Interesting Guardian article

[Dawie]

The Home Office report, Exploring the Decision-Making of Immigration Officers, published last week, provides further evidence of what most non-white travellers have long known to be true. That the practice of profiling on the basis of race, ethnicity and religion persists at borders around the world. Compared to all the strip-searching, deportations and interrogations that go on, I have got off lightly. My granny was once questioned for more than three hours after arriving from Barbados. They wanted to know, among other things, whether she was coming to work. "Do you cut cane here too?" she asked.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... 18,00.html

[OL7MAX]

Nice article, Dawie. I, too, am shorter than I should be

[Dawie]

Nice article, Dawie. I, too, am shorter than I should be

And I, unfortunately, am one of those South Africans who is unlikely to be harassed.

[stedman]

Well I'm a black African, have travelled all my life and have never been bothered by anyone or treated differently. Maybe something to do with the fact that I'm a tall, leggy, modelesque stunna! Seriously, the usual reaction is of lascivious appreciation and a cheery wave through or normal friendliness/indifference

My white south African colleagues in the NHS, strangely enough, think they are often treated like pariahs in job applications and interviews - they may just be paranoid but there is discrimination everywhere, some of us are just lucky never to experience it. I'm married to a white English man and his family and friends could not treat me better if they tried, but I know of people with the opposite experience.

So.. Gary Younge isn't telling us anything we don't know, but I'd take his experience as just that - his experience. Stats are meaningless without context.

[Dawie]

The reality is that discrimination (whether it be by race, class, wealth, nationality or otherwise) is alive and well today, despite human rights charters, etc. Immigration control, by it's very nature, is discriminatory. If discrimination did not exist, there would be no need for immigration control.

What I always find interesting is the double standards that a lot of people live their lives by. For example, I'm sure most forward-thinking people in the UK would be disgusted if someone was denied a job because they were black, or because they were female, or because they were overweight. And yet, every day, people are regularly denied entry into the UK because of that most arbitrary of markers....their nationality. Yet everyone seems to think that it is perfectly OK to discriminate based on nationality. How fair is that? Entire moral judgements are made of people based on their nationality.

It's like they say:
"Ok, you're from the USA, so you don't need a visa, and you're from India, so obviously we can't trust you, so sorry, we'll need a DNA sample, fingerprints, urine sample, biometrics and full-cavity search before we'll even think of granting you a visa."

What makes someone from the USA more trustworthy than someone from India? The only way to make immigration rules fair is to apply the same rules to ALL nationalities. Either everyone needs a visa or everyone does not. But to make some nationalities require one and some others not require one is just plain discriminatory and unfair.

[Rawling]

Excellent article. I think the world need more superpowers, Chinese, Indian, All these countries need to unite and be one the like the rest of asia,South america and Africa. So we have basically 6 or 7countries super powers That is USA EU, Africa, South America, China, India and Asia. That way all these most of these stuff going on will stop. Because other countries will do the same. What do you thinks you guys.