Bungling British immigration control
A THREE HOUR wait to get into Britain: Olympic official's fury after he was delayed at passport control -- and no sign of an apology from the Border Agency
An Olympic official has complained after he queued for three hours to pass through immigration checks at Heathrow.
The revelation is bound to cause fresh embarrassment for Home Secretary Theresa May after it was recently revealed passengers could be 'left on runways' as airports struggle to cope during the Olympic Games.
Senior MPs warned earlier this month that planes could be forced to circle the airport and tourists made to queue at passport control for several hours.
In a leaked letter to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, the MPs claim cuts to UK Border Agency staff and poor contingency plans could be a recipe for disaster during the London 2012 Games.
Heathrow's owner BAA has confirmed that a senior Olympic official made a complaint and said that some passengers had queued for 2.5 hours. The Home Office and BAA both declined to name the official concerned.
A source at the UK Border Agency told The Sunday Times a report explaining the delays at Heathrow's Terminal 5 on Tuesday night was drafted because 'a senior Olympic bigwig was caught in [the queue] who was not impressed and had made a complaint'.
Shashank Nigam, chief executive of Simpliflying, an airline marketing company, said he had also queued for 2 hours and 50 minutes on the same day. He told the Sunday Times: 'To my horror, the queues were spilling into the overflow area and there weren't enough staff to manage everyone.' Other people reported seeing passengers sleeping because of such long delays.
As many as 600,000 people are expected to arrive at Heathrow around the time of the Games, which run from July 27 to August 13, causing further chaos and longer queues.
This latest incident has caused airport and airline bosses to accuse the border agency of not being able to cope.
BAA, which owns Heathrow, said immigration does not have enough staff to carry out the checks following the reintroduction of tougher checks after unauthorised relaxation of procedures by Brodie Clark, former head of the UK Border Force.
The Government plans to cut the number of border officer staff from 8,874 in March 2010 to 7,322 by March 2015. But unions have been told extra staff will be drafted in to ease pressure during the Olympics and will include people from the Home Office and HM Revenue & Customs, some of which have retired.
A BAA spokesman said they are experiencing high levels of arrivals in the airport for which the border force is failing to provide resources.
A Border Agency spokesman said they refuse to compromise security but will aim to keep disruption to a minimum. It said it was inevitable that thorough checks would cause some queuing during peak times.
SOURCE
Recent posts at CIS below
See here for the blog. The CIS main page is here.
1. The Alleged Costs of Ending Universal Birthright Citizenship: A Response to the National Foundation for American Policy (Memorandum)
2. Document Fraud in Employment Authorization: How an E-Verify Requirement Can Help (Congressional Testimony)
3. Flushing Out the Extremes on Immigration. The DREAM Act was supposed to, but didn’t. Secure Communities can (Op-ed)
4. Reform Our Visa System for Entrepreneurs or Reform the Economy? (Blog)
5. Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are (Blog)
6. Let's Create American Workers' Desks in Federal Agencies (Blog)
7. Clueless in Cook County (Blog)
8. Dear Reader: Please Encourage USCIS Do the Right Thing! (Blog)
9. 'I Absolutely and Entirely Renounce and Abjure ...' (Blog)
10. A Little Bit of Nationalism, Please: Or Which of Those Are U.S. Firms? (Blog)
11. EB-5's Institutional Allies Give the Program a Hard Time (Blog)
Background
Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.
Why is "La Raza" the one Spanish term that is NEVER translated in the American mass media? Because translating it would make it a lot less respectable. It means "THE RACE" -- The mixed Hispanic "race" of Mexico. Racism is fine South of the Rio Grande only, apparently.
The "line" of this blog is that immigration should be SELECTIVE. That means that:
1). A national government should be in control of it. The U.S. and U.K. governments are not but the Australian government has shown that the government of a prosperous Western country can be. Up until its loss of office in 2007, the conservative Howard government had all but eliminated illegal immigration. The present Leftist government has however restarted the flow of illegals by repealing many of the Howard government regulations.
2). Selectivity should be based on "the content of a man's character, not on the color of his skin", as MLK said. To expand that a little: Immigrants should only be accepted if they as individuals seem likely to make a positive net contribution to the country. Many "refugees" would fail that test: Muslims and Africans particularly. Educational level should usually be a pretty fair proxy for the individual's likely value to the receiving country. There will, of course, be exceptions but it is nonetheless unlikely that a person who has not successfully completed High School will make a net positive contribution to a modern Western society.
3). Immigrants should be neither barred NOR ACCEPTED solely because they are of some particular ethnic origin. Blacks are vastly more likely to be criminal than are whites or Chinese, for instance, but some whites and some Chinese are criminal. It is the criminality that should matter, not the race.
4). The above ideas are not particularly blue-sky. They roughly describe the policies of the country where I live -- Australia. I am critical of Australian policy only insofar as the "refugee" category for admission is concerned. All governments have tended to admit as refugees many undesirables. It seems to me that more should be required of them before refugees are admitted -- for instance a higher level of education or a business background.
5). Perhaps the most amusing assertion in the immigration debate is that high-income countries like the USA and Britain NEED illegal immigrants to do low-paid menial work. "Who will pick our crops?" (etc.) is the cry. How odd it is then that Australians get all the normal services of a modern economy WITHOUT illegal immigrants! Yes: Before the pandemic, you usually COULD buy a lettuce in Australia for a dollar or thereabouts. And Australia IS a major exporter of primary products.
6). I am a libertarian conservative so I reject the "open door" policy favoured by many libertarians and many Leftists. Both those groups tend to have a love of simplistic generalizations that fail to deal with the complexity of the real world. It seems to me that if a person has the right to say whom he/she will have living with him/her in his/her own house, so a nation has the right to admit to living among them only those individuals whom they choose.
I can be reached on jonjayray@hotmail.com -- or leave a comment on any post. Abusive comments will be deleted.
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