Posted on 11/16/2001 1:19:45 PM PST by sarcasm
They just need a few Boy Scouts who have earned their rifle & shotgun shooting merit badge. Tho, that will never happen in the UK.
HUNDREDS of illegal immigrants housed in a Red Cross refugee centre outside Calais are laying siege nightly to a freight depot on the French side of the Channel, it was disclosed yesterday.
As another 57 illegal immigrants - Afghans, Iraqis and Iranians - were discovered at the Kent depot of the freight service yesterday, industry sources disclosed that 300-500 people from Sangatte refugee centre were storming the marshalling yards at Frethun, near Calais, every night.
Security guards there have been beaten up and stoned by the immigrants, many of whom are so desperate to reach Britain that they cling to trains as they head for the Channel Tunnel.
Last week, 84 immigrants were found on the trains in one day. At the Dollands Moor depot near Folkestone yesterday, eight men were found under one train and, 49 were discovered in or under the next train to arrive.
On Monday 28 illegal immigrants were found hidden in compartments in a coach at Dover. Many needed urgent medical attention.
With less than a week to go before 4m Danish voters go to the polls to vote for a new government, immigration policy has emerged as the dominant theme in an uncharacteristically bitter election campaign.
Opinion polls ahead of Tuesday's vote are forecasting that Pia Kjaersgaard's Danish People's party, a hardline anti-immigration party, may double its support to around 13 per cent. That would make the People's party the country's third largest political group, after the Social Democrats of Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, prime minister, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen's centre right Liberal party.
Despite the fact that Denmark has a robust economy and a relatively low non-native population, a recent Gallup opinion poll said that 55 per cent of Danish voters are convinced that the most urgent problem their country faces is immigration.
The focus on the issue comes despite the strength of the economy. Denmark's gross domestic product expanded by an unexpectedly robust 1.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2001. Unemployment, at 5 per cent, is the lowest in 25 years, and some sectors, notably healthcare, are suffering from serious labour shortages.
With 7.4 per cent of the resident population comprising foreign citizens, naturalised immigrants and their descendents, Denmark has a lower per capita immigrant population than neighbouring countries such as Germany and Sweden. Both countries also have more asylum applications than Denmark. But neither has witnessed anything like the antipathy towards immigrants that has emerged in Denmark.
Tensions over immigration have increased since the September 11 attacks in the US. Mogens Camre, a European parliament member of the Peoples' party, recently stated that "all Western countries have been infiltrated by Muslims, some of whom are polite to us while waiting until there's enough of them to get rid of us".
Although extremely vitriolic outbursts such as this are largely confined to politicians on the far right, there is growing unease that a broad anti-immigration sentiment has spread to the two mainstream political parties.
Birthe Ronn Hornbech, justice and aliens spokeswoman for the Mr Fogh Rasmussen's Liberal party, which is expected to form the next government, said last week that Danes' statutory right to bring a foreign spouse into the country should be abolished.
She argued that the current law, which allows foreign born naturalised citizens to marry overseas nationals, should be replaced by a system in which civil servants would pass judgment on a case-by-case basis.
While she said the changes would apply to all Danish citizens and not just naturalised foreigners, Mrs Ronn Hornbech referred in particular to Turks, Pakistanis and Somalis as groups that continued to arrange foreign marriages into the second and third generation.
Americans marrying Danes would still receive residence permits, she said: "They (Americans) do not bring in new family members for three generations, they don't move their homeland to Denmark."
Mr Fogh Rasmussen himself later moved to distance himself from his colleague's remarks.
The Social Democrats have also been stressing the need to control immigration, without offering specific policy ideas. Karen Jespersen, the interior minister, has warned that current immigration levels will lead to an unacceptably high second generation immigrant population in the future.
Mimi Jakobsen, leader of the small Centre Democratic party, has accused the Liberals of espousing views similar to those of the Austrian People's party of Jorg Haider, while accusing the Social Democrats' Karen Jespersen of beliefs that were indistinguishable from those of Mrs Ronn Hornbech.
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 1995-1998
Get a clue.
Bless her heart.
BERLIN -- Only two things about German society in 2015 are already certain: It will consist of few young people and more elderly people, and because of the latter, society will change more slowly than it does today. Germany's new immigration law makes it possible to draw a few more conclusions about how its society will be in coming decades. Members of minorities will speak better German, and will be more informed about the German state. It will be common practice to import workers to relieve the labor shortage, and Germans will have recognized that the welfare state must import workers merely to maintain its accustomed standard of living.
One result of the new law will be changes in how Germans treat newcomers. Prejudices that long ago were commonly held about Italians, then Turks and, in 2001, about Poles and Russians, will have diminished or disappeared altogether. The Germans will have understood that their elaborate state depends on the help of immigrants.
This is an optimistic version of Germany as an immigration country, and is the one that demographers are painting for the country in 2015. They long ago accepted the necessity of immigration to Germany, and saw a need to accommodate that influx.
One scholar of human migrations, Klaus Bade of Osnabrück, says the legislation proposed by the government would allow "controlled" immigration that "gives us a little time" -- time for the welfare state to prepare for a population with a constantly rising average age. Mr. Bade praises the draft for making "selective" immigration possible, and for establishing institutions to determine who the immigrants should be and what they should do.
Berlin demographer Rainer Münz sees in the law a signal that society must send to take the edge off the conflict between the majority and the minority. It regulates something that is happening anyway, and regulates it in a way that serves the population's general welfare. Or so say social studies scholars who maintain the country needs more people because Germans raise, on average, just one child each.
Both Mr. Bade and Mr. Münz would readily agree that different government policies and services could encourage more people to have children, but they point out that it would take generations for that to translate into population growth. Conservative demographers agree completely, but criticize the government's proposed legislation for starting from false assumptions. Herwig Birg, a demographer from Bielefeld, says the proposition which makes immigration attractive -- that immigrants will contribute to social services coffers -- does not hold up. "Immigrants cost more than they produce," he says.
In fact, one must take care to avoid the mistake of thinking that some number of job-hungry immigrants can patch up ailing health, retirement and nursing insurance systems. Immigrants also become ill, and over time minorities' birth rates adjust to those of the general population.
Mr. Birg outlines a different vision, one which promises lean times and which he calls "ordered shrinking." People will have to work longer, make greater contributions to social security insurance, strictly limit immigration, and divert money now spent on the integration of minorities to social policies that encourage people to have children.
"Immigration only slows down the population's aging." Mr. Birg says, and laments that "ordered shrinking" is not even the subject of discussion. He says the immigration policies proposed by the governing Social Democratic Party (SPD) and its coalition partner, Alliance 90/The Greens, will lead to a "multi-minority society" characterized by conflicting interests. Mr. Birg reminds anyone tempted to think in rosy terms of a multi-ethnic society like that in California, with its stark contrasts, of the bond of patriotism that holds Californians together in times of conflict. Such a bond is missing in Germany.
Certainly not missing, however, are the differences. Now it will be left to a giant social experiment to see whether integration courses, 300 hours of German lessons and 30 hours of "orientation training" can soften the impact of those differences.
Conditions for such an experiment in the future are unlikely to be better than they are today, because the SPD-Green draft creates new forms of asylum based on gender and extra-governmental persecution, which in turn create new lines of conflict. Victims will come from places where no government exists, says Joseph Schmid, a demographer from Bamberg.
That makes it unlikely that the victims of such persecution will ever return to their own countries. "Anyone who wants to unnecessarily import the countless and manifold unresolvable conflicts of the world makes this kind of law," Mr. Schmid says. In the face of an ethnic-religious state of conflict it creates conditions for an "excess of humanitarian entry of people" -- in a time when the western world must defend its values and political systems.
Mr. Schmid calls this the lawmakers' "unrealistic humanism." He says the price will be paid by those little people "who are pleading for more effective German family policies." That, at least, is one thing on which both proponents and opponents of the law agree -- the resulting integration will be expensive. Mr. Bade estimates the price at DM1 billion per year ($457 million).
What's that you say???
>>>DOINK<<<
...take that, you Christian SOB.
{g}
That is the funniest thing I have read in a long time!
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