UK PM Cameron Calls for Tougher Immigration Rules

In some of his strongest rhetoric against the problem of illegal immigration to the United Kingdom, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has urged Britons to report such lawbreakers to the authorities so they can be deported.

The PM said he wants everyone in the country in order to help reclaim our borders during a speech.

Aside from proposing tighter immigration laws, Cameron also unveiled plans to battle against forced and bogus marriages (methods many South Asians, among others, take to settle family members in the UK). He wants to make the act of forced marriage a criminal offense.

The Home Officer earlier rejected a similar proposal on forced marriage out of fears that victims would endanger themselves if they came forward.

If we take the steps set out today and deal with all the different avenues of migration, legal and illegal, then levels of immigration can return to where they were in the 1980s and '90s ... a time when immigration was not a front rank political issue, he said.

Regarding forced marriage, Cameron described the practice as “little more than slavery.

To force someone into marriage is completely wrong and I strongly believe this is a problem we should not shy away from addressing because of some cultural concerns, he said,

Separately, Cameron said he wanted to prevent immigrants from becoming a burden on taxpayers by proposing certain minimum income for new arrivals.

Of course, in the modern world, where people travel and communicate more easily than ever before and where families have connections all across the globe, people do want to move to different countries to be with loved ones,” Cameron conceded.

We all understand this human instinct. But we need to make sure -- for their sake as well as ours -- that those who come through this route are genuinely coming for family reasons, that they can speak English, and that they have the resources they need to live here and make a contribution here - not just to scrape by, or worse, to subsist on benefit.

However, he added: We will make migrants wait longer, to show they really are in a genuine relationship before they can get settlement. And we'll also impose stricter and clearer tests on the genuineness of a relationship, including the ability to speak the same language and to know each other's circumstances. We will also end the ridiculous situation where a registrar who knows a marriage is a sham still has to perform the ceremony.