Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 05:01:16 +1000
Subject: Re: refugees and migrants UK


Steve,

1) The NYTimes reports that a significant percentage of New York City
recruits into the military services are immigrants with green cards.

2) Anyone who has spent time at U.S. colleges or universities in the last
decade knows there are a great many foreign students. About 10 years ago, on
a visit to the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the campus was cluttered with groups
of new students whose orientation leaders were pointing out the sights and
telling ancecdotes.  One was a story of Gertrude Stein explaining to Wm.
James why she hadn't submitted a certain assignment..

There were a great many orientals in those groups.

Despite the lamentable condition of city schools in the U.S.,  the best of
higher education is still attractive to foreigners who can afford it.

3) I think graduates who return to their native countries will be less
likely candidates for sacrificial death by terroist acts against the U.S. or
the U.K. than their fellows who know us only through propaganda - theirs
and ours.

The same might apply to immigrants who have served in the U.S. military.
If, on completion of enlistment, the government would give them financial
assistance towards higher education,  it would benefit the U.S reputation in
their home countries, whether those concerned returned home or not.

Scholarships might be more effective and far less expensive  than bombs and
bullets in changing the minds of young Mulslims who are likely to become
dupes of Bin Laden and Hamas.

regards,
Hugh

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

>
> As part of the British Govenment's disgraceful and increasingly racist
> behavior it has begun to think in terms of introducing policies that aim
> to integrate people who ask for 'citizenship' through giving
> integration, cultural and language lessons on Britishness.
>
> The reason this sudden departure is the ongoing orchestration of the
> anti-refugee/migrant issue by the state/media nexus.
>
> The notion of a community and a collective, in this case British and the
> British people, is always, as in every case that attempts to name and
> engender a community that mirrors a reactionary ideology results in a
> disastrous and horrible evil event, (in its 20th C extremes this was
> Nazism),  in this case the reactionary use of the word British or
> English has a single purpose to persecute and oppress those who live in
> the UK under the completely arbitrary naming of them as refugees and
> migrants.
>
> For this reason I am rethinking the issue of 'difference' I think i/we
> have been wrong to begin to abandon the concept as not useful...
>
> regards
> sdv
>