THE story of Gregg, Kathryn and Lachlan Brain’s fight to be allowed to stay in the Scotland has touched the hearts of the country after extensive coverage in The National, but yesterday it went truly worldwide.

As the family sit out an anxious weekend awaiting a decision from Immigration Minister James Brokenshire, their battle with the Home Office has been related in newspapers and on radio and television from Switzerland and Canada to China and, of course, their native Australia. And the headlines – all in the same vein – will make depressing reading for the UK Government.

“Australian family facing deportation highlights UK immigration headache,” trumpeted the website of Swiss Radio International, while Australian broadcaster SBS said: “Australian family wants UK to honour visa deal.”

AOL chose: “Family hope ‘common sense will prevail’ as they fight deportation,” and quoted Gregg Brain retelling the story he has recounted so many times over recent weeks.

“I’m hopeful that common sense will prevail and that the Home Office will realise that any immigration policy must be set to allow people in who are a net asset to the national interest, and we have a family here who have been working, paying their own way, not relying on taxes, who are willing to live and work in what is a comparatively sparsely populated and economically depressed area of the country.

“[Home Secretary] Theresa May said last year that she would welcome immigrants who are willing to culturally assimilate and pay their own way.

“I would like to think the Home Office ... will now make the right decision and allow us to stay so that we can continue to contribute.”

Much of the coverage stems from a syndicated report, but most highlight the insensitivity of taking seven-year-old Lachlan, whose first language is Gaelic, out of an education system where he is flourishing and putting him into an English-speaking one where he will be at a distinct disadvantage.

Others focus on an immigration system that does not work. Under the headline “Australian family at risk in UK migration muddle”, the Shanghai Daily said the family “arrived in 2011 as part of a plan backed by the British government to help prop up an ageing and shrinking population in the Highlands of north Scotland”. It added: “But the scheme was closed and a change in the rules meant the family required a different visa to stay in the country – a requirement that has pitted the devolved Scottish nationalist government against the British government in London.”

Of course the foreign media might simply be looking ahead to next month’s EU referendum, where immigration is a key battleground.

The potential deportation of the Brain family has highlighted the differences between Scotland, where immigrants are needed to bolster a shrinking and ageing population, and other parts of the UK, where immigration spawns only negativity.

But the last words go to the New Zealand Herald, whose headline “UK wants to deport boy who speaks Gaelic” may be oversimplifying the story, but whose website features the video of Cameron’s stand-in at Prime Minister’s Questions, Chancellor George Osborne.

The film shows Osborne’s reply to Angus Robertson’s question about the family – a response the SNP described as “dire”, and which prompted former First Minister Alex Salmond to describe him simply as “an ignoramus”.