By now, quite a few Samizdata readers will have learned of the infuriating plight of my good friends and fellow bloggers Andrew Ian Dodge and his lovely fiance Sasha Castel. They were able to spend just a few days in the UK owing to officials carping about (alleged) glitches in Andrew’s paperwork. Andrew and Sasha were forced to fly back to Maine earlier this week.
What is obviously incredible, considering that these are two citizens from Britain’s No 1 ally, is that they were treated in this way while, of course, thousands of folk enter this country successfully on false papers, or with no papers at all. Often many such folk disappear. Such people may even pose a security risk. The contrast between the treatment of Andrew and Sasha on the one hand and that of folk possibly entering Britain with hostile intent hardly needs to be stressed.
I guess this shows that as far as rules about emigration and immigration are concerned, we need a thorough overhaul in ways that encourage enterprising and good folk to live here like Andrew and Sasha. On a more positive note, may I recommend readers to look at Jim Bennett’s An Anglosphere Primer, which sets out ways in which these issues might be resolved.
In the meantime, my best wishes to two of the feistiest bloggers in the business. Britain has lost the chance to be host to two fine writers, not to mention two of the biggest heavy rock and opera nuts around!
We are rapidly moving to a world in which there will be two sorts of people: the law-abiding whose lives will be increasingly restricted and the the outlaws who will be able to do whatever they like.
One of my friends is a lawyer. He’s OK; he brews his own beer and loads his own ammo. In his youth he also made nitroglycerin (once, scientific curiosity). As he described the process, some time after pouring in the acids there is a moment when it turns and the nitroglycerin appears.
Brit society is going to turn if you keep pouring acids into it.
Patrick’s statement is interesting because of the very dichotomy that regulators and lawmakers fail to see. When a bad guy performs a harmful act, new laws and rules are put in place to “prevent” that act from reoccuring. Rather than preventing that act, though, the bad guys move around the newly-revised obstacle course law-abiding citizens feel required to huff through to perform another harmful act. Lawmakers and bureaucrats react similarly, and so on. Meanwhile, otherwise law-abiding folks violate increasingly-technical and obsure requirements and are penalized. Meanwhile, the bad folks avoid the obstacle course, however complicated altogether.
It’s not only a British-problem. Why do you think the US Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Election Commission ever came about?
P.S. Heavy rock AND opera nuts?? A very good combination.
I suggested a humane and practical way to revise immigration and asylum in a post a couple of days ago.
Is it boring to just link back to that post?
Following the link, it’s certainly true that Sascha is a “feisty” blogger.
An unworthy thought, perhaps, but I wonder if she might have gotten a bit stroppy with one of Her Majesties Officials?
“Majesty’s,” I mean.
Theo, we’d woken up at about 8:30 am on Wednesday, gotten on the plane at 7:30 pm, flown though the night (Andrew slept on the plane, I didn’t), and landed at Heathrow about 9am. We didn’t get out of our immigration-hell until 6:30pm Thursday.
Believe me, I was too tired to get stroppy.
Besides, the only people I get stroppy with are the ones who add an extra “C” to my first name.