Immigration

Trump has hinted that Democrats may have been secretly funding the ‘caravan’ of more than 7,000 Honduran immigrants trooping towards the United States. I don’t think so. In the lead-up to the midterms, if any party would sponsor by far the largest organised mass migration to the US on record, Republicans would. For politically, the spectacle is a gift. Thousands of clamorous would-be asylum seekers crammed onto a bridge with no toilets, stampeding, breaking into fights, demanding to cross the Mexican border, the better to gatecrash the US: it was a premier photo op for anti-immigration Republicans. Trump has threatened to close the American border and bring in the military.

What kind of a president would build a wall to keep out families dreaming of a better life? It’s a question that has been asked world over, especially after the outrage last week over migrant children at the American border. Donald Trump’s argument, one which his supporters agree with, is that the need to split parents from children at the border strengthens his case for a hardline immigration policy. Failure to patrol the border, he says, encourages tens of thousands to cross it illegally — with heartbreaking results. His opponents think he is guilty, and that his wall is a symbol of America closing in on itself. In fact, building

The idea that left vs right has been replaced by open vs closed is one of the most self-serving conceits of contemporary politics. I have never met anyone who wants to live in a closed society, but I have met plenty of people who think that the forms of openness of the past couple of decades have not served their interests. Factories and offices have moved abroad. EU free movement has brought a new workforce to compete with the one already here, and an extra four million people overall have arrived in the past 15 years, while wages have barely grown. Combine that with open public services and an estimated

Home Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, apologised in Parliament for the treatment of immigrants from the Commonwealth from before 1971, known as the ‘Windrush generation’ (after the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought West Indian workers to England in 1948). The 1971 Immigration Act allowed Commonwealth citizens then living in the United Kingdom indefinite leave to remain, but the Home Office kept no records of these. Some had lost their jobs, others had been refused National Health Service treatment, and others threatened with deportation. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, apologised to Caribbean heads of government who were in London for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. A teenager was stabbed

How did the government manage to create such a terrible row over the Windrush generation? The Home Office has told many people who arrived here as children in the late 1940s and 1950s that they are in fact illegal immigrants because they cannot produce documents from 40 years ago about their residence here. That in itself might have been a terrible cock-up, but Number 10’s decision to then turn down a request from the representatives of 12 Caribbean countries for a meeting was totally bizarre particularly given those representatives are in London for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting this week. Inevitably, since the row about this broke, the government

Ever since Theresa May’s clarion address of the UK’s housing shortage (and how many successive PMs have embarked on the same brave heave-ho?) countless comment pieces have addressed the real problem that drives the disjunction between supply and demand. Nimbyism. Complex, protracted planning permission. Developer land banking. Rich Chinese and Russians investing in unoccupied properties as three-dimensional bank accounts. Excessive protection of green belts. Second homeowners. Empty properties the state should confiscate. The catastrophic sell-off of social housing. A wilful confusion about what the word ‘affordable’ means. Yet when two statistics are out of whack, it behoves us to look at them both. All the above dysfunctions regard supply. Which

On this week’s episode, we look at the situation in Germany, and whether Angela Merkel can hold things together. We also speak to Norway’s immigration minister, and discuss the dying art of cottaging. After 12 years as Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel is this week facing the worst crisis of her premiership. Coalition talks collapsed after the Free Democrats walked away from negotiations with Merkel’s Christian Democrats. So where does this leave Germany? In the magazine this week, William Cook calls the situation ‘uniquely damaging’, whilst James Forsyth outlines the implications for Brexit. James joined the podcast, along with Thomas Kielinger, London correspondent for Die Welt. As William writes: “Suddenly, all