So unreal that I can't imagine it's true.
The real question is, are Pakis good drivers?
I read that and boggled that the idea that we were even considering conditioning the need for a visa on the ethnicity of British citizens. Who thinks that way? If we don't trust the British, make them all get visas, but this can only lead to madness: "Excuse me, sir, I noticed you were brownish. Are you of Pakistani origin?"
I mean, is being of Pakistani origin even a legal status in Britain? What would keep everyone from saying "Actually, my family came from India, so fuck you."
What would keep everyone from saying "Actually, my family came from India, so fuck you."
Pride, I imagine.
Are they going to return to using quadroon and octaroon as legal designations?
4: Well, yeah. This just seems like an obvious area for civil disobedience if anyone were stupid enough to try to enforce it.
But seriously, Timbot, I'm surprised that you're surprised. This is how these people think. It's early yet, but here's on endorsement, from a Brit, no less. Note the use of quotation marks.
Good point, LB. A fairly substantial number of British Muslims may have ancestors who came from Pakistan, but so soon after that country was created that their allegiance to it would be pretty damn thin.
However, that's off point, because it doesn't matter how easily you can connect people's ancestry to this, that or the other unfashionable country, it's still fucking racist to say that I can visit New York without a visa but my next door neighbour can't. What about all the Americans of Irish ancestry who used to raise money for the IRA (my father-in-law for one)? Can you imagine anybody getting away with saying that Britons of Irish descent should be discriminated against in case they were collecting for NORAID?
B - in my city 99% of taxi drivers are of Pakistani descent. Some good, some bad, but they all take care to keep their licences.
It's not just the UK. The visa waiver program applies to 27 different countries (generally of the friendly Western European varietal.) All you need is a machine readable passport, no tourist visa.
The options here are pretty much to require all British citizens to get visas in order to travel to the U.S. Chances are, the UK responds to that by requiring all Americans to get visas if they want to visit the UK. Or, to deny young men of Pakistani origin (meaning: looks like a terrorist) at the border. Neither's a great solution, frankly. The latter just increases resentment, and the former really doesn't provide much security, assuming that we'd screen applicants and that al-BadGuys are smart enough to send 'clean' terrorists to apply for tourist visas.
9: I'm not surprised that we would attempt to implement such a policy; I'm surprised that we wouldn't hide it in a broader policy of policing all Brit passport holders or some such.
10: B - in my city 99% of taxi drivers are of Pakistani descent. Some good, some bad, but they all take care to keep their licences.
See, but that proves nothing. I'm sure the taxis are controlled by the Pakistani mafia.
Okay, actually this isn't funny and I'm starting to offend myself. Never mind.
Oh, and it's not a loophole. If you're a British citizen, you get a British passport. If you have a British passport, you can come to the U.S. for 90 days. C'est ça.
Okay, actually this isn't funny and I'm starting to offend myself. Never mind.
It's OK, B. I think everyone knows that you're down with la gente. Or, I guess, the ijma. Possibly the ak hwat.
Next up: No visa requirements for anyone who will eat a pork rind at customs.
Dude! I don't even know what those words mean! How mortifying. I shall have to reapply to renew the visa in my ghetto pass!
(17: I don't know what those words mean, either, B. They were the first ones that seemed remotely relevant when I searched an Urdu dictionary for "people." I'm not 100% sure that Urdu was the right language.)
18: You big poser. Me and the gente will make sure you're the first up against the wall.
Punjabi is more likely, but I'll let our British and south Asian correspondents answer definitively.
No visa requirements for anyone who will eat a pork rind at customs.
Mazel tov.
Anybody see Pat Buchanan's latest column? Virginia Tech (and everything else that ever happened that was bad in America) is because of our immigration/visa policies.
From Wikipedia
Urdu is Pakistan's national language and has been promoted as a token of national unity, though less than 8% of Pakistanis speak it as their first language but it is spoken fluently as a second language by all literate Pakistanis. ...
Punjabi is spoken as a first language by ~44% of Pakistanis, mostly in Punjab as well as by a large number of people in Karachi. It is an important language since Punjabi is spoken by about half of Pakistanis. However, Punjabi does not have any official status in Pakistan.
21: No doubt the Pat Buchanans of the world will think that keeping the Jews out will be a bonus, not a drawback.
18. Urdu is the official language of Pakistan. Punjabi, Kashmiri, Pashtun, Baluchi, Sindhi also widely spoken, depending where you start from.
The last paragraph of 23 should also be ital.
OFE is down with the ijma. Or, possibly, the ik hwat.
How close are Urdu and Punjabi? Really distinct, or more on the Swedish/Norwegian spectrum where they're intercomprehensible if you talk slow and listen carefully?
I'm told that Urdu and Hindi are close, but don't know about Punjabi.
28. Pretty close I imagine. Urdu originated as a creole of Farsi (spoken by the armies and courtiers of the early Mughals) and Hindi. Punjabi is a national/regional language, similar to Hindi. But I believe, IIRC, that Indo-Iranian languages are generally closer than western IE languages to each other.
Anybody see Pat Buchanan's latest column? Virginia Tech (and everything else that ever happened that was bad in America) is because of our immigration/visa policies.
I'm not terribly surprised by Buchanan's reaction. More interesting to me--truly surprising, which may say something bad about me--is how extraordinarily ethnically diverse Ho's victims were. It's as if he killed every Admissions Officer's go to group photo. Iranians, Hispanics, Lebanese, African Americans, white people, etc.
Is Urdu written with Arabic script or with Vedic script*, or some other way?
* (And is "Vedic script" the correct way to describe the character set in which Hindi is written?)
31: He took out a class of graduate students in engineering. Those usually draw students from all over the globe.
28: Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible. Punjabi is different enough that it's difficult to understand for Urdu speakers. It also comes in a number of different "flavors," like HindKo, which are even more confusing.
32a: Calligraphic Arabic, like Farsi.
32b: Devanagari
32b: I think you can just say "Devanagari."
Thanks, OFE and Gov't Drone and BZA! "Unfogged" is where I can come to get my script questions answered.
Is a version of Bengali, written in Calligraphic Arabic, used in Bangla Desh? Or do the Bangladeshis get by with the same I presume Devangari version of Bengali used in Northeastern India?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:WritingSystemsoftheWorld4.png
Bangladesh uses the traditional Bengali script, which is different from the much easier Devanagari. That was actually one of the great ideological cornerstones of their war of independence in '71 -- they were dead set against changing their lingua franca to Urdu.
This is great! Can anyone translate some Linear A for me?
As far as I can tell, this fragment says something about a meetup in Ephesus, then makes a crack about Lesbians.
Every person of Pakistani origin I've ever met spoke Punjabi rather than Urdu -- which I suppose may partly be an artifact of patterns of immigration. Also, a fair number of my friends whose families are Pakistani aren't really particularly literate in their parents language.
I know one friend of mine used to say that she spoke fluent Punjabi, and read Urdu but her younger brothers and sisters spoke slightly less good Punjabi and knew no Urdu at all.
Nitpick: not all British citizens can get into the US without a visa. If you're coming on holiday, yes. If you're visiting your American grandmother, yes. If you're on a business trip, or attending a conference, yes.
But if you're a journalist, coming for a few days to (say) interview someone in the US? No. Then you need a special US I-Visa, which is not at all easy to get. No other profession has this requirement. It's a complete pain in the neck.
43: Interesting point, ttaM. Round here, where 90% of PPOs are Kashmiri, Urdu seems much more generally spoken. The Yoof are monoglot anglophones, with a strong Yorkshire accent that is still somehow slightly distinct from that of their contemporaries whose parents are monoglot anglophones.
I mean, is being of Pakistani origin even a legal status in Britain?
Of course it fucking isn't.
Pride, I imagine.
And you'd be right.
I'm sure the taxis are controlled by the Pakistani mafia.
I remember a murder case in Bradford that involved a convoy of several dozen cabs. I'm not saying, I'm just saying...
Further, Urdu is the 99% majority-minority language oop north, with an interesting local creoleisation. Bangladeshis mostly went to London, Kashmiris, Pathans and Punjabis to West Yorkshire and East Lancashire, Punjabi Sikhs to the Midlands and West London.
When I still lived in West Yorkshire, I used to know which postcode area had which community.
Scotland is mostly Punjabis as far as I know. Which is probably where my impression of language use comes from.
Also, all Scots of pakistani origin under about 50 years of age have Scottish accents that are completely indistinguishable from other Scots of anglophone* descent. In that respect, it's different, I think, from England.
* or whatever the appropriate word is
It's funny, with the exceptions of the Assyrians in Södertälje, I don't think immigrant communities in Sweden cluster much at all. Every little immigrant neighbourhood will have like 50-70 nationalities.
There's a pidgin dialect common to every hood, which even has its own wikipedia entry, which has a distinct accent as well as vocabulary. It'll be mixed with the regional accent, and usually with your parents laguages accent to varying degrees, but a chilean dude may well have this maybe vaguely mideastern accent without any trace of Spanish.
"50-70 nationalities"
From googling, this might have been an undestatement. 82 nationalities in Skärholmen, where I live, and 127 in Rinkeby.
the Assyrians in Södertälje
We are living in the future. Don't forget it.
49: Do their cohorts gleam in purple and gold?
or whatever the appropriate word is
Honkeys.
I've been looking for the joke in LB's variant spelling, but I can't find it. Misterseventies© says "honkys."
Misterseventies ought to be writing "honkies", lest somebody pronounce his written word to rhyme with "kiss".
No joke, just ignorance. Honkys it is. (Honkies?)
(In other respects he is quite correct.)
