Immigration: Us V Them

While they wait, some for up to 16 years, asylum seekers languish in housing condemned by the committee as, in some cases, "appalling". Not just a shambles, degrading also. The committee was rightly outraged by testimony from gay and lesbian asylum seekers, some of whom were required to go to extraordinary lengths to establish sexuality. Having exhausted all reasonable ways of making a case, a few resorted to handing over photographic and video evidence of "highly personal sexual activity". Is this a system we can be proud of? The anti-war slogan comes to mind: not in my name...

Hugh Muir in The Guardian, after the Tories announced they were "getting tough" on immigration and asylum, yet again.

Gulf states to introduce medical testing on travellers to 'detect' gay people and stop them from entering the country

Daily Mail, October 7th.

The Mail story was widely reported as above (their own has since been updated).

It is a gross distortion.

As Scott Long has reported, no-one in Kuwait - or Qatar - has proposed some new "gay test" for tourists.

Rather; "The Kuwait Ministry of Health has proposed tightening genetic tests for immigrant workers in order to prevent transgender migrants from entering the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] job market."

The "gay test" fiction was reported in the international LGBT media and elsewhere.

Please let Fagburn know of any you see who have published a correction or an update on the story, ie one that is actually accurate.

At the time of typing, despite polite requests from many individuals, I know of none.

[Edit: Towleroad gave the earliest and most transparent correction I saw. More usually, where the real story was printed, they were mendacious, and the fact that they had published a garbled version before disappeared down an Orwellian Memory Hole].

Thanks to @undersided