Immigration to the UK

There's been a fearsome row lately over immigration, not to the US, but to the UK. This one hots up every few years or so when the Little Englanders think it's time to throw out all the illegals yet again. The fact that foreign criminals who had served their sentences were not routinely being deported made lots of news and cost former Home Secretary Charles Clarke his job. But his replacement. John Reid, hasn't been very lucky either. One of his civil servants, asked by a Parliamentary committee how many illegal immigrants were in the country, responded that he didn't have the faintest idea. It's a true statement, but it gives the impression that not only doesn't he know, but he doesn't really care either. It infuriated Parliament and the newspapers. Yesterday five illegal immigrants were caught as they were preparing to go to their jobs--cleaning the offices of the Immigration and Nationalisation Directorate in London. The IND says that it was their first day on the job. The employer (who holds the contract to clean the IND's offices) begs to differ: two had worked there for more than two years, one for 1 year, and one for 6 months. I guess the other one was the neophyte.

I expect that Reid will order raids on all contract cleaning establishment to try to detect illegal immigrants. This has worked (partially) in catering establishments and restaurants. I expect that most of the cleaners who are non-white will be detained and forced to prove their nationality and status in the UK. Families will be deported, or split up.

The days when we could reasonably secure our borders have ended. The volume of traffic is just too great. Forgery of papers is too easy and too good a quality now. As a (legal) immigrant married to a (legal) immigrant, maybe it's time the government rethought its attitude toward immigration. In large measure, the illegal immigrants perform jobs that we as a rule are not interested in doing. They pay their own way, and contribute to the society we are currently building here (with cheap labour making inexpensive products for sale to well-off people).

But the government, scared witless of the tabloids, the British National Party, and the booboisie, cannot do that. So poor Nigerian and Zimbabwean cleaners will be deported and be replaced by poor Poles and Lithuanians.

Many happy returns of the day to...

...Cher, who is today officially a sexagenarian.

On the iMac now

As you may remember, I bought and updated an iMac a while back. While I got a bit of flack from HWMBO when I did it, I think it was the right move.

First, I'm learning how to use a Mac. Always a good thing to know how to use different operating systems. Our former flatmate strangemanstanding is going to post a better machine to us sometime shortly from Australia. I am starting to think it might be a good idea to have my own webserver here at home, and that would be a perfect machine for it.

Second, it's good to have a computer in every room, and this one is in the kitchen. It's great for checking my LJ friends page or listening to Hearts of Space while HWMBO is on the main computer.

Third, it was great to be able to successfully upgrade such a beast as this. The instructions are fearsome, and rooting around in the iMac's interior is difficult.

However, if you can keep a secret, there is a shop on the Walworth Road that has a load of slot-loading iMacs on display. I don't know how much they want for them, but perhaps a la fj and his pink Hello Kitty laptops I might be able to refurbish some and sell 'em off to people who long for those heady days when the iMac was king of the Appleverse.

Got an assignment for the next two weeks!

Forgot to tell everyone: got an assignment for 6 days of work in the next two weeks. It's in a town called Lytham St Annes in Lancashire, and it's very near Blackpool. Three 2-day courses, introducing software testing to developers for a company up there. It's the same course I taught a few weeks ago, but abridged to delete the quizzes, exercises, and exam, plus a couple of other extraneous items. I've never been to Blackpool before, so I'm looking forward to that.

If I could get six days' assignment a month, we'd be doing OK on the money front, and I'd still have lots of time to spare to do all the things I should be doing but aren't at the moment.