Immigration a major election issue on both sides of the Atlantic
Immigration reforms are the focus in the UK elections and in the USA Senate elections for this year. Both countries are yet to come to grips with the need to develop consistent policy frameworks in which immigrants can effectively and productively utilize their skills, knowledge, and previous work experience. Both countries are trying to identify measures on how to better deal with undocumented migrants and how to devise laws for low-skilled workers and for high-skilled workers.
In the UK, prime ministerial candidates have proposed the following approaches to undocumented migrants: 1) Gordon Brown’s proposal is to ban unskilled workers from outside Europe and cut the numbers of semi-skilled and skilled workers to enter into UK; 2) David Cameron proposes that “new countries that join the European Union should have transitional controls so not everyone can come at once. Regarding immigration from outside the European Union, there needs to be a cap”; and 3) Nick Clegg puts forward a proposal for "earned citizenship" for those who have lived illegally in Britain for at least 10 years, who speak English, who want to pay taxes and who want to play by the rules. (Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is promoting amnesty for undocumented workers.)
In the US, Senators Harry Reid (D-NV), Richard Durbin (D-IL), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) have put forth an immigration proposal—the Real Enforcement with Practical Answers for Immigration Reform (REPAIR)— that provides a framework for immigration reform. (See article). President Obama stated that “the proposal outlined on April 29 is an important step in the process of fixing our nation’s broken immigration system.” (See ww.aila.org)
Some common measures that both countries are proposing include: biometric visas, biometric employment verification, foreign nationals’ ID cards and regularization of undocumented immigrants if they have been in the country for more than 10 years in the UK and more than 8 years in the US. Will these proposals survive and become laws?
Migration pressures are expected to rise with growing demographic and economic differences. Both sending and receiving countries are beginning to realize that the volume of resources currently being channeled through immigrant communities will continue to grow, and that public policies must be jointly developed to increase the development impact of both migratory movements and the remittances they generate. The current elections debates show an increasing recognition of this reality. The solutions, whatever they may turn out to be, are unlikely to be perfect, but time has come to to take big steps to address migration issues.
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Immigration & Community Development Hubs as an innovative soluti
Dilip,
Immigration & Community Development Hubs as an innovative solution for all
In difficult times like these, when jobs have become an ever more precious commodity, people and whole countries turn to self-protectionism. Many people without sufficient income, especially Immigrants and their Communities at home, have begun however to realise there are new ways with new ideas - tapping into the latent value that resides within their own culture right around them, one that opens the door to many new and inspiring opportunities to behold. eg. re-discovering the Great Silk Road & the Oregon Trails. It is found deep within our Culture, accessed by our own language, and is a culture that differentiates us from all other people, cultures and communities. Today we all have the technological possibilities available in Telecentres or at Home or over smartcells to enable us to monetise our own cultural assets and share them, with and through our own online global communities, with a world that is fast becoming one global village. The new new earnings open the door to microfinance and many new and greater possibilities begin to emerge.
People in all parts of the world are today very aware, with aid of ICT, of what they have and also do not have. They fully appreciate that while Asian & African Nurses are important in and to western people and hospitals - and that remittances have provided a great deal of compensation to their families and communities - that there is also a huge global shortage of Nurses and an unsatisfied demand for all kinds of careworkers among Asian and African Communities themselves. They know that these services are desperately needed but are not available because they cannot afford them. They know too that it is possible to at least alleviate that great problem through use of new innovative ideas, finding new ways of doing things today such as in tele-nursing, tele-care, home-care. They can see that these services would create countless of very necessary jobs at home while addressing global health issues that increasingly affect us all; providing new jobs, new traded services at and from home. They are also very aware of the social advantages and much lower cost base involved in working at home and from home to the world, and online. Now the means are also there too to accelerate this activity with the creation of local Community Development Hubs, revolving around Telecentres, Coops, SHG's and Social Enterprise Centres, where there is a will there is a way. And it is a process where everyone gains.
This is a win-win solution, better than today's automatic Emgration found necessary in creating a life for some hundreds of millions of people and their families; those enterprising enough to leave home from among the billions of people living in disenfranchised communities sticken by poverty. New poverty reduction economic models are available to aleviate or eliminate poverty as we know it in new ways today. Whereas those who want to travel for work may or will still choose to do so, there are other options possible now. Now technology allows people to avail of online educational and traded services opportunities from within their own global community and/or worldwide in a borderless world eg. caring across cultures. And there are a hundred different paths one can follow. It is now viable to educate more educators of Nurses & Careworkers at much lower cost in Developing World and thus ever more people into skills to fill great global shortages in tacit interactive caring jobs or traded services opportunities - especially with advent of remote, self-paced, peronalised eLearning, online ICT like ICDL, and college internet distance education (CIDE) based learning opportunities. And learning is no longer the preserve of young students but an ongoing lifelong experience
I believe that the potential for impact on lives of everyone involved is enormous, especially with the arrival of technology-driven virtual offices, virtual workshops and virtual new eBusiness models for Communities where you can do-it-yourself as a community and together build your own interactive Community Brand. This will undoubtedly eliminate many of the stresses of Immigration on both sides of every border, while providing -through ever more ICT innovation- a better solution for all.
Richard O'Farrell
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