Friday, February 27, 2009

Voters 'want immigration level cut': Green preventive solutions

Voters 'want immigration level cut':
"A cut in immigration is the top priority of both Conservative and Labour voters, with more than half the electorate wanting a future Government to reduce numbers of incomers, according to a poll.

The survey for the Daily Telegraph found that 52% wanted a future Tory administration to reduce immigration. Some 62% of Conservative supporters wanted it cut, along with 42% of Labour backers."

The Green Party has liberal immigration policies, which exist in a certain amount of tension with our policies for self-sufficiency and our awareness of the reality of ecological carrying capacity. Our population levels are already beyond the carrying capacity of these islands, in that we import 30% of our food. Although we also waste 30% of our food, hopefully not the same food items as we import, because that would be really really stupid, as opposed to just plain stupid.

First, we should emphasise our absolute commitment to giving asylum to people escaping from political abuse and torture. At the moment, they are jumping from the fire of political oppression into the frying pan of British Government immigration bureaucracy.

Second, it is vital that we put forward the policy of immigration prevention, as opposed to immigration hostility, in response to this survey.

Papers such as the Mail and Telegraph illogically combine opposition to immigration with indifference to what happens in other countries ("Far away lands of which we know nothing. Let them sort themselves out. Why should we send them our hard earned cash in aid payouts?")


People do not emigrate from the land of their birth, and leave their families for fun.
The motivation for people leave their countries is:
1 Torture and political oppression
2 War
3 Poverty and unemployment
4 Environmental collapse.

All Green policies are designed to avoid and prevent these problems.
  • Our Global Index of Human Rights policy will work against torture and political oppression, and also against war to some degree.
  • Green policies are always dedicated to peaceful resolution of conflict.
  • Our economic policies are designed to resist divergence - the tendency of the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.
  • There is no need in a green economy for any unemployment above the minimum ("structural unemployment"), because there is so much work to be done in healing our broken society and sick environment.
  • All our policies are committed to preventing environmental collapse.

So we have a unique angle on the matter, which we should try to put in front of the electorate.

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