This migrant problem is going to let Reform in isn’t it?

The Australians have deported an average of under 400 people a year to offshore processing centres and it seems to have worked.

13 years ago they had 17,000 asylum seekers arrive by boat so one can only imagine how many they would have now if they hadn’t put that system in place.

These are two different things, the UK Govt at the time, targeted a lot of things, inc migrants for deportation BUT Rwanda could never have accepted them nor did they agree too or have accommodation for, PR, much like commissioning planes... which they knew would never fly migrants there.

Numbers who hoped over the to ROI were very small, a few 100.

@Xenia don’t you think that’s a terrible salary for a graduate? My starting salary in 1989 was £21,500 in the city aged 23. @Alexandra2001the 5,700 figure is cited in a number of sources in the context of the initial number identified as targeted for deportation

Care home wage is what graduate paralegals get in many places ie the minimum wage of £23,500 for a 35 hour week.

Voluntary movement to ROI cost us nothing. Too bad people couldn’t see why that was helpful and posted so much about scrapping it.

If Labour have nothing else then they’ll struggle to stay in.

Are you sure about that? accommodation was built for 300 across 2 sites.

Rwanda had 257 units built not all for UK migrants.

The 5700 figure was max number over 10 years.

We gave them £320m plus £120m once the 300 figure was reached, which it never was, we handed over £320m for nothing....

BTW Migrants don't get "Free Dental Care" they are given an entitlement to Free Dental, same as all of us, few dentists take on new NHS patients, so they get an emergency appointment at best, which is filling or extraction, nothing else.

Exactly
the more I learn the more frustrating it is

people who already live here and pay taxes struggle to get NHS dental care or affordable housing

why are we giving it to people who have no business being here in the first place

Agree completely! Social care should not be subsidised in this round about way. We should face up to the real cost now and not foist it on our children to pay for through their taxes later when a raft of underpaid people come up to retirement with no savings or capital.

New data reported by DT:
59% of all HC2 certificates issued over the last 5 years have been given to asylum seekers.

These certificates provide low-income individuals with access to healthcare benefits that are not available to the general public. These include free prescriptions, dental treatment, eye tests, wigs, and reduced costs for glasses, contact lenses, and travel to and from medical appointments.

“Asylum seekers are automatically given a HC2 certificate if they are eligible for “section 95 support” under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, which means they are entitled to claim financial and housing assistance”

@Alexandra2001 The target for Rwanda in 2024 was initially set at 5,700.

@cattenberg

But that doesn’t mean we should do it this way. It’s obscene to pay people very little and rely on immigration in this way. Taxing people to pay for benefits paid to immigrants who then qualify for ILR and dump the care jobs and are entitled to benefits for them and any dependents is extremely inefficient - we could just pay people more and have less immigration, which is what many people actually want

it’s also extremely stupid not to move towards giving caring professions protections and better money, as it’s one of the few jobs that will survive AI. What are all the smug middle managers who think they could never be carers going to do otherwise?!

Rwanda was 500 per year, 5000 over 10 years.

BUT it never happened did it? just wasted 500m, enough to give Train drivers a 75% pay rise..... or met the Resident Doctors pay demands.

If "Australia" was easy and doable, it would have been done, we've right wing Govts in Austria and Italy, the EU has said it wouldn't break EU rules....

Other governments facing the far right would quickly set up schemes to wreck the popularity of the AfD and RN....

Starmer would instigate such a scheme and see his ratings soar..

Just as we don't want undocumented migrants, neither does anyone else.

Plus you saw it on here. People thought Labour could actually smash the gangs and other nonsense.

The most effective way to get people to leave was to ROI and pretty much free to the taxpayer.

Lab just dropped it as a two finger salute to the Tories

lt looks like Labour made a mistake in junking the Rwanda scheme. The upfront costs were sunk; there were noises from Calais and Southern Ireland that it was beginning to work and creating knock on effects; why not follow through and see whether it worked.

It was odd to drop it so quickly after the money was spent, and the conservatives had taken the political hit for them.

@strawberrybubblegumtotally agree with you. My daughter worked in a care home throughout university and found it very satisfying and fulfilling. Only draw back was the terrible pay.

My son picked lettuces for 2 summers and was completely shocked at the conditions that the immigrant workers were living in. The whole system was set up to accommodate immigrant workers willing to tolerate appalling treatment.

So much easier to just give up and put it in the 'too hard' bucket.

The other policies do work. Denmark has much lower immigration than Sweden, which has very loose immigration policy.

I wouldn't be surprised if Rwanda came back, if no better alternatives are found.

I have several family members who did care work for a while and found it very personally satisfying as a job (they're caring types!) but it didn't pay enough. They did a mix of at-home care and worked in care homes. I've had the same story as the pp about at-home work not being viable due to time spent travelling between appointments.

How does it make any financial sense for the UK as a whole to bribe immigrants to do this work at below-living pay for a few years to get a visa, then have them change to more lucrative taxi/delivery work and bring over many dependents - incurring a high net lifetime cost?!

It makes sense for the care home at the time, because they don't incur the future costs. But not for the UK over a lifetime.

If we reduce this immigration, the pay for care work will have to go up, and then UK-born people will want to do it. There's nothing wrong with it as a career apart from the low pay. There's a great progression path, learning specialist caring skills like caring for patients with tracheostomy tubes, or dementia patients etc Specialist skills should normally lead to better pay. and more opportunities. Care work is also personally rewarding in the same way that nursing or any other health-related work is.

I haven't done the maths (hard to get the data) but I suspect that this would cost the UK less overall over a lifetime. It would also be a socially/emotionally positive for both the patients and the carers. It would also be healthier for society as a whole: it's not healthy for a society to have areas of work which are considered beneath most people, and reserved for a 'servant' class - immigrants in this case.

@Alexandra2001 Rwanda was, and in significant numbers. The proposed schemes don’t have to be identical to Australia’s to work. It’s the deterrent that matters and the ability to break the people smuggler’s business model.

Well yes they are now as we have Labour in and the numbers are going up still.

There’s no doubt it would work in the same way. People will choose other countries that don’t end in offshore location.

Aus was high then it got to near zero in some years. Just read the information. It’s been discussed for years now, each thread is as if it hadn’t been said. Other posters have said it clearly, go to one of those posts.

But no deterrent to irregular migration.

You can put in all the rules and regs you like but if the migrant cannot be deported, what does it matter?

I understand exactly what Australia did.

The countries claimed to be adopting an Aus system are not & as Italy is finding out, its not a deterrent, if migrants get returned to Italy after processing, its hiding the problem.

In order for any off shoring to work, it has to be, like Australia's, permanent & it has to be able to take sufficient numbers to be a deterrent, that maybe 5000 or it might be 20,000 we don't know, given the numbers coming here, far in excess of Australia.

All I know is that a high proportion of care workers were born overseas. For example, my (male) next door neighbour needs a high level of care and many of his carers (both men and women) are not from the UK. Also, one of my Romanian colleagues was able to come to the UK by securing a job here as a domiciliary care worker. She no longer works in this field, but that was partly due to her dissatisfaction at not being paid for the time she spent travelling between appointments. However, two of my acquaintances (one Guatemalan and one Lithuanian) still work in residential care homes.

Other Lithuanians I know work in manufacturing and warehouse distribution, which are not popular jobs among Brits due to the low pay, unsociable shift patterns and pressure to work fast.

Denmark is leading the way. Interestingly, their Left wing parties are on board: they see that excessive low-earning immigration is a disaster for the working class. (and they want to stay in power!)

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/denmark-migration-profile-pioneer

I find their 'temporary asylum' strategy really interesting. It hasn't been mentioned on here as a something we could adopt, but it makes perfect sense. Permanent residency is possible after 7 years, but only when the refugee has proved that they've integrated with language tests and have been employed for 3.5 out of the last 4 years. I think the type of work is taken into consideration too.

They also have far stricter rules on family reunification, which seem very sensible. Dependents must all be individually self-supporting.

They haven't got an agreement with another country for external processing yet. They considered Rwanda like us, but didn't go ahead. Italy of course are using Albania. But it seems that Denmark want to get the right solution, and bring other countries with them.

This doesn’t make sense. You’re not understanding what the Australian system does.

A few posters now have said how and why the numbers are very low. Just read the posts, it’s all there.