Immigration news

The 2011 Canadian census shows that Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines, is the fastest growing language in Canada. It is now the fifth most commonly spoken language among Canadians at home. The number of people speaking Tagalog at home rose by 64% between the last Canadian census in 2006 and 2011. The results of the 2011 census showed that there were nearly 280,000 people who spoke Tagalog at home living in Canada. In 2006, there were only 170,000 Tagalog speakers.

Canada's immigration minister Jason Kenney announced further changes to Canadian immigration policy on 2nd November 2012. Mr Kenney said that the Canadian immigration system would be transformed by the end of 2013.

His headline announcement was that, by the end of 2013, the Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP) backlog would be eliminated well ahead of schedule. Mr Kenney had previously announced that the backlog would be cleared by the end of 2017.

The Age newspaper reports that most of the hunger strikers on Nauru have ended their protests. Some reports last week suggested that 300 of the 350 inmates then being held in the offshore processing camp were refusing food. The Australian government denied that the hunger strike was so widespread.

Less than a week after the Republicans lost the US presidential election, there are signs that the US's stalemate on illegal immigration may be resolved. The Schumer Graham bill would, in effect, grant an amnesty for most illegal aliens already in the US while strengthening the border to prevent any further illegal immigration.

There are reports of a growing rift in the UK government over immigration. The Guardian, a UK newspaper, reports that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, held a meeting with Home Secretary, Theresa May, in late October to see if the government could abandon its key immigration policy to reduce net immigration to under 100,000 a year.

When the Coalition government came to power in 2010, it promised to reduce net immigration into the UK from outside the European Union to 'tens of thousands' every year from the level at that time which is thought to have been about 250,000 per year.

The UK's Home Secretary Theresa May MP has said that the UK is not able to extend controls on the migration of Bulgarians and Romanians beyond December 2013. However, she said that she was considering other options to limit the numbers of people coming to the UK from those countries. Mrs May was appearing on the BBC political programme The Andrew Marr Show.