Perceptron
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Forced marriage will be a problem for as long as we have mass migration
Ed West
Ed West is a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture. He is @edwestonline on Twitter.
Forced marriages - a practice imported from abroad
One of the most common symptoms of a collective political delusion is that people will go to almost any lengths to avoid questioning it, however costly the detour. Another is that when a conflicting issue threatens this delusion, however important that issue is, it will be smothered by it.
The Government, it has been announced, is to bring in a new law making forced marriages illegal. As this paper reports, roughly 1,700 people a year go to the police over forced marriages, and the Home Offices Forced Marriage Unit is working with 400 children threatened with marriage against their will.
The people who campaigned on this difficult and touchy issue should be applauded, showing as it does genuine "muscular liberalism"; and if this law proves effective, then it will save countless young men and women. But theres also a massive elephant in the room here.
Every year 60,000 people become British citizens through family reunion, which includes large numbers of people marrying British citizens. Family reunion remains the most common reason for immigration from South Asia (although since the government allowed foreign students to work, in effect, for ever in Britain, this has also become a hugely popular route).
Jack Straw made marriage-migration easier, abolishing the primary purpose rule, partly because Labour MPs spent a lot of time dealing with constituents who wanted a relative brought over, although we cant rule out cynicism, since Labour musters overwhelming support from the Pakistani community.
The vast majority of forced marriages in the UK are inflicted on young British girls of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, and yet last year 6,460 British citizens applied to bring over a spouse from Pakistan, the largest of any country; most will succeed, and every year 20,000 Pakistanis are granted British citizenship, many through family reunion. As that tireless anti-forced marriage campaigner Ann Cryer MP told the Economist three years back, as many as 80 per cent of Muslim marriages in her area were to spouses from the old country, and this a way of getting around immigration controls.
The Tories are uncomfortable with this issue, because theyre convinced that they must detoxify their brand and win over minority voters; Im sceptical of this strategy, mainly because the American example shows that some individuals (and to some extent, groups) will never vote for the more conservative party whatever their moral compass, because politics is tribal.
And yet despite the inevitable cries of racism, family migration is the least liberal form of migration possible. Not only are those brought over often unskilled, rural and un-cosmopolitan, and so the least suited towards a diverse society, the overwhelming majority of cases involve people marrying those of the same ethnic group; in fact a large number marry people from their own extended family, and ethnic groups who marry their relatives are harder to integrate because they tend towards clannishness (marrying into another family is itself a sort of integration in microcosm).
This has led not only to a large increase in the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities of Britain in the past decade and a half, but to much more ghettoisation, each family migration injecting the extended family with Urdu and Bengali culture through spouses who do not speak English. Anyone interested in maintaining a liberal, cosmopolitan society with good communal relations should appreciate that family-reunion migration is the type least likely to bring this about.
But such is the cognitive dissonance that immigration produces that many of the Left have been willing to ignore another aspect of this migration the terrible effect on women, who can never enjoy Englands freedoms while the threat of marriage looms over.
Eventually the Labour government made some effort to tackle the worst abuses, by raising the idea of mandatory English language skills and age restrictions, but like this Coalition proposal, it can only do much. Most of the offences involved with forced marriage are offences already making threats, kidnapping, domestic abuse and crimes involving families are notoriously hard for the police to deal with.
The Coalition government has already proposed increasing the minimum income for anyone wishing to bring in a spouse from overseas, which is currently only £13,700, and that modest step is a good start. But we may have to eventually abandon the idea that marrying a UK citizen must automatically bring British citizenship. It was always assumed in the past that if you fell in love you could always bring him or her back to Britain, but the past is a foreign country, and family migration is a luxury that a multi-ethnic society cannot afford.
Ed West
Ed West is a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture. He is @edwestonline on Twitter.
Forced marriages - a practice imported from abroad
One of the most common symptoms of a collective political delusion is that people will go to almost any lengths to avoid questioning it, however costly the detour. Another is that when a conflicting issue threatens this delusion, however important that issue is, it will be smothered by it.
The Government, it has been announced, is to bring in a new law making forced marriages illegal. As this paper reports, roughly 1,700 people a year go to the police over forced marriages, and the Home Offices Forced Marriage Unit is working with 400 children threatened with marriage against their will.
The people who campaigned on this difficult and touchy issue should be applauded, showing as it does genuine "muscular liberalism"; and if this law proves effective, then it will save countless young men and women. But theres also a massive elephant in the room here.
Every year 60,000 people become British citizens through family reunion, which includes large numbers of people marrying British citizens. Family reunion remains the most common reason for immigration from South Asia (although since the government allowed foreign students to work, in effect, for ever in Britain, this has also become a hugely popular route).
Jack Straw made marriage-migration easier, abolishing the primary purpose rule, partly because Labour MPs spent a lot of time dealing with constituents who wanted a relative brought over, although we cant rule out cynicism, since Labour musters overwhelming support from the Pakistani community.
The vast majority of forced marriages in the UK are inflicted on young British girls of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, and yet last year 6,460 British citizens applied to bring over a spouse from Pakistan, the largest of any country; most will succeed, and every year 20,000 Pakistanis are granted British citizenship, many through family reunion. As that tireless anti-forced marriage campaigner Ann Cryer MP told the Economist three years back, as many as 80 per cent of Muslim marriages in her area were to spouses from the old country, and this a way of getting around immigration controls.
The Tories are uncomfortable with this issue, because theyre convinced that they must detoxify their brand and win over minority voters; Im sceptical of this strategy, mainly because the American example shows that some individuals (and to some extent, groups) will never vote for the more conservative party whatever their moral compass, because politics is tribal.
And yet despite the inevitable cries of racism, family migration is the least liberal form of migration possible. Not only are those brought over often unskilled, rural and un-cosmopolitan, and so the least suited towards a diverse society, the overwhelming majority of cases involve people marrying those of the same ethnic group; in fact a large number marry people from their own extended family, and ethnic groups who marry their relatives are harder to integrate because they tend towards clannishness (marrying into another family is itself a sort of integration in microcosm).
This has led not only to a large increase in the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities of Britain in the past decade and a half, but to much more ghettoisation, each family migration injecting the extended family with Urdu and Bengali culture through spouses who do not speak English. Anyone interested in maintaining a liberal, cosmopolitan society with good communal relations should appreciate that family-reunion migration is the type least likely to bring this about.
But such is the cognitive dissonance that immigration produces that many of the Left have been willing to ignore another aspect of this migration the terrible effect on women, who can never enjoy Englands freedoms while the threat of marriage looms over.
Eventually the Labour government made some effort to tackle the worst abuses, by raising the idea of mandatory English language skills and age restrictions, but like this Coalition proposal, it can only do much. Most of the offences involved with forced marriage are offences already making threats, kidnapping, domestic abuse and crimes involving families are notoriously hard for the police to deal with.
The Coalition government has already proposed increasing the minimum income for anyone wishing to bring in a spouse from overseas, which is currently only £13,700, and that modest step is a good start. But we may have to eventually abandon the idea that marrying a UK citizen must automatically bring British citizenship. It was always assumed in the past that if you fell in love you could always bring him or her back to Britain, but the past is a foreign country, and family migration is a luxury that a multi-ethnic society cannot afford.
