The Home Office has been forced to scrap a computerised visa system after campaigners claimed it was “racist” for being more likely to refuse people from third world countries entry to Britain.
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) and Foxglove, which campaigns for “social justice” in technology, claimed a computer algorithm used to grade would-be travellers’ visa applications amounted to “speedy boarding for white people”.
According to the NGOs, the system — which automatically judges whether it is in the United Kingdom’s interest to grant someone a visa, based on a variety of factors — is “racist” for considering an applicant’s nationality when awarding a green, orange, or red rating.
Foxglove alleged that there was a “secret list of suspect nationalities” for which people were more likely to have their applications coded red, which resulted in additional scrutiny and an increased likelihood that they would be denied a visa, according to the BBC.
“The visa algorithm discriminated on the basis of nationality — by design,” said JCWI. The council complained that people from higher-risk countries “received intensive scrutiny by Home Office officials, were approached with more scepticism, took longer to determine, and were much more likely to be refused”.
The group, which receives funding from British taxpayers, claimed that the process amounted to a breach of the Equality Act 2010.
Following a judicial review, the Home Office — which characterised the algorithm as a “streamlining” system — agreed to drop the technology from August 7th onward, but denied that it was racist.
“We have been reviewing how the visa application streaming tool operates and will be redesigning our processes to make them even more streamlined and secure,” the government ministry said in a statement.
“We do not accept the allegations Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants made in their judicial review claim and whilst litigation is still ongoing it would not be appropriate for the department to comment any further.”
Foxglove founder Cori Crider commented: “We’re delighted the Home Office has seen sense and scrapped the streaming tool. Racist feedback loops meant that what should have been a fair migration process was, in practice, just speedy boarding for white people.”
Meanwhile, JCWI’s Chai Patel blasted the Home Office as “oblivious to the racist assumptions and systems it operates”, asserting that the algorithm “took decades of institutionally racist practices, such as targeting particular nationalities for immigration raids, and turned them into software”.
In the months leading up to the judicial review, the globalist media published a succession of articles publicising the case and attempting to present the NGOs’ arguments in a purely sympathetic light.
A feature from openDemocracy, a Britain-based political website funded by George Soros, protested that “African applicants are refused UK visas at twice the rate of those from any other part of the world”.
Figures including Lucy Moreton, professional officer of the ISU — which represents borders, immigration, and customs staff — have stressed that once would-be immigrants manage to set foot on British soil, “they are likely to be able to stay”.
Breitbart London previously reported how up to two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa’s more than a billion-strong population was hoping to migrate to Europe or the U.S., according to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center.
With the population of Nigeria alone set to triple to 800 million by 2100, the international media has recently repeated claims that “migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option”. It has even been alleged that the future will see “competition for migrants, as there won’t be enough”.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.