[foot-loose]

There's a big rally going on in Glasvegas City Centre just now cos of some asylum seekers that chucked themselves off a tower block when they were told "naw" to being allowed to stay in the country.

What's peoples thoughts on this? I know we are venturing scarily close to a Daily Mail discussion here, but I can't help but feel that we need to be careful about how many people we let into the country, especially since there's all this crap about unemployment etc. I know that there are a chunk of wasters that are quite happy just sitting back and claiming off the social, but there are a lot of people out of work who can't get a job despite constantly trying. Should we be paying for others when we have problems with those here?

Or is it not about that? Is it that we have a standard of living in this country that some other countries don't have and part of our ethics say that we need to let others in regardless - everyone is our neighbour and all that gubbins?

I've got mixed feelings.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/gla ... 564999.stm

[MK Chris]

I have mixed feelings too, but I think the unemployment problem is irrelevant. If someone foreign is better for the role than someone who is British, why the hell shouldn't they get the job? Employers should offer jobs based on suitability for the role, not nationality or ethnicity.

[foot-loose]

I think I agree with that to an extent, but the counter argument might be that foreign folk might work for less than the UK folks.

Also, the people being discussed in that article couldn't get jobs because they hadn't been approved to stay here. Whither they wanted to or not, they couldn't apply. They have been here since 2007 and I dunno how much longer they would be here if they hadn't jumped out a window. It strikes me as a pretty sad story where they had been given hope that they would maybe be allowed in but that was taken away from them.

All that aside, who was paying for them for the 2 /3 years they have been here? Why has it taken so long to reach a decision? It's not fair on them let alone anything else!

[English Bob]

I agree with Topher regarding the unemployment bit. I'm firmly of the opinion that just because you had the good fortune to be born in a wealthy country, doesn't automatically give you all the benefits and privileges some people seem to expect. You have to earn it. It really annoys me when you see people moaning about 'foreigners taking our jobs'. Well yes, if they are more qualified than you, they deserve that job! What, you should get the job because you were born here?

I'm not sure what to make of the whole immigration thing though. I can't really make an honest opinion thanks to all the different spins the media put on the issue.

However, articles like this scare me somewhat. http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local ... 190268.ece

According to the article, the number of rapes in Norway's capital Oslo are spiralling. Two out of three rape perpetrators were foreign-born. Something seems to be going wrong with Norway's immigration

I consider myself to be a liberal, but when you look at the figures, they shake your beliefs a bit.

[DevilsDuck]

I dont have problem with foreign people who want to work in this country. Its the people who come over here get given everything, but make no attempt to get a job that annoy me!

[foot-loose]

The people who were BORN here who expect to get given everything annoy me!

[MK Chris]

According to the article, the number of rapes in Norway's capital Oslo are spiralling. Two out of three rape perpetrators were foreign-born. Something seems to be going wrong with Norway's immigration

I consider myself to be a liberal, but when you look at the figures, they shake your beliefs a bit.

Yeah, but as you said before that - the figures are always produced with spin one way or another.

[DevilsDuck]

The people who were BORN here who expect to get given everything annoy me!

good point and agreed!

[Yudster]

If someone - anyone - is in this country with a legal right to live and work here, then I can't see any reason why their application for a job should be treated any differently to mine.

The real question though is - who is, and who SHOULD be in that position? We have in the UK a fairly conservative policy on immigration which on paper seems entirely reasonable to me. The problem is not the policy, its the fact that it simply isn't being applied, policed and enforced that is causing a problem. If it was being applied, then the situation which happened so tragically in Glasgow simply wouldn't have happened - if those people had no legal right to be here, then they shouldn't have been able to come - or when the terms of their initial visit no longer applied, they should have left. And if they were told from the start that the UK law didn't allow for them to stay, why did they stick around for however many years it was? Because they knew that it would take forever for anything to be done at all, if it ever was - and that's a chance they were willing to take.

I fully take on board that a lot of people who are trying to come here are doing so because they are facing terrible circumstances if they stay where they are. If those circumstances fall into the category whereby someone could apply for asylum, fair enough - but almost none of them actually do. Somehow though there still seem to be thousands of people applying for asylum, even though they have absolutely no grounds to do so. Again, this is because they know that it will take us such a long time to get around to dealing with them that by then they might have been able to "disappear" into the system.

Immigration in and of itself is not only a fact of life, but it crucial part of global development. Our problem in the UK - and we clearly have one, there's no point going all soppy on that reality - isn't immigration, it isn't unemployment, its inefficient and negligent administration of existing (and perfectly good) immigration law. I was going to say its the government's fault and I suppose it is, but the bottom line is that its our topheavy, overpaid, over-beaurocratised Civil Service that's the problem. Says the ex-civil servant.

[Munki Bhoy]

Bloody foreigners, coming over here, stealing our suicide statistics. Can't they just kill themselves in their own countries?

This is my way of saying "I haven't the first * clue how to deal with this issue". Seriously, there's the "are they better than what we have" thing, "capitalism demands hiring the cheaper one and this is a capitalist country" thing, "they're looking for a better life" thing, "they come here they should fit our language and society" thing...

Not to mention I'm descended from Irish and Polish ancestors myself, so somewhere along the line someone in my family were immigrants too.

[foot-loose]

Not to mention I'm descended from Irish and Polish ancestors myself, so somewhere along the line someone in my family were immigrants too.

Right, i've heard enough. Go home. Go on... just go.

[Yudster]

Not to mention I'm descended from Irish and Polish ancestors myself, so somewhere along the line someone in my family were immigrants too.

Go back far enough and I reckon this applies to almost everyone in Western Europe. Well North Western Europe anyway.

[Yudster]

I can't find anything but East London relatives in my mum's family since 1787, which is the furthest back we've definitively got. My dad's family however - well, my dad's dad was born in Scotland, but there must be a reason why his middle name was Leopold!