Tuesday 29 August 2017

Fun Online Polls: Protest marches; students and immigration targets

The results to last fortnight's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

What's the correct response if people with whom you disagree organise a march?

Ignore them, hope they get bored and perhaps organise your own event a few weeks later - 84%
Organise a violent counter-protest to ensure maximum coverage and encourage them even more - 9%
Other, please specify - 8%


Good, I was with the majority on that. People don't seem to get the "other, please specify" option, it got eight votes but only three people left comments, heck knows what the other five were voting for.

Thanks to everybody who took part (104 voters).
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Just to change the topic a bit, let's look at the whole mess that Ms T May is making of immigration targets, in particular how students from overseas fit in.

The debate seems to jumble three topics;

a) whether we should have immigration targets at all (large employers against; nationalists and low-paid Brits in favour);

b) whether overseas students should be included. One the one hand, they pay top dollar to be here and should be welcomed like any other high-spending tourists IMHO; on the other, some of them overstay their visas (again, whether that is acceptable or not depends on your point of view)

c) what the actual figure for over-stayers is. For some reason the lefties (see linked article from NS) seem to think that the fact that the true number of over-stayers is very small (allegedly) is a reason to exclude them. Logic fail - if the number is so small, it doesn't matter whether they are included or not (seeing as the official target is a made-up number to start with, which the Tories have no intention of actually delivering).

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

5 comments:

Sackerson said...

Can't do the poll because my first reaction would be that we have to tackle "overstayers" firmly. If they overstay then they're not here legally. Either you have borders or you don't.

Mark Wadsworth said...

S, by all means include overstayers in the target, but why include all overseas students?

Sackerson said...

I wouldn't - in the target - but all entrants should be noted, of course.

Mark Wadsworth said...

S, makes sense. Overstayers are by definition not students any more.

Bayard said...

I saw an article that said that the vast majority of overstaying students were students that had gone home, but the Home Office had failed to realise it, through a variety of blunders, the main one being not actually checking who leaves the country.