There's nothing like a bracing encounter with a taxi driver to shatter one's cosy liberal middle class vision of tolerant Britain welcoming hard working immigrants filling jobs indigenous Brits don't want to do. Cocooned by a Today programme which runs an item on Blue Peter phone in scandals and John Hurrumphries frothing about the Channel 4 programme on global warming as its lead stories, I had failed to hear about the riots at the Campsfield detention centre. My Brighton taxi driver had, and his view was "Who's paying for all that damage? We should never be letting immigrants in here in the first place if you ask me". I hadn't asked him, needless to say. It turns out the detention centre has started taking in foreign criminals (the wrongly released ones) in addition to the asylum seekers it was originally designed for, and these people of course have nothing to lose by further criminal behaviour.
Philippe Legrain has a chapter in his book suggesting that one way of overcoming objections to immigrant workers is to allow them in on temporary stays. I can foresee lots of problems with enforcement, but I suppose if it allows both immigrants and employers to be more transparent with each other that the employment offer is simply low skill low paid work, this would avoid the kind of situation currently occurring in Japan, whereby foreign workers are being brought in as "trainees" but are in fact only exploited and not trained in any skills at all.
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