Good launch on Wednesday with Mark Harper, the immigration minister of the UK China Visa Alliance. They’re trying to make it easier for high spending Chinese tourists to enter the Country – at the moment we get five times fewer of these than France – because a Schengen visa gets you to 26 European countries whereas a UK one only gets you one.
No chance (yet?) that the Government will join Schengen, so we need to look for practical ways of allowing tourists only to apply once for both Schengen and UK. At the moment they may need to FLY! 3 hours to get to a visa centre because the UK insists on biometric data in person.
But some good progress by the Home Office on this. They will now take a photocopy of your passport rather than holding onto it during the process.
There was an estimate at the launch that we are losing over £1billion of potential income to the UK as a result of the complex process.
But let me stress the Home Office is making progress – their clear distinction now between keeping out the people we don’t want and welcoming those we do is progress from two years ago.
Full report on Chinese tourist visas here
Q1: Weren’t the Chinese scoring higher in their Education than the British, American, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand students ?
Q2: Aren’t the Chinese Leaders succeeding percentage-wise upon the lowest salaries in the whole world ?
Q3: Wouldn’t the above two factors alone make China a higher-scoring, including more ‘sustainworthy’, near-future World-Governance-Leader than Britain, the USA, Russia, India, Brazil, or the Vatican (not to mention the Mafia) ?
Q4: Shouldn’t we be more ‘selective’ in what we ‘teach’ Foreign-Students;
and in what we require them to spend their money on here ?
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