"You are not welcome" sign

From our Professional Services Department.

Immigration: Romanian or Bulgarian? You won't like it here, is a Guardian title from 27 Jan.

The article presents the fears of Britain being swept by a wave of new Europeans from Romania and Bulgaria and a number of proposals to deal with this.

To the K-Landnews, the eye-catching concept addressed there is that of "anti-nation branding ads".

No more "Britain is a fantastic place to live: a modern thriving society", instead "it rains all the time", "jobs are scarce", or "trust us, you don't want to be at a hospital emergency room on the weekend", or "streets around here are not paved with gold".

Rolling out the big "You are not welcome" sign is a tradition many societies have pursued at one time or other. Its main evilness is that it excludes the wealthy and the tourists - they are always welcome.

Maybe, just maybe, it is really an acknowledgement of the fact that migrants have shaped history like no other group.

The Roman Empire was built on migration and brought down by it. The British Empire used the forced migration of slavery and was arguably hugely important to the migration streams headed for North America.

But, none of this interests us at the K-Landnews. We find it tremendously funny that the Fear of the Other might bring governments and nations to admit that their current branding is but one sliver of the many facets of any society.

As a hiring tip to our British friends: don't do any anti-nation ads yourselves, you won't be able to suppress that British brand of humor the world enjoys.

Talk to your EU experts, hire some French or some Germans. Their pool of anti-British-nation branding pundits has shrunk, partly through your own doing, but - if the money is right - you'll find enough who are willing to point out whatever may be needed to keep the Others away.

[Update 9/2015] We recently found this report on a 2014 German film about the country's asylum process. The article describes how one (1) applicant goes through the process in an idealized way. The same federal agency, the agency for migration affairs, took a different approach in a 2015 film designed to deter "economic migrants" from the Balkans. In a not very realistic fashion either, says the article.