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The Mayor of London has given his support to the Migration Matters Trust. The Trust was established last year but will be officially launched in January 2013. Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, is defying his own party's official policy on immigration, according to The Independent, a London newspaper.
Australia's population grew by 1.6% or 359,600 people in the year to the end of June 2012. 58% of that rise was caused by immigration. The population reached 22.7m in July, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Last year, the Australian population grew by only 1.14%. This coincided with a period when levels of immigration were lower than normal. In 2009, the Australian government curbed immigration in response to the global economic slowdown.
President Obama has told Latino pressure groups that he will do everything he can to reform the US's immigration system in 2013. But first, he has asked for their help in helping to pull the US back from the brink of the 'fiscal cliff'.
Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the UK between 1997 and 2007, made a rare visit to the UK parliament at Westminster on Tuesday 18th December 2012 and walked into, or perhaps created, a row about immigration.
Mr Blair attended a lunch at Westminster where he spoke and answered journalists' questions. Mr Blair's lunch was held just one day after new Labour leader Ed Miliband appeared to distance himself from the Labour governments of Mr Blair and Gordon Brown on immigration policy.
The United Nations has issued a request for US$1.5bn to help support 5m Syrians displaced by the Syrian conflict. The UN has said that it needs US$519.6m to support 4m people internally displaced in Syria and a further US$1bn to support 1m people who, the UN believes, will be seeking assistance from relief workers by July 2013. It says that this is the 'largest short-term humanitarian appeal ever'.
Canada's Immigrant Investor Program (IIP) was suspended in July 2012. When it was established, it enabled wealthy people from around the world to gain Canadian permanent resident status if they had CAN$400,000 which they could lend to the Canadian government for five years, as well as showing assets, legally acquired, of at least CAN$800,000.
Some critics of the programme complained that the IIP amounted to selling Canadian citizenship and was therefore morally wrong. Others had no difficulty with the notion that wealthy individuals might 'jump the queue' to gain permanent resident status but argued that the price was too low.