is a leap of 15,000 claimants in three months, or almost 30 per cent.
Most worrying for the Government is that the influx, which began with the controversial expansion of the EU eastwards in May 2004, shows no sign of slowing.
During the last three months of 2006, there were a staggering 63,000 new applications to join the worker registration scheme.
It is the equivalent of 700 a day, or 14 coachloads pulling into London's Victoria coach station.
Crucially, the total is 23 per cent higher than during the same period of 2005 - when 566 arrived every day - suggesting that Poles and other Eastern Europeans are keener than ever to move here.
Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: "These statistics betray John Reid's utter failure to get a grip on the chaos in the immigration system.
"The Government assured us that no more than 13,000 immigrants per year would arrive from A8 countries (those that joined the EU in 2004). This figure completely blows that estimate out of the water. "Immigration can be of real benefit to the country but only if it is properly controlled, taking into account its impact on the economy, public services and social cohesion. This is demonstrably not the case."
The benefit payouts will be an embarrassment to the Government, which claimed they would be kept to a minimum.
Ministers insist most of those heading here are young men with no interest in receiving state handouts. But there are now 70,000 people in receipt of tax credits, child support and even council housing.
Once a migrant has been working here for 12 months, they are entitled to the same level of support as any British citizen. Word has also reached Poland of generous benefit payments to eastern Europeans with children - including a rule which allows workers to claim Tax Credits for children even if they do not travel to Britain and remain in their homeland.
There have been 533 successful applications for Income Support (£57.45 a week), 1,221 for Job Seeker's Allowance (also worth £57.45 a week) and 41 for State Pension Credit (which gives a guaranteed income of £114.05 a week.)
Some 45,252 claim child benefit (worth £17.45 for the first child and £11.70 for each further youngster), 22,685 are receiving Tax Credits (worth up to £5,200 a year) and 173 families have been given local authority housing. Some 615 are receiving other homelessness support. The total bill is likely to be £75million.
The figures pre-date the entry of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU, on January 1 this year.
A very pretty young Polish girl was our waitress at a restaurant in Inverness when my wife and I visited Britain last September. She told us that she was homesick for Poland. We noticed that many restaurants we frequented in various places around Britain had eastern European waiters or waitresses. Couldn't always definitely pinpoint the accent, but for sure it wasn't cockney.
My English in-laws told me that many of the immigrants, illegal and legal, do the hard manual labor that homegrown Brits don't want to do. For instance on a road trip to Scotland to visit some of my other in-laws, we passed an agricultural field where a group of people were pulling veggies out of the ground. One of my in-laws opined that probably everyone of the pickers was a non-Brit. Gee, where else is there a similar situation concerning people doing work the locals don't want to do?
Additionally we witnessed many foreign trucks on Britains main dual carriageways...four lane highways to us Yanks. The Chunnel has made that much easier.
The British never voted for mass immigration. Unlike the US we have no need of immigration, this country has been full up for many years.
Because the UK is an old country it already had a set of homogenous identities, but now we are asked to accept unlimited change in our national identity. We don't want it, never voted for it, and won't have it.
If I wanted to be a Pole, I would have chosen to go to Poland. If I want to live like amongst Nigerians, or Pakistanis, I would have gone to Lagos, or Lahore.
Why we give any old foreigners citizenship rights, when all they are, are guestworkers.
If all the bilions of the world population who wish to come and live in the UK are allowed to the UK will cease to exist.
The UK Government never says what the UK GDP per person is in a real terms comparison with recent years.
I'd hazard a guess that the Total GDP has increased because the working population has increased, but the real income per person is a different story.
So the Channel is their Rio Grande!!
It is truly shocking how the common man has acquiesed to this hijacking of the British polity by the Oxbridge Bolsheviks and Trotskyites.
From immigration, to abolition of the death penalty, to (at least before Dunblane) gun control, successive Governments have brought in truly remarkable changes to the British way of life, with remarkably little consultation with the man in the street, and sometimes over the clearly stated wishes of the majority.
Even now, some polls show majority support for bringing back Jack Ketch and his rope, and if Britons felt free to speak their minds without risk of arrest by the multi-culti commissars of hate crimes, I am sure a thumping majority would want Muslim and Jamaican immigration halted altogether, if not chucking them out en masse.
Someday, I fear, things are going to boil over, and somewhere Enoch Powell will sadly smile.
-ccm
The local people won't do the work...... for the pay being offered!!!
All the immigrants do is undercut the locals. Many would offer to empty bed pans for a million $$ per year. It's not the work that's the problem, it's the price being offered to do it.
Also guessing many of the commenters here who so approve of 700 eastern Europeans per day a country of 60 million would be vehemently against 700 Mexicans arriving legally every day into the United States (255,500 a year), much less the proportional (to the UK) 3,500 (3500) Mexicans per day (~1.3 million), since the USA has 300 million to the UK's 60 million. Furthermore, the Mexican culture is probably closer related to the American one (at least depending on how much of Mexican culture is of Spanish descent compared with Amerindian. Both Spanish and English are Centum languages, and both have western European descended cultures. Eastern European languages are largely Satem, and there cultures are (obviously) eastern European. There are Polish newspapers in the UK, just as there are Spanish ones here.
This is not to state that eastern European immigrants are bad (many can and do assimilate here, and probably the same happens in the UK), but simply to put things into balance.
If you read these pings, ping.
A nation has a responsibility to its dependent territories, in this case, Hong Kong (pre-1970). Otherwise, those territories should be independent.
Apparently you got plenty of responses.
When did Hong Kong ever have a responsibility towards us?
The realationship was forced, (by us), any resultant rights granted to the Hong Kongers were the result of an un-natural relationship, and therefor void.
I would only be bound by rights and responsibilities freely entered into by both parties.
If people are going to be under British control, they should be at least given preference in immigration. The United States famously broke away from the British because of taxation without representation. If you aren't going to accord people from British territories with some sort of special status (not even necessarily full-fledged citizenship), then the UK should give those territories their independence.
The same goes with people from American possessions, be they from Puerto Rico, the American Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Marianas, and American Samoa--they are American citizens, and can move to the United States proper. They cannot vote federally in their own lands (where they have their own local governments), but if they move to an American state, then they can vote federally for members of Congress, and indirectly for president, the same as an ordinary American.
You're quite welcome; it's my pleasure. I felt that your sentiments on the other thread apply here as well.
It is truly shocking how the common man has acquiesed to this hijacking of the British polity by the Oxbridge Bolsheviks and Trotskyites.
Socialism is the art of inflicting a slow boil upon a population, so that they are out of luck before many realize that there is a problem.
From immigration, to abolition of the death penalty, to (at least before Dunblane) gun control, successive Governments have brought in truly remarkable changes to the British way of life, with remarkably little consultation with the man in the street, and sometimes over the clearly stated wishes of the majority.
I predict a hot summer of rioting. Maybe not this year, but soon. Decent, honorable and hardworking people can only be pushed so far.
Even now, some polls show majority support for bringing back Jack Ketch and his rope, and if Britons felt free to speak their minds without risk of arrest by the multi-culti commissars of hate crimes, I am sure a thumping majority would want Muslim and Jamaican immigration halted altogether, if not chucking them out en masse.
Wildly disparate cultures cannot peacefully coexist on a small island. If the newcomers don't want to assimilate, there will be trouble...it's only a matter of time.
Someday, I fear, things are going to boil over, and somewhere Enoch Powell will sadly smile.
-ccm
Agreed. For readers unfamiliar with the Enoch Powell reference, it's one that I would highly recommend their understanding. His "Rivers of Blood" speech was his most famous, and some would say infamous....still others would term it as prescient.
Hong Kongers are not under British control, and the idea that a small country like the UK can allow unrestricted mass immigration is unreasonable . We are not the US, with lots of wide open space.
Additionally, your idea that the occupants of conquered territory should automatically enjoy rights to emigrate to the occupying country, and equal rights in the occupying country with its citizens is also unreasonable.
That is supposedly the problem in the States. Regular citizens purportedly won't do that nasty work for the wages the illegals make. Then logically if they raised the wages of the pickers and other people who do such work, regular Americans would flock to the fields for a few bucks more. I doubt it.
Much better for Britain than immigrants from the mid-east. Perhaps the Poles can turn that country back to it's roots.
Poles, Czechs or Bulgarians wouldn't plant bombs to the buses, but there is just no way for them to adapt to British life easier than HongKong citizens. Language, first of all - the HK population is bilingual.
And secondly, though Eastern Orthodox (Bulgarians, Rumanians) or Catholics (Poles, Czechs etc.) wouldn't create same problems as Muslims, they're quite capable of crating their own peculiar ones. To mention just one, how about Polish drinking? :-))
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