Posted on 11/15/2007 2:11:55 PM PST by blam
I’ve heard this before and it makes me sad each time. What’s Britain going to be without the British?
On a similar note:
Million whites leave SA - study
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1712536/posts
Good point. I've ragged on Britain before but it's only out of love since I feel a kinship with them because of a British mom. I'm sorry what is happening to Britain just as I'm sorry the way the U.S. is headed, but we do need to be careful what we say. Britain still has some good sensible folks left and some of them inhabit FR.
As long as they don’t come to the US with their socialist (Democrat) voting habits.
It's very difficult for a Briton to emigrate to the US. The main ways are via marriage or via a H1B visa, most of which are locked up by Indians.
Well that’s probably because Britons can’t apply for the Greencard lottery, not all are qualified to come here as workers, especially if retired, and not all have relatives who can get them here on chain immigration.
Immigration’s flip side
The British have always been susceptible to wanderlust, a trait that helped create an empire and has given the globe its common tongue. Even today, we remain the most dispersed nationality on the planet.
There are 41 countries where at least 10,000 Britons reside and a further 71 with British communities of more than 1,000 souls.
Yet, if emigration has been part of our way of life for centuries, it has rarely been on such a scale as today. New figures from the Office for National Statistics show that more than 200,000 UK citizens emigrated last year, the biggest outflow of nationals since before the First World War.
Why the exodus? There is little hard evidence, but much that is anecdotal, to account for the figure. There is the traditional lure of a better life, higher wages, lower living costs, more sunshine and, increasingly, the desire to make permanent the lifestyle enjoyed in a holiday home. Cheap air travel makes living in a distant land not quite the leap into the unknown that it was even a few decades ago.
Increasingly, too, people are leaving these shores not to earn money but to spend it – the number of retired Britons living overseas, where their pensions go further, appears to be climbing inexorably.
That’s the pull – what about the push? For it is also clear that people would not be departing on this scale if they did not find life in this country unsatisfactory. High taxes, intrusive government, unsafe streets, dirty hospitals, a coarseness of society that is squeezing out the old-fashioned virtues of courtesy and consideration – expats everywhere cite these aspects of life in modern Britain to justify their escape.
Yet none of these ills prevents this country remaining the most astonishing magnet for people. Last year, 510,000 foreigners came to live here, taking to 3.9 million the total since Labour came to power, the largest prolonged wave of immigration in our history.
It is when these two trends are set alongside each other that we see the profound implications. Put simply, as more and more UK nationals leave and more and more foreign nationals arrive, it is inevitable that the nature of this country, its society and its culture, will change.
Many will welcome the change and the diversity it brings. For centuries we have welcomed newcomers (though never on this scale) and they have contributed to the richness of British society and its wealth. But others will be alarmed by this “churn” of population, worried by its speed and scale and the way it is transforming our way of life.
These are big issues that are only now, belatedly, being addressed by politicians, notably by David Cameron with his call for a grown-up debate on population management. They have clear implications, too, for Gordon Brown’s quest to identify that elusive thing, Britishness.
Most of all, they should lead us all to question why, when we have never been more prosperous, so many Britons no longer find this country such an agreeable place in which to live.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/11/16/dl1601.xml
What is the green card lottery? Someone mentioned this to me Friday afternoon.
Green cards are the permanent US work and residence visas.
There are different classifications. Skilled workers, academics etc. can apply for them and if they are having needed skills they can come to the US easily. Additionaly to this there is a lottery each year, where 50000 applications, from millions coming from around the world, are drawn and if fulfilling several requirements they can apply for a permanent residence and work visa in the US. The idea behind this lottery is “diversity”, which means that each country has a special quota of applicants to be drawn. The State Department wants to balance the immigration coming from mainly Mexico, East Asia and India these days. Britons however are excluded from the lottery, because there are already many British origin Americans. French, Germans, Polish etc. however are permitted.
Okay, I know a lady from South Africa over here and she’s having immigration problems. She’s about to give up and head back to SA. She mentioned the green card lottery to me on Friday and before I could ask her about it, the conversation went somewhere else. Do you know if the South Africans are excluded or is just the British?
Not eligible are:
BRAZIL, CANADA, CHINA, COLOMBIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC,
ECUADOR, EL SALVADOR, GUATEMALA, HAITI, INDIA, JAMAICA, MEXICO, PAKISTAN,
PHILIPPINES, PERU, POLAND, RUSSIA, SOUTH KOREA, UNITED KINGDOM(except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and VIETNAM.
This means that the lady you mentioned is permitted to apply for the lottery.
BTW I mistakenly said in my previous post that Poles are permitted, apparently they aren’t this year.
Note that the list of barred countries can change each year, although most of listed countries remain the same all the time.
Thanks for your information.
Remember those old black&white films in school that showed an animated shadow creeping across Europe representing the German advances during WWII?
That is Islam (ably assisted by the worst sort of cowards).
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