Immigration consultation

[cosmolinguist]

I try not to talk negatively about my own political party in public, because we have all of the media to do plenty of that for us, while the positive things go unnoticed or misunderstood.

But as several of us have said, the consultation on what our immigration policy should be is abominable. I've been mired in it this week, trying to face up to questions awful both in style (unevidenced assertions, soliciting opinion on matters of fact, leading questions) and substance (bigotry worthy of Nigel Farage or the Daily Mail).

I wish I could say I didn't, but I feel personally attacked by this consultation paper. However! I'm buoyed by how many of my friends are sharing the words they've used to stand up and speak up against it; this is also something I'm taking personally.

When the questions made me nearly cry from frustration or fear that the world may never improve, these people make me nearly cry with their unashamed support for me, and for other immigrants who've had it much worse, and for refugees and asylum seekers.

Most spectacularly, and the one I can share with you verbatim, is Andrew's. He's gone on a proper tour de force here.It includes so many good bits that miss_s_b said she kept reading bits of it out to matgb until she just read the whole thing to him.

It's basically summed up in this paragraph.

I urge that this consultation be dropped as the appalling piece of racism appeasement that it is, and that those responsible consider the idea that at a time when the country is about to go through the catastrophe that is Brexit because for the last thirty years nobody in the mainstream of politics has dared to stand up and tell racists that they might be wrong about anything rather than pandering to their so-called “legitimate concerns”, when even the economic profit and loss calculations that this consultation prizes so much more highly than human beings are being destroyed thanks to hatred of immigration, it might — it just might — be time for a political party to suggest trying something else instead?

But the beat paragraph for my mental/emotional equilibrium is probably

My wife being here has brought me untold benefits, even though by any purely economic cost/benefit analysis I, as principal earner in our household, am down many thousands of pounds by her presence (many of those thousands being money paid to the vicious bureaucracy that this consultation paper presupposes needs only minor tweaks). Perhaps the people in charge of this consultation believe I should send her a bill for the tens of thousands of pounds I have spent on her over the years, for which all I have received in return are love and affection and companionship and other such trivialities which affect the exchequer not one whit.

Comments

[barakta]

Round of *APPLAUSE* for Andrew!

[jesse_the_k]

Oh, that's beautiful.

I'm so angry it's necessary.