Highland deportation rows prompt call for greater Scots voice on immigration
A Highland MP is claiming Scotland and not the Home Office should have the right to decide who stays here and who gets deported from the country.
Ian Blackford, MP for Ross, Skye & Lochaber, has taken up the case of a young Australian family in Dingwall who face deportation.
On March 3 the Strathy revealed how another family, in Badenoch, were facing the misery of deportation for not having quite enough “points” to remain running the village shop they restored nearly three years ago.
The Zielsdorfs, invested some £300,000 turning the disused Laggan Stores around and have never claimed benefits in their seven years after moving here from Canada, even educating their five children at home, but the Home Office has told them to sell up and go in accordance with what another SNP MP - Drew Hendry - described as an inappropriate, “one size fits all” immigration policy.
Now his fellow SNP MP has taken up the case in Dingwall to call for the Scots to have their own immigration policy, “so that it can identify the correct priorities for sparsely-populated areas such as the Highlands and act accordingly.”
Gregg and Kathryn Brain are a professional couple whose great-grandparents originally came from Scotland. In response to the 2007 Highland Homecoming initiative, they returned to their ancestral country to study, with the intention of eventually working within the Heritage industry here. Kathryn’s student visa, which listed her husband and son as dependents, expired in December and her application for an interim visa so that the family could continue living and working here was refused.
Mr Blackford has written to Immigration Minister James Brokenshire and has tabled an Early Day Motion calling upon the Government to grant the family the right to appeal whilst remaining in the UK and continuing in their current employment. Both parents have been working full-time and their son, seven-year-old Lachlan, is in Gaelic Medium education at Dingwall Primary School. His teachers have stressed that he will suffer both academically and socially if his education is disrupted by a return to Australia.
The MP said: “Gregg and Kathryn Brain and their young son Lachlan are just exactly what we need in the Highlands, young families that want to settle here and make a contribution to Highland life. They are exactly the type of young people required to help grow and sustain our economy and their young son Lachlan was thriving at the local Gaelic primary school.”
They are a young professional couple who are well regarded within their community. Having completed their education, both secured good jobs in the Highlands, and yet the Home Office want to throw them out and send them back to Australia.
“They have been told that they must leave on a technicality and apply to return from within Australia. This is a nonsense - they ought to be given leave to appeal whilst here, which is something I am taking up with the minister. We do not need a modern day Highland Clearance. We need families like the Brains to be given the right to stay here.
“We really do need control of immigration here in Scotland so we can determine our own priorities where we can extend a traditional Highland welcome to families like the Brains.”
A crowdfunding appeal has been set up by friends of the family to help the Brains fight the deportation at crowdfunding.justgiving.com/backthebrains.
