Tag: Visa

From all indications, the British government may have, at least for the time being, backed off from its earlier proposal to impose a ‘punitive’ £3,000 (N730,000) visa bond on travellers from a group of six Afro-Asian countries deemed to pose “high risk” of immigration abuse. Last week, UK’s The Guardian quoted a member of the Liberal Democrats, the coalition partner of the ruling conservative government as saying that the policy has not been “signed off’. However, far from suggesting that the proposal was off the table, he gave hint that the government still agreed in principle with the policy although he noted that the “exact details of how it is to be piloted, including the size of the bond, is still being discussed in the government”.

In other words, whether the six countries affected by the policy likes it or not, the visa bond policy which targets India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Ghana — all non-white Commonwealth nations may have come to stay.

The collective outrage by the nationals of the affected countries about a measure they considered as discriminatory, although understandable is somewhat misdirected. To start with, visas are by their nature inherently discriminatory; countries put visa regimes in place to restrict the influx of immigrants into their territory. It is elementary that not every one that applies for a visa ever gets one, including applicants ordinarily deemed as qualified!

What are the arguments against the measure? That Her Majesty’s government, as leader and primus inter pares in the Commonwealth has no business imposing such patently unfair visa regimes on fellow commonwealth members? And that because of the rich historic ties between her and the group of six, the measures are simply unfair! In the first place, those who bandy the argument obviously forget or chose to forget, that the sun of the British Empire is said to have set in different parts several decades ago. It set in India and Pakistan in 1947; Sri Lanka 1948; Ghana in 1957; Nigeria 1960, Bangladesh 1971. Just as it seems fashionable for my generation to recall a time when they needed no visas to travel to Britain, part of the problem is the temptation to relapse into nostalgia; to reset the relations buttons to the 60s and the 70s!

The issue here is that Her Majesty’s Government has already determined that the targeted countries posed high risk of immigration abuse! That is the judgment by a sovereign government to which they are entitled! Shouldn’t we have spared ourselves the emotionalism while making the case that our citizens seeking sojourn in UK are model citizens?

Today, the global economy is in a flux; In UK for instance, youth unemployment is 7.8 percent, moderate by the standard of its peers in Western Europe. Before the global crisis, it was a little over five percent. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) for instance reports that the number of people looking for work for over a year has more than doubled since 2007, up from 391,000 to more than 902,000.

Like America, the subject of immigration remains a hot button one. A Britisher put the issue in perspective when he observed rather wryly: “You don’t need a PhD to understand that when the number of unemployed people vastly outnumbers the number of job vacancies, and public housing stock is under huge strain, it’s a very bad idea not to radically restrict immigration. This isn’t rocket science”.

So, is the £3,000 the answer to the immigration problem?

I agree that the policy lacks rigour. What it does is adjudge the potential traveller as guilty until proven otherwise. Moreover, the act of singling out of six countries as “high risk” immigration violators is apparently in bad taste. And if you ask me, it is unlikely to deter the potential illegal immigrant; it simply jerks up the cost of procuring the exit card!

However, I think the problem is that we pay too much attention to what the Brits are doing to fix their problem. My problem is that we are not even about to start dealing with ours which is to fundamentally address the question of why our youths have found the lure of foreign pastures irresistible despite the dangers and frustrations, or why many would readily pay the ultimate price than stay to work things out.

Last week for instance, we heard Foreign Minister Gbenga Ashiru swear to “defend the interest of Nigerians by whatever means we can”. With what? A tit-for-tat wouldn’t be a bad proposition except that in our circumstance, it would be a most laughable one. What would that amount to given that the migration is almost wholly one-way?

I say take it easy; we have seen similar posturing before. Didn’t one minister, Stella Oduah once threaten to ban British Airways from flying the Nigerian airspace over claims of unfair discriminatory practices? Has the world ended since the threat came to no effect?

At the root of our problem is governance. We churn out graduates into a labour market already bursting in its seams. We cannot even guarantee admission for our children in higher institutions preferring instead to outsource admissions to Ghana, Ukraine and other foreign universities. In the last Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination UTME held in April for instance, of the 1.7million that sat for the exam, only 520,000 spaces are said to be available – less than a third. For our army of youngsters, theirs is an annual sentencing into an uncertain, bleak future.

If you ask me, I’ll insist that our enemy is within; at least the Brits are not nearly the enemy we think they are – not anywhere those foreign investors who pose as friends but act like fiends by bringing in labour for jobs that locals can conveniently do.

As always, the point must be borne in mind that the right to travel is nowhere guaranteed; not even in No-Man’s-Land.