Where do you draw the line between immigration control and systematic racial discrimination?

What makes someone a high risk visitor? Your skin colour, nationality or your personal individual circumstances? This article, in the Sunday Times today, confirms suspicions that the government is prepared to target non-white migrants in the guise of immigration control.

The cat is now out of the bag and this seems to be the first piece of legislation that openly discriminates against whole nations of people. Should it be read that this government is against visits from non-Caucasian?Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for controlled migration, but having seen the bundles of paper work already required by visitors from these countries in order to secure a short term visa, is this further hurdle really necessary?

Why should the genuine visitor from India, who has already established that they are going to return home at the end of their visit, payed hundreds of pounds in Visa fees, and is providing business for the tourist industry in this country, have the additional burden of providing £3000 on top of that, just because they happened to have been born into the ‘wrong race”.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I don’t think these forced British single parents, who have been deprived the opportunity to bring their foreign spouse into the country, need this additional visiting restriction either. (See my earlier post about spouse visas)

If we are going to ask people to leave a deposit in order to ensure that they return home at the end of their visit, surely the fairest way would be to apply this to all visitors. Is it also wise to restrict tourism, at a time when we are in a recession and the tourist market is already highly competitive?