Not only is the UK visa authority raising fees (what’s new?) and halving stay time, now sponsors may also have to post cash bonds to keep their errant relatives in line! Yup, that’s right, sponsors of visitors to the UK may have to pay up to 1000 pound deposit to ensure that their visitors return home. This legislation, if passed, will definitely prevent poor people from visiting their relatives in the UK. If you didn’t feel like a criminal (on bail) yet for having a Bangladeshi passport, you will if this legislation gets passed and you happen to have family in the UK that you’d like to see every once in a while:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7146527.stm
What a sad world we live in. I would have thought the required in person interview would be enough.
There are few easy answers to the immigration debates raging across Europe and the US. Prof. Amy Chua of Yale Law School wrote a tough but mostly fair piece in the Washington Post. It’s a few steps right of “kumbayya” which is probably more realistic anyway.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/14/AR2007121401333.html
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December 22, 2007 at 4:26 pm
fugstar
There is another solution. making the bangladeshi passport as generally honourific and welcomesome as the Swedish one.
I know why they are doing it but this policy seems a little too impractical and gimmicky to make it into reality.
December 24, 2007 at 3:55 pm
talam
Much immigration debate takes as an axiom that nation states have the right to set their immigration policy. Can we start from the other end? What if we take as a given that human beings have the right to live anywhere on this planet.
Why? One argument - if free movement of capital makes the world a better place, why shouldn’t free movement of labor?
Then, what are the arguments that allow any geographically organized entity to restrict movement of people?
Seems to me the immigration debate should be framed in terms of a tradeoff between individual right (to free movement) and group’s rights (to, say, maintaining certain “identity”). The individual right seems not to enter most discussions.