UKIP poster boy is a racist immigrant, film at 11

[Josquius]

The irony is Hungary was fine during the admission process. This has all happened since they joined. I still don't think the Baltics or Cyprus should've been let in.

Why not them?
I would agree with Cyprus- tell them to sort out their crap with the north first.

The thing about UK migration to the EU is it's a bit different in that it's mostly ex-pats or pensioners who'd probably do it anyway. I think there's relatively few Brits who just up sticks and move within Europe.

Would do it anyway....that's kind of true but the EU does make things a lot easier. It seems unlikely that many companies would bend over backwards to bring in a non-EU Brit as compared to just hiring a Brit as they would a local. I doubt I would have gotten my current job if the UK wasn't in the EU for instance.

We go to Australia, New Zealand or Canada or, a little bit, to the US.

Thats a different sort of migration, that's full on emigration, not just movement for work. The sort of people who do that have a very different mindset IMO.

Health care is a pretty bad argument considering in most countries you have to pay for doctors.

I don't think this is true.

Of the EU countries I've had to see doctors in it was in Sweden and France.
Off the top of my head Denmark is the only country with a proper NHS-like system that comes to mind.
Not everywhere is as backwards as Switzerland but there are a lot of systems where you have to pay a fair bit out there.

[Sheilbh]

Why not them?
I would agree with Cyprus- tell them to sort out their crap with the north first.

In my view their treatment of the Russian minority has no place in the EU.

Edit: What really annoyed me with Cyprus was the UN had negotiated a deal. The North who I always thought were the difficult ones overwhelmingly approved it in a referendum, the South vetoed it in a referendum and then got to join the EU anyway. It was wrong.

Would do it anyway....that's kind of true but the EU does make things a lot easier. It seems unlikely that many companies would bend over backwards to bring in a non-EU Brit as compared to just hiring a Brit as they would a local. I doubt I would have gotten my current job if the UK wasn't in the EU for instance.

If there's a need for skills and an expat is the way to do it then companies will bend over backwards to move them. Normally the reason you move an expat is because of their skills, their career development or the lack of local skills. Moving them to the EU is really easy but it's still generally massively expensive and having to get a visa would barely add anything to the cost or hassle.

But yeah it's different than your situation though maybe you'll be caught by the Swiss kicking out EU migrants

Thats a different sort of migration, that's full on emigration, not just movement for work. The sort of people who do that have a very different mindset IMO.

Sometimes. But loads of people do the working holiday, two year visa in those countries. If we left the EU I'd want that sort of program for EU countries and I think it'd probably catch 90% of current EU migration.

[Josquius]

If there's a need for skills and an expat is the way to do it then companies will bend over backwards to move them. Normally the reason you move an expat is because of their skills, their career development or the lack of local skills. Moving them to the EU is really easy but it's still generally massively expensive and having to get a visa would barely add anything to the cost or hassle.

It is really tough to bring in non-EU folks below the top exec level in a lot of countries.
Before you can do it you have to jump through a lot of hoops to prove you can't hire a local (or for legal purposes an EUer) for the same job.
In this climate of widespread unemployment...it would only be a very special outsider who gets the nod.

But yeah it's different than your situation though maybe you'll be caught by the Swiss kicking out EU migrants

Not going to happen luckily. At the worst things will be made harder for hiring EUers in the future.
Most likely though they're going to reject the referendum since it has become clear it is impossible to implement without shooting the country's economy in the head. I hope. Though less French people would be nice.

[Sheilbh]

It is really tough to bring in non-EU folks below the top exec level in a lot of countries.
Before you can do it you have to jump through a lot of hoops to prove you can't hire a local (or for legal purposes an EUer) for the same job.
In this climate of widespread unemployment...it would only be a very special outsider who gets the nod.

Not really. Companies have entire departments dedicated to doing this, failing that they have consultants (I used to work for one in 2009-10) who help them move people. The bureaucratic hoops are easy to jump through if you, the company, want to move someone. I know someone now working in India whose company got that visa (an Indian visa!) sorted in under a week because it became urgent. They're the same age as me and not a top executive.

The only time from work, or from friends who've been moved around the world, that it's not happened has been for a business reason. If there's ever an issue with the visa they just postpone it.

[Sheilbh]

Ugh. Some nasty dog whistle politics in Thurrock by the Tories.

It's a seat UKIP should win. The UKIP candidate is of Turkish descent and though he's been known his entire life as Tim Akers, Tory leaflets are now referring to him with his full first name Timür Akers

[Martinus]

Ugh. Some nasty dog whistle politics in Thurrock by the Tories.

It's a seat UKIP should win. The UKIP candidate is of Turkish descent and though he's been known his entire life as Tim Akers, Tory leaflets are now referring to him with his full first name Timür Akers

Yeah that sounds lame. Trying to out-racist UKIP is never a good strategy.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Excellent pun 

[Syt]

Headline article in Die Zeit: "Are the British xenophobic and anti-European? No, they're just suffering because the island isn't special anymore, just a middling country of middling importance"

[Tamas]

It is really tough to bring in non-EU folks below the top exec level in a lot of countries.
Before you can do it you have to jump through a lot of hoops to prove you can't hire a local (or for legal purposes an EUer) for the same job.
In this climate of widespread unemployment...it would only be a very special outsider who gets the nod.

Not really. Companies have entire departments dedicated to doing this, failing that they have consultants (I used to work for one in 2009-10) who help them move people. The bureaucratic hoops are easy to jump through if you, the company, want to move someone. I know someone now working in India whose company got that visa (an Indian visa!) sorted in under a week because it became urgent. They're the same age as me and not a top executive.

The only time from work, or from friends who've been moved around the world, that it's not happened has been for a business reason. If there's ever an issue with the visa they just postpone it.

I am guessing that is to move people accross borders but within a company. Tyr is right, outside of the EU it is a nightmare to hire a foreigner in most countries.

[Martinus]

Good article on the van controversy from Spectator (sorry if posted before):

The virtual mob that got Emily Thornberry is coming for you, too

The internet can turbo-charge national hypocrisy so that it turns ferocious within hours

Are we heading for a new barbarism? Is this the return of the 18th-century mob? Here are more questions than answers. I ask because when all the fuss about Emily Thornberry and her photo tweet from Rochester has died down, we shall be left with something more disturbing than whatever sin she may or may not have committed. We've just seen demonstrated the speed, the destructiveness, the sheer violence of the modern tempest that information technology can create. In the world of opinion, climate change has arrived already.

As a workaday columnist, I reflect that I could equally easily write a spirited defence of Ms Thornberry; or a spirited attack; or I could attack Ed Miliband for publicly laying into her; or for privately agreeing with her.

In the Telegraph Boris Johnson achieved all four within the compass of a single column. He argued that Thornberry was unlucky; that it served her jolly well right; that Ed Miliband shouldn't have attacked her; and that he must secretly agree with her.

Well, it would be fun to tease Boris for running so nimbly with the hare and hunting so stylishly with the hounds. We may wipe a tear from the eye after reading his touching tribute to White Van Man (barely — but just — avoiding the phrase 'salt of the earth') while remaining doubtful whether, if a Johnson daughter declared her intention to shack up with a van man in Rochester who decorated his house with English flags, he would greet the affair with rapture. But we should not single Boris out. Horror at the match would be shared by the entire cabinet, the shadow cabinet, the editors of any of our newspapers, most Spectator readers and doubtless Nigel Farage too. Truly we are a nation of hypocrites.

But that's not new. What's new is the way IT can now turbo-charge national hypocrisy, turning it into a ferocious force within the space of a couple of hours.

Here's a warning: a warning equally to those inclined to praise Emily Thornberry and those inclined to blame her; to those inclined to admire Mr Miliband's prompt command and those inclined to mock it. It's a warning to the likes of myself; and Boris, too, who will remember his run-in with Liverpool over Hillsborough and the late Ken Bigley a decade ago, and will ask himself whether in an age of Twitter he would even have survived. It's a warning to left and right, to liberals and conservatives, to black and white, feminists and sexists, racists and multiculturalists alike.

All should quail. For the mob is fickle and knows no single creed. It has no favourites — or rather its favourites may switch in the blinking of an eye. Its prey may rise from nowhere into sudden public contempt, and be forgiven as fast. One day the mob is with the fox, the next with the hounds. All you can be sure of is that if you attract the mob's attention in the morning, by sundown you may have been smothered with kisses or beaten to a pulp.

And as 18th-century grandees may have peered nervously down from the windows of their dining rooms, always in fear of the gathering of the mob in the street, so in the internet age those who may be in (or have the misfortune to catch) the public eye can never be sure whence the next virtual mob may gather and strike. Those who call themselves reputation managers may become the new bodyguards against the footpads prowling the Twittersphere.

There are two keys to this dawning dynamic: speed and volume.

Until a few years ago, and for the whole of human history before that, inbuilt blocks, inefficiencies and delays acted to retard the spreading of — and reaction to — information. Word of mouth was very slow; manuscript was intrinsically slow; the printing press did accelerate the dissemination of news but there remained brakes to its speed, and very severe breaks to the spreading of public reaction to news. Letters to the editor were the closest we got to an internet flash mob.

Sound amplification, then broadcasting and the telephone, gave new wings to the spreading of report, but again there were limitations to speed and volume of response. We might know almost instantaneously that a murderer had been caught or a politician indicted; and know pretty fast what we thought about that. But it took much longer to know what everyone else thought. Opinion may echo and amplify with the knowledge of others' opinion; waves of public indignation were hard to gather on the instant.

Street mobs in an earlier age, and radio phone-ins and pollsters' reports in our own, have been the closest we got to that. There were inbuilt restraints to rapid report and reaction. Almost overnight, those restraints have gone. All at once I can know immediately what has happened, can know that everyone else knows too; can know their reaction; and know that they know mine. Tremendous self-reinforcing surges of anger, outrage — and indeed distress, admiration or generosity — can be the near-instantaneous result. We have no time to sleep on it and see whether we still feel the same in the morning: the wave is already breaking.

In this case it broke over Emily Thornberry's head. Recently it broke, too, over the heads of the 'pick-up artist' Julien Blanc and the comedian Dapper Laughs. I regard both these characters as pond life, but there must be fairer ways of deciding whether to withdraw Blanc's visa or cancel Laughs's ITV show. It was crude volume that swung these decisions, with little thought as to how easy it might be to assemble the 150,000 signatures that did for Blanc, or the 60,000 signatures that finished Laughs.

And there but for the grace of God go I — and quite possibly you, reader — and certainly Boris. Will mankind learn to start ignoring these storms? Or will people start going down like ninepins? Or will everybody become horribly circumspect, like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four confiding only in old friends in safe houses? Who knows? I end, as I began, with questions.

[Tamas]

Good point I guess, but we shouldn't forget that even in ancient Rome mob killed senators and such.

[Gups]

I don't cdisagree with the Spectator chap, but he overstaes the case a bit and he uses a pretty poor example.

Thornbridge was sacked after the story broke on the front page of the Sun and because of the timing (after an election result whcih should have led to several days of Tory-bashing, not because of Twitter.

[Zanza]

It is really tough to bring in non-EU folks below the top exec level in a lot of countries.
Before you can do it you have to jump through a lot of hoops to prove you can't hire a local (or for legal purposes an EUer) for the same job.
In this climate of widespread unemployment...it would only be a very special outsider who gets the nod.

Not really. Companies have entire departments dedicated to doing this, failing that they have consultants (I used to work for one in 2009-10) who help them move people.

Your "not really" and the observation that it takes entire departments or external consultants to make it happen doesn't really fit together.

The bureaucratic hoops are easy to jump through if you, the company, want to move someone. I know someone now working in India whose company got that visa (an Indian visa!) sorted in under a week because it became urgent. They're the same age as me and not a top executive.

A visa or a work permit? The former is usually fairly easy to get, the latter is what makes it complicated and tedious.

[Tamas]

eg. currently you "just" need to remotely convince a company in Canada to offer you a contract, THEN they can go about doing the paperwork about your necessity and whatnot. That's fairly easy compared to something like the USA where there is an elaborate set of rules (like the hopeful employer must first advertise country-wide and then use that as a proof in its paperwork that there is indeed no US citizen capable to do what the poor foreigner would do, etc) making sure the only immigrants they get are illegal Mexicans.

[Ed Anger]

eg. currently you "just" need to remotely convince a company in Canada to offer you a contract, THEN they can go about doing the paperwork about your necessity and whatnot. That's fairly easy compared to something like the USA where there is an elaborate set of rules (like the hopeful employer must first advertise country-wide and then use that as a proof in its paperwork that there is indeed no US citizen capable to do what the poor foreigner would do, etc) making sure the only immigrants they get are illegal Mexicans.

I guess all those Indians I see everyday are Mexicans.

You sound butthurt and sad.