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Sir: Frank Field MP (Letters, 24 March) thinks that giving a one-off amnesty to long-term undocumented migrants (that is, asylum-seekers who have waited for years in limbo on Home Office decisions; visa-overstayers who have secure jobs and pay taxes) would ‘send out a trumpet call to people to come here illegally’. I don’t pretend it would stop illegal immigration, but it wouldn’t have the green-light effect he fears: people don’t cross the world in search of visas but for work; where they find it (as in the UK) they often end up staying.
The US and many European countries have all introduced pathways to citizenship for long-term migrants because there are huge benefits, both for the host country and for migrants, of recognising realities. In each case they have not had a discernible green-light effect; immigrants have continued to arrive in greater numbers — as they have to the UK, which has not had an amnesty — because the economies need them. Of course, if the amnesty provision is too generous, it might have that effect; but we think our proposal of a six-year residence requirement annuls any such risk.
Mr Andrew Sim ends his letter with two acid drops: that I want to abolish immigration controls — nothing in my article suggested anything like it — and that my wages are paid by the ‘state-funded charityworld’. In spite of all temptations, for the record the Citizen Organising Foundation does not take the state’s shilling; its members — mostly churches, schools and the like — pay dues heavily supplemented by saintly, far-sighted community trusts which believe in the benefits of ordinary people being involved in politics.
Austen Ivereigh
Co-ordinator, Strangers into Citizens,
Citizen Organising Foundation, London E1
Presumed guilty
Sir: Your correspondents who criticise Tessa Mayes must be living in the past (Letters, 10 March). In our Big Brother society, police are no longer friendly and civil servants are neither civil nor our servants.
My husband and I were interrogated a few years ago by two tax officers for three hours. We thought we had nothing to fear because we were innocent and welcomed them into our home. But we were quickly disabused. The officers couldn’t believe that we were living on as little as we were and were convinced that we had another, undeclared, source of income. But the burden of proof has now changed, and rather than they having to prove that we did, we had to prove that we didn’t. How do you prove a negative? We were unable to, and in a follow-up letter we were advised that, although the officers had been unable to find anything wrong, we shouldn’t relax because we could be checked up on again at any time. My husband was so traumatised that he was unable to eat or sleep for days. The foot in the door is of no worry to criminals who are used to living on the edge; but to innocent law-abiding people, it’s a life-shattering experience.
Virginia Price Evans
Whitland, Carmarthenshire
Swanton’s ‘malign influence’
Sir: We all love Frank Keating but he can’t be allowed to get away with his jolly-good-chap defence of E.W. Swanton (Sport, 17 March), and his not-so-veiled attack on Leo McKinstry, whose reasonable criticism of the former Telegraph cricket correspondent irked him so. Swanton had good qualities but he was a terrible snob, and his writing on cricket (desperately dull, by the way) perpetuated a snobbery that characterised so much of English cricket for so long. In his patronage Swanton could indeed be helpful to younger scribes. As a journalist, however, he was a compulsive meddler and had a malign influence on English cricket for half a century. As a good liberal, with a long record of exposing such people, Francis should have recognised that. Instead, he preferred to belittle McKinstry for trying to tell the truth.
Michael Henderson
London W13
A novel interpretation
Sir: Has Rachel Holmes (Diary, 10 March) read Jane Austen’s novels? From her descriptions of the characters it would seem she knows them only from television adaptations. She believes the heroines are made up of ‘a lace-ruffled heaving bosom’ (Emma? Anne Elliot?) with a ‘subservient attitude to limp egoistic fops’ (Captain Wentworth? Darcy?).
‘The most relevant Austen novel to our present historical moment,’ she writes, is ‘Mansfield Park, with its sharp critique of slavery, economic colonialism, and the dismal failure to enforce the Abolition Act.’ Slavery is mentioned once, and only once, in Mansfield Park. ‘Economic colonialism and the dismal failure to enforce the Abolition Act’ are not mentioned at all. When Fanny tries to broach the subject of slavery with her plantation-owning uncle, she is met with that famous ‘dead silence’. The implication is that the silence was due to Sir Thomas’s refusal to answer questions on a sensitive subject.
Felicity Browne
London W8
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