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The veteran rapper Snoop Dogg has been issued with an Australian Temporary Work (Entertainment) visa despite a campaign by feminists to bar him from the country. Mr Dogg was therefore able to perform at the Big Day Out festival on Australia's Gold Coast in Queensland on January 19th 2014.
On Wednesday 15th 2014, Australian immigration minister Scott Morrison told journalists in the capital Canberra 'Snoop Dogg has a visa'.
A senior Conservative cabinet minister has been 'rebuked' by the UK's Prime Minister David Cameron for saying that he did not accept 'that the European Union is responsible for unacceptable waves of migration' and adding that immigration had made the UK 'far more exciting and healthier'.
Kenneth Clarke, a veteran Conservative politician who served in Mrs Thatcher's cabinet in the 1980s, told The Financial Times that immigrants from the EU had made 'a positive contribution to our economy'.
The Maltese government has announced that it intends to go ahead with a controversial plan to 'sell citizenship' to applicants who pay €1.15m. The government intends that the Individual Investor Program (IIP) scheme should go live in February 2014.
However, there may be a last minute hitch. European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding is said to be taking legal advice about whether the Commission has the power to stop the scheme under EU Treaty law. The European parliament has already held a vote censuring Malta.
The UK's top immigration expert Sir David Metcalf has told the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee that UK employers are deliberately employing foreign-born workers in preference to UK workers to do low-skilled work such as vegetable picking or food retail because foreign-born candidates are likely to work harder, learn faster and be more highly motivated than their English counterparts.
Penny Pritzker, the US's Secretary of Commerce, has told journalists that she believes that there is a good chance that the US's immigration system could be reformed in 2014.
Ms Pritzker told a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday January 8th 2014 that she was hopeful that the House of Representatives would pass an immigration reform bill already passed by the Senate in 2013.
She told her audience 'There's an enormous window in the first half of this year to actually get immigration reform done. I think the momentum is building'.
Canada's immigration minister Chris Alexander has promised to improve the service that his department, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) provides for those seeking to migrate to Canada.
Mr Alexander became immigration minister in August 2013, replacing Jason Kenney who had been in the post since 2008. Mr Kenney introduced a series of major changes to the Canadian immigration system, re-focusing the system to favour skilled based and employment based immigrants over family stream applicants