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Labour Party on Asylum and Immigration
"Charles Clarke [MP] has laid out plans for new controls, including sponsorship, financial bonds to ensure that they will return home, adn £2,000 fines for employers using illegal workers. Only skilled workers can settle long-term, and they must take English tests."
"The Labour Party rejects any annual quota on economic immigrants, saying migrants are needed to fill large gaps in the workforce, for instance in the catering and construction industries."
Labour supports "a new Australian-style points based system to ensure only those economic migrants who have the skills our economy needs can come to work in the UK."
"We will introduce legislation to reform the immigration system and set out a new agenda of earned citizenship where the rights and responsibilities of becoming a British citizen have to be earned. This will ensure that only those who share our values can earn the right to stay by clearly spelling out the rights and obligations of legal immigrants to Britain, as well as the requirements for earning British citizenship - including learning English, paying tax and obeying the law."
"Labour is delivering the biggest shake-up to our border protection and immigration system in decades; the new Australian-style points based system; ID cards for foreign nationals; a new border force and high-tech system for counting people in and out of the country are part of a new system fit for the 21st century; built to benefit Britain."
"We have tripled the number of staff who work on border control, and enforcement of Britain’s border controls now starts overseas. Since January 2008, we check everyone’s fingerprint before we issue a visa. So far we have enrolled over 1,000,000 people and have matched over 10,000 fingerprints in connection with previous immigration matters."
"The lesson from the A8 accession is that the disruptive effects we got wrong, we didn't predict that properly," Mr. Woolas [the Immigration Minister] said during a debate at the Foreign Press Association in London. "And the reason why we got it wrong was because we didn't reckon on the decisions of other European countries"
"Ministers vastly underestimated the scale of immigration, running into hundreds of thousands of new entrants, from the so-called A8 countries who joined the EU five years ago. The Government subsequently introuced tighter restrictions on the movements of workers from Bulgaria and Romania when those countries acceded in 2007"