Pakistan to Britain: immigration superhighway
One reason why shop signs on the streets of Bradford are still written in Urdu, half a century after the first Pakistanis came to Britain, is that population flows between the two countries remain large (see chart). Each year 250,000 Pakistanis come to Britain to visit, work or marry, and some 350,000 British citizens journey in the opposite direction, mainly to visit family. Links are reinforced by ingrained marriage customs: six of ten ethnic Pakistanis in Britain pick a spouse from Pakistan.
Only a minority of these marriages are forced, most people agree. British-born men are willing to marry Pakistani girls to stay in their parents’ good books; in any case, some carry on relationships with a local woman. British girls are less keen, but local Muslim men are in short supply owing to their own Pakistani marriages. Many people hotly dispute that there is a problem; Ms Cryer is angling for white votes, they say. On the contrary, she retorts, many of the loudest critics of such marriages are women whose foreign grooms filed for divorce once in Britain, often then bringing their real partners over from Pakistan.
For Ms Cryer, radicalisation is less important than the conditions in which many of her constituents live. "Parents who arrange marriages like these are holding the whole community back. They're not just importing cousins; they're importing poverty." And that, in the long run, may prove a bigger Pakistani threat to Britain than extremism.
[ When a Labour politician uses language such as saying Pakistanis are "importing poverty" to Britain it is a gift to those of us who have been trying to point this out for years but are called "extremist" for our efforts. The voters who care about this should choose those who have always criticized immigration however, rather than a party that lets immigrants in and then tuts about their behavior. ]
nationalist on 04.20.09 @ 09:09 AM CST [more..]
Russian police vows to thwart rallies on Hitler birthday
"The Interior Ministry's units for struggle against extremism are taking additional measures to prevent nationalistic rallies on Hitler's birthday celebrated on April 20," a source in the Interior Ministry said.
It was earlier reported that Russian neo-Nazis were planning to celebrate Hitler's birthday, three weeks before Victory Day celebrations - on May 8 in Europe and May 9 in Russia - which mark the defeat of Nazi Germany.
According to the Russian non-governmental organization SOVA, last year more than 630 Russian citizens and foreigners became targets of xenophobic attacks, most of them in Moscow, the Moscow Region and St. Petersburg.
[ 630 "xenophobic" attacks - most of which must have been against whites if it is anything like the situation in the west - is a ridiculously small number in a population of 142 million. In Britain, with a third of the population of Russia such attacks number around 3000 a year. Clearly they are not taking into account the fact that crime by immigrants in Russia must dwarf this figure. ]
nationalist on 04.20.09 @ 04:44 AM CST [more..]