Tories finally get tough on immigration
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ants-home.html
Tory posters telling illegal immigrants to 'Go Home' branded 'nasty' by UKIP's Farage as Lib Dems demand they be 'shredded now'
- Border officials released advert asking illegal immigrants to text them
- It warned people in Britain illegally to 'go home or face arrest'
- Nearly 200,000 people are thought to have stayed in UK after visa expired
- But Nigel Farage said it was an 'unpleasant' reaction to the rise of UKIP
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Originally Posted by Daily Mail
Coalition tensions over immigration boiled over last night after the Home Office launched a provocative poster campaign telling illegal immigrants to ‘go home’.
The Liberal Democrats reacted furiously to the initiative, with party president Tim Farron condemning the billboards as the ‘politics of division’, and saying they should be ‘shredded’.
In a separate intervention, Vince Cable said the Coalition’s immigration policy was ‘totally illogical’ and ‘very damaging’ to the economy.
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Originally Posted by Daily Mail
The Business Secretary said that cracking down on foreign students and skilled workers from outside Europe when the public is mainly concerned about mass immigration from the European Union was ‘like having a family quarrel and trying to resolve it by kicking the cat’.
The giant billboards, which are being driven around on the back of vans, say: ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’
Illegal immigrants are offered a number to text for ‘free advice and help with travel documents’.
Tory Immigration Minister Mark Harper said the controversial poster campaign would encourage illegal immigrants to leave voluntarily – and serve as ‘an alternative to being led away in handcuffs’.
Speaking at the launch of the campaign, Mr Harper said the initiative was ‘just another part of the reforms of the immigration system that have cut out abuse and seen net migration drop to its lowest levels in nearly a decade’.
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Originally Posted by Daily Mail
The initiative is being piloted in six London boroughs but could be extended nationally if successful.
The billboards also display the number of illegal migrants arrested recently in the area the vans are visiting. The blunt message will also be displayed in leaflets, posters and advertisements in local newspapers.
Critics claim that illegal immigrants face only a minimal risk of deportation.
The Commons home affairs select committee reported this month that the now-defunct UK Border Agency had left behind a backlog of more than 500,000 cases, which would take 37 years to clear at the current rate of progress.
But the Home Office campaign prompted an angry response from the Lib Dem part of the Coalition.
A Lib Dem spokesman said: ‘These poster vans were not cleared or agreed by Lib Dems in government. We are totally committed to tackling illegal immigration but this is a disproportionate, distasteful and ineffective way to do it.’
Mr Farron wrote on Twitter: ‘These “Go home” posters are the politics of division – the billboards must be shredded, and now.’ Lib Dem peer Lord Roberts of Llandudno, also raised the ‘dreadful Home Office campaign’ in the House of Lords, saying the posters were ‘creating a great divide in our communities’.
The poster campaign also drew unexpected criticism from UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who described the initiative as a ‘diversion’ from the issue of legal mass immigration from the EU.
Mr Farage told ITV’s Daybreak programme the posters were a direct response to UKIP’s surge in the polls. But he said voters wanted action on immigration, not publicity stunts.
‘I think the tone of the billboards is nasty, unpleasant, Big Brother,’ he said. ‘I don’t think using messages like this will make any difference. What will make a difference is enforcing our borders properly.
‘It’s also a diversion: the real problem isn’t illegal immigration, there are perhaps one million illegal immigrants in the country. The real problem is that on January 1st next year we’re opening up our borders to 28million people from Bulgaria and Romania.’
Yes, the Government have finally decided to get real tough (:rolleyes:) on immigration... by driving around billboards literally asking illegal immigrants to go home - despite the fact that a) they are here illegally knowingly already & b) a large proportion of them can't speak a word of English. An absolute farce - how about leaving the EU, patrol our borders and get serial flip-flopper Boris to shut up about the idea of an amnesty which will only draw more of them to these shores.
As for the lie that I keep seeing Tories (along with Twitter Tory boys) peddle - that immigration is now under control, this is only if you fudge the figures (as they do) and look solely at NET immigration .... in other words, if 900,000 educated, culturally British subjects emigrated from these islands and were replaced by 900,000 immigrants consisting of Romanian pick pocketers, Irish gypsies and Somalians - the NET immigration figure would show up as 0. So they're telling LIES when they say immigration is in anyway under control.
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Illegal immigrants are offered a number to text for ‘free advice and help with travel documents’.
Send out bounty hunters like in the states, arrest them and send them home immediately. Job done.
Thoughts?
