It’s a promised land for the workshy

Mar 23 2009 By David Bell

IN AUSTRALIA, immigration policy is decided on the basis of what best helps the country.

It sets an annual quota to fill specific skill shortages in fields like, for example, technology.

Australia has just announced the quota is being reduced – by 14 per cent – for the first time in a decade because of concern that foreign workers could stoke resentment by taking jobs at a time of rising unemployment and static economic growth.

It is sound common sense.

On the other side of the world is another island which has lost control of its borders and its immigration policy has become a farce.

Great Britain has finally copied the Australian system after years of unfettered immigration on such a huge scale that one in nine of our population are not born in the country and one in seven primary schoolchildren only speak English as a second language.

We needed foreign workers to do the jobs our own unemployed wouldn’t do.

What other country would tolerate a family like the Chawns? Ma and Pa and their two obese daughters weigh in at 83 stone. They are among 2,130 people claiming benefits because they are too fat to work. They spend all day in front of the TV stuffing their faces.

“Often I’m so tired from watching TV that I have to have a nap,” explained Mr Chawn.

“I certainly can’t work. I deserve more.”

This fat family feeds on benefits of £22,000 a year, money forcibly taken from the wage packets of those who work for a living.

As our dole queues head for the three million mark, Immigration Minister Phil Woolas has promised tougher controls. Gordon Brown has promised British jobs for British workers.

Enter Hazel Blears. The Communities Secretary slapped a £50 migrant tax on foreign workers last week and hopes it will raise £70 million in two years.

Do the maths. This works out at 700,000 new immigrants a year. Can we believe anything these politicians say?

And then there’s the queue at Calais. Around 1,500 economic migrants, largely young men from Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Iran are out at dead of night every night hoping to steal a lift on a lorry heading for “The promised land”.

Rumours of work aplenty on London’s Olympic sites see the crowd at the port swelling by the day. And if they can’t get a job, there’s our indulgent welfare benefit system to fall back on for accommodation and sustenance.

There’s a weepie touring French cinemas. It’s called Welcome and it tells the harrowing story of a Kurdish teenager so desperate to get to Britain that he tries to swim the Channel.

It is by all accounts very moving.

It certainly moved Eric Besson. He’s the French Immigration Minister and after seeing the film he announced the opening of a two acre Welcome Centre for the asylum seekers and economic migrants.

The Calais Centre will feed and shower them and distribute leaflets explaining how to claim asylum in Britain and, ahem, how to claim welfare benefits.

The creation of such a centre will, of course, act as a magnet to even more illegal migrants. In the good old days we’d have sent a company of longbowmen to sort our French friends out but times change and we are left with Mr Woolas.