FreeRange user yuebai li wanted you to see this:
"地下劳工:天下无“黑户”"
Britain
Illegal immigrants
非法移民
All sins forgiven? 天下无“黑户”
Mar 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition
A report on the scale of undocumented working sparks calls for an amnesty
一个关于地下劳工大赦的报告
PROTECTED by a 20-mile-wide moat, Britain need not worry as much as most countries about illegal border-hoppers. There are those who take the wet route: a new French film, “Welcome”, tells the story of a Kurdish boy’s plan to swim La Manche to be reunited with his girlfriend in Britain. More common are those who stow aboard lorries to get across by ferry or tunnel. But such plans are fairly easy to foil: border guards have turned away 88,500 Channel-crossers in the past five years.
有20英里宽的天堑为壕沟,使得英国不必像世界上大多数国家那样担心非法入境者。有人妄图采用水路入境:一部新拍的法国电影《欢迎光临》,讲述了一个库德男孩计划从拉‧曼恰游泳至英国,与女朋友团聚。但通常人们会藏匿在过境的卡车上,由轮渡或隧道进入英国。可是这样的计划也很容易被识破:边境警察在过去5年里已经遣返了88,500名非法的海峡隧道入境者。
Nonetheless, it appears that the number of “irregular” migrants in Britain has been growing fast. The government’s previous best estimate was that in 2001 there were 430,000 undocumented residents, made up of illegal entrants, visa overstayers, failed asylum-seekers and the British-born children of all the above. But on March 9th a report commissioned by Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, suggested that the figure is now nearer 725,000. The authors, from the London School of Economics (LSE), reckon people whose asylum claims have been rejected but who have not returned home account for most of the growth.
然而,资料显示英国“非正规”移民的数额正呈快速上升趋势。政府早前乐观估计2001年英国有430,000名不在册的居民,主要由非法入境者、签证过期滞留者、申请难民未遂者和这些人在英国出生的孩子组成。但是由伦敦市长、保守党人鲍里斯•约翰逊,委托调查的并于3月9日公布的报告显示这个数字已经接近725,000。据这份报告的作者,伦敦政治经济学院估计,这一增长主要是由于申请避难者被驳回之后并没有返回自己的国家。
The number is still small by international standards: America, for instance, is thought to harbour some 12m undocumented workers, more than three times as many as Britain has per head. But the LSE team points out that Britain’s irregular residents are unusually highly concentrated in London. Around two-thirds are based in the capital, they estimate, which means that roughly one in 15 Londoners is living there illegally.
不过按照国际标准,这个数字并不是很大:比如,美国据称容纳了1200万未在册的劳工,按人头计算是英国的三倍。可是伦敦政经学院指出,英国的非正规居民的集中度出奇得高,按照他们的估计,几乎三分之二都聚集在伦敦,这意味着大概每15个伦敦居民中有1个属于非法逗留。
That is a tax base worth taking seriously. Against his own party’s line, Mr Johnson backs a managed amnesty for those workers, which would bring about 320,000 Londoners in from the cold if it were offered to those who had been in the country for at least five years, as is mooted. The power to grant such an amnesty lies with the central government, whose view is that it would merely encourage more people to try their luck in future. But the Liberal Democrats are in favour and so are many Labour MPs, including Harriet Harman, who, many reckon, is already running to be the Labour Party’s next leader.
从税收角度考虑,这个问题就值得认真对待。与保守党党派的观点不同,约翰逊先生赞成对这些非法劳工进行有计划的特赦,如果正如现在所争论的,以在英国居住时间五年至五年以上为标准,那么大赦就将使320,000名伦敦居民从冷落和边缘化的黑暗角落得到新生。这种特赦的权利只在政府,而政府认为这么做只会鼓励更多人今后到英国来碰运气。不过自由民主党议员和许多工党议员都赞成这一方案,包括大家都认为将成为下一任工党领袖的哈里特.哈曼。
For some, the moral arguments weigh most heavily. Jeff, a failed asylum-seeker from Zimbabwe, describes nine years in Britain being bounced from one agency to another, unable to work and afraid to return home. His children did well at school but cannot go to university; they too now live lives of enforced idleness. “It mirrors what is happening to so many families,” he says. Fear of deportation keeps sick children away from hospital and battered prostitutes away from the police, and promotes other woes.
对于另一些人来说,更重要的意义在于道德层面。杰夫,来自津巴布韦的一个难民申请失败者,他描述这九年来在英国的生活,就是在一家家中介吃闭门羹,找不到工作,害怕被遣送。他的孩子读书很好,但是不能上大学,他们现在也只能被迫失业。“我的经历折射出很多家庭的遭遇,”他说。由于害怕被遣送,孩子生病了不能送医院、妓女被欺负了不能找警察,还有其他的不幸。
The LSE will deliver a second report in May, weighing the costs and benefits to the taxpayer of an amnesty. Given the difficulty of comparing the pros and cons of even legal migration, assessing the undocumented will be impressionistic at best. But the “vast majority” of irregulars are “young, single men who use services very lightly”, the researchers say, suggesting that any additional burden on public services would be slight. And some are laid on already: health care, for instance, is provided at the discretion of doctors, few of whom are sticklers for the correct papers.
五月,伦敦政治经济学院将提供第二份报告,分析大赦给纳税人带来的成本和福利。考虑到即使比较合法移民所带来的利弊都有一定难度,因此评估不在册移民顶多也只是凭感觉。但是“决大多数”非正规移民“是年轻的单身,很少使用社会福利”,因此,研究者说,对公众福利不会是很大的包袱。而且有些人其实已经缴税了,比如,医疗费用,看医生时就付款了,没有多少人会坚持到检查报告出来再交钱的。
Perhaps more controversial would be the impact on the job market of hundreds of thousands of newly legal workers. But that, too, is hard to predict. Undocumented workers are the most competitive of all, because employers don’t need to worry about sick pay, holidays or the minimum wage. Giving them the same legal rights as everyone else might actually raise wages in sectors such as construction, agriculture and hospitality.
也许更有争议的问题在于其对劳动力市场的影响,因为那里已经有成千上万新加入的合法劳工。但这也很难盖棺论定。一直以来,没有登记的劳动者是劳动力市场里最有竞争力的,因为雇主不用担心病假工资、带薪休假或是最低工资这些条条框框。但如果他们被赋予了其他人一样的合法权益,这将实实在在地增加某些行业的工资成本,比如建筑业、农业和酒店业。
Amnesties for those who have broken the rules are never popular. But they are not unusual. France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain have regularised more than 3m illegal residents in the past 20 years. And Britain has done it too, albeit modestly. Between 1998 and 1999, domestic workers who had broken their visa restrictions were offered the chance to come clean without penalty. And in 2003 the Home Office announced an amnesty for 15,000 asylum-seeking families who had been the victim of an unusually long backlog in processing applications. That scheme was portrayed as a measure to “clear the decks” before introducing new, tougher immigration controls. As the government prepares to roll out its new ID-card scheme, could this be the moment for an amnesty?
对那些已经违反规定的人进行大赦,永远都不会受到本国公民的欢迎。但大赦还是很普遍。法国、希腊、意大利、葡萄牙和西班牙已经在过去20年里承认了超过300万的非法居住者的合法地位。英国也做过同样的事情,尽管幅度较小。1998至1999年,超过签证期限仍逗留在英国的工作者得到了一个机会重新申请签证,也不必付罚金。2003年,英国内务部又宣布对15,000户受冗长的申请过程拖累的申请避难的外国家庭给予大赦。这项计划被描述成是在引进新的、更严厉的移民管控措施之前先“理清桌面”的一个手段。当下政府又准备推出新的身份鉴别卡计划,而这会不会又是一个大赦的良机?
随机文章:
享受性爱还是理智防艾? 2008-05-07
阿根廷总统大选:克里斯蒂纳,熟悉的陌生人 2007-11-05
欧盟条约:解读里斯本条约 2007-10-31
日本 :一党执政的危机 2007-09-27
网络电台:失谐 2007-07-04
收藏到:Del.icio.us
《城客》:第一本中文互动杂志!
经济学人
FreeRange WebReader - bringing the Internet to your mobile phone like never before!
Reading this on your Windows Smartphone, Palm or Blackberry? Try it now by clicking http://mwap.at
Posted via email from liyuebai's posterous