If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Last year Theresa May announced that 260,000 fewer student visas will be given out over the next five years, through harsher restrictions on fake colleges and bogus students. Whilst it is clear that preventing fake students from illegally gaining visas is a positive thing, I believe the problem has been hugely overblown, and the solution poorly managed and badly miscommunicated.
We reached the Brazilian town of Guajará-Mirim at around 11pm. I finally got some sleep by putting my headphones on. Maybe - just maybe - the woman ...
The Home Office in the last two years has been run chiefly by the Conservative dogma of repeating things until they become true.
Almost ritually, the UN's Development Program ranks Norway as nothing less than the best country in the world to live in. Still, one man found life in our country so unbearable he chose to stage one of the most brutal terrorist attacks in modern history. A week into Anders Behring Breivik's trial, this paradox is continuing to baffle not only Norwegians, but the world.
While Hollande may be elected France's first Socialist president in 17 years, it was under another socialist, Francois Mitterand that the National Front first made headways in response to austerity measures in the 1980s.
The news that a British helicopter may have been involved in the 'left-to-die' boat on which 63 refugees drowned and starved to death fleeing Libya for Lampedusa last year is shameful, but not at all surprising.
British voters have elected George Galloway of the Respect Party to Parliament in an admittedly spectacular electoral coup.
I am a Londoner, but I live and work in São Paulo in Brazil. This week I collected my Brazilian permanent ID card. It's taken months of bureaucracy and many visits to the policia federal in Lapa to get this far.
If we value the future of subjects which are seen as necessary to drive the UK economy as being sacrosanct, and indeed as public goods within themselves, then the right-wing media need to leave international students out of their rhetoric.
We need to have another public debate on immigration - do UK citizens want a creative, multicultural Britain leading the world in research, or do they want a country that looks like the Conservative back benches?
It seems to me that, in a manner somewhat evocative of the Incredible Hulk, politicians in both America and the United Kingdom suddenly mutate from passably normal humans into furious and destructive ogres whenever they discuss the matter of immigration.
Back in June 2011, the government presented their policy on counter terrorism - sold to us as the new Prevent strategy (what I call Prevent 2.0)- which supposedly signified a radical shift from Labour's approach to stopping extremism.
There's a lot of tough talk on immigration but not enough is being done to bring down immigrant numbers from the hundreds of thousands experienced under the last Labour government, to the tens of thousands, promised by the Conservatives at the last general election.
Trade and aid can be drivers of sustainable development: Fairtrade certification has demonstrated that, when poor farmers in developing countries are supported financially with development aid to become organised and are provided with an opportunity to tap into, and benefit from, global trade there can be a significant impact on poverty reduction at the local level.
The honorable minister's phrases of "fewer and better", "precisely selective", and "brightest and best", sounds like sifting the grain from the chaff; a complete display of contempt for vulnerable immigrants.
I visited my family in Wisbech at the weekend - the very same town which "the Baltic Mafia is terrorising" - according to a sensational report in Saturday's Daily Mail. Driving through the town, I passed a coach with a Lithuanian number plate parked outside a factory. A new influx of migrant workers? Or potential drug dealers, as the Mail would have us believe.
