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No to calls to 'close the border!' 25 May 2003 ~ 00:32 Sometimes, Mark and I head home together and on Thursday, I happened to flip through a copy of The Conservative Chronicle that he�d just finished reading. A column by Samuel Francis entitled �Mass Immigration wrecks American hospitals� had me seeing red. Mr. Francis not only detailed the problems of illegal immigrants but had the cheek to suggest that legal immigration contributes to the problem. He wrote:�But aside from diseases that mass immigration imports�since 1997, there are some 7,000 cases of leprosy in this country, virtually unknown in the continental United States historically�immigrants themselves are responsible for mammoth health care costs, which the American taxpayer has to pick up.� I understand the fears a nation may have when it comes to diseases that immigrants bring with them, but I am led to believe that the American government puts you through the wringer before you are allowed to reside in the country. One of my interests is researching what would be required of me should I decide to live in the U.S. with Mark, and, from what I have read, matters regarding health appear to be taken very seriously by U.S. immigration control. Indeed, you are required to have a medical examination. I won�t dispute that illegal immigrants cause problems and probably place a burden on American hospitals. But Francis wants to halt legal immigration to prevent the spread of disease? I have a major problem with that. We are an Anglo-American couple. One of us has to live somewhere, either in the U.K. or the U.S. What if David Blunkett (our Home Secretary) decided that immigrants were too much of a strain on our NHS and therefore banned the possibility of Mark living over here. And, to make the situation very scary indeed, imagine a U.S. government inclined towards Francis� call to �close the borders.� Where would we go to live then? Atlantis? I believe in sensible levels of perfectly legal immigration. It makes my blood boil at the thought of thousands of asylum seekers, a good percentage of whose claims of asylum status are completely bogus, getting free holidays, welfare and council housing as soon as they enter the country. I resent my country�s approach to immigrants of this kind, immigrants who aren�t interested specifically in being English. But for Mark and many others like him�legal immigrants who were put to the test before being awarded residency rights�there should be no impediments on their right to live in England. And I am horrified that someone like Samuel Francis wouldn�t want me in America, even considering my American husband and in-laws. His attitude smacks of purity of race and disgusts me. There are certainly some very decent members of the Right, but Francis� strain of anti-immigrant conservatism and those that adhere to it, frighten and anger me.
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