Jobs the Brits won't do?

"Immigration is necessary to get people to do the jobs Americans won't do" is one of the claims that the immigration/amnesty supporters frequently repeated, including Pres. Bush, during the debate on the Senate bill. That outlook is fundamentally problematic because it instills or reflects a mindset that America needs non-Americans to perform "grunt work" or unskilled tasks and allows the country to flaunt its own lassitude.

In the UK, the jobs that Brits won't do include working as doctors for the National Health Service. Until recently, the UK faced a major shortage of homegrown doctors. Thus, the NHS had a nearly open door for non-UK applicants, provided they could meet certain medical and linguistic capabilities. Seven of the eight people that the UK has detained in the London/Glasgow car bomb plot are doctors, the other is an NHS medical technician.

Here is a description of the requirements that, until recently, an NHS applicant had to meet, and note the wide-open backdoor that the EU provides:

Foreign doctors who have qualified outside the EU have to pass a series of linguistic and clinical tests before they can register with the General Medical Council (GMC), the profession's regulatory body.

The GMC then issues a limited registration but once the doctor has been working in the NHS for a little while they would be expected to apply for a full registration.

However, under European legislation, doctors who gain their qualifications in countries within the European Economic Area - EU countries plus Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein - have a right to registration in Britain and are exempt from the GMC's tests.

Even worse, CBS News reports that the whole operation started as a sleeper cell construct that deliberately used the UK's fast-track visa program for medical students to allow the jihadis to enter the country, appear to assimilate, and lie low until the time came for the attack. CBS reports that Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, the present Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, recruited the jihadis between 2004 and 2005, while they lived in the Middle East. He started the recruitment upon orders of Iraq's previous AQ leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

HT.