The Europe and Migration Minister for Scotland’s SNP-led devolved government claims proposals for it to be given powers to set its own open borders immigration policy are “making traction” with the British government.

The left-wing, anti-Brexit Scottish National Party, which still hopes to separate Scotland from the United Kingdom despite losing a referendum on the issue in 2014, wants Scotland’s devolved institutions — similar to state government in United States — to be able to issue their own “Scottish visa”, which would effectively circumvent even the meagre immigration controls which the Tories half-heartedly enforce at UK-level.

“Currently the UK Government has a cap on numbers but that hasn’t worked and actually we need to grow our population in Scotland,” asserted Ben MacPherson MSP in comments reported by The Scotsman — without ever explaining why this was such an imperative, or why immigration was a superior means of achieving it to Hungarian-style pro-family policies.

“We could decide to have a lower salary threshold, we could decide to have no salary threshold, we could decide not to have an immigration skills charge, we could decide if we wanted to emulate Freedom of Movement from the European Economic Area [the European Union plus Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein],” he said, describing a system under which virtually anyone would be free to come to Scotland with few requirements and minimal vetting — and no reals of preventing them from migrating southward to England and Wales once after their arrival.

MacPherson said progress in persuading the British government to devolve these powers was “slow” but that he believed they were “making traction”.

‘Unsustainable’: Non-UK Born Population Record High, One Tenth Foreign National https://t.co/4d1A1s2dIO — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 24, 2018

Commenting, Neil Anderson, Executive Director of Migration Watch UK, said that “the SNP claim that it is moving closer to obtaining support for a regional visa system for Scotland is bizarre.”

“Not only has the government’s Migration Advisory Committee already made clear that such an idea is unworkable, but it also flies in the face of Scottish public opinion which, regardless of what the SNP says, is just as averse to the current massive levels of immigration as the rest of the UK,” he explained.

Anderson’s assertion is reflected in recent polling which shows that some 45 per cent of Scots think immigration is too high, 37 per cent think the current levels are about right, and a mere six per cent want it increased, as the SNP desire.

5.64 million people working in Britain were born abroad – greater than the population of Scotland. https://t.co/AMKf9GFJwi — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 17, 2017

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