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

Well, there must be a queue of countries lining up to take them..... oh wait there isn't.

Almost 1000 migrants crossed the channel yesterday, its a crisis and i'm all for solutions...

The UK will need a country that is able to take a lot more than 4000, we are a lot further down the road than Australia.

No they aren't at all, none of those countries are putting into place a Nauru style policy.
Albania will accept migrants for processing, successful ones sent back to Italy, unsuccessful ones deported from Albania, despite having sent migrants there, numbers still keep coming to Italy..... because many, even if sent to Albania, will end up in the EU.... esp if Albania ends up IN the EU...

Austria is deporting some Syrians back to Syria, as the country is now deemed safe.... as we are.

Denmark is in talks with Rwanda, who must be laughing, another 1/2 billion for doing nothing at all.

Netherlands in very early talks with Uganda....

Like i said earlier, i'm not against the policy, its just that no country, so far, is willing to take in migrants that we don't want.

4,100 over 13 years is very low and manageable. Most people can understand that.

@Alexandra2001 4,100 people over 13 years is pretty much a drop in the ocean for Australia too given that they had 6,000 arriving illegally by boat alone in the year before the policy was implemented. And of course, like the UK and everywhere else, that 6,000 would likely be a multiple all these years later.

And as for where, well Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Austria and others are in varying stages of putting exactly this policy in place with differing destination countries.

@Alexandra2001whilst you persevere with the same stuff each time you can’t take on board the low numbers. Every time someone says this to you it’s forgotten by the next thread.

Well i got no answer as to where we would send these migrants too from pp.... what a surprise!

So have you got a country in mind? any country would need to house them for many years, or rather imprison them, as per Nauru.

Italy and the EU have looked to do this too and got no-where.

We have a far far bigger migrant problem, so 5000 would be 4% of the numbers who have so far come here.

A migrant who has risked drowning and death crossing Africa and then the Med, might think a 1 in 25 chance of being deported is worth it...... esp if they can slip into the Black economy very easily.

All pp does is parrot the same old line "we just have to vote for it...." no, we have to find a country willing to take in 1000s of migrants permantely.

I note Reform cannot answer this very simple question either, just hot air.

Actually, I suppose it depends on your view of the British class system whether you agree that 'it worked out OK for us'.

Most of the British upper class - and still the wealthiest, most powerful families - are descended from the Norman nobility.

So if you feel oppressed by the class system, then you probably feel that our society (and you individually as a descendent) haven't recovered from that invasion 1000 years ago, and the resulting demographic changes. (it was pretty unpleasant for the Saxons at the time too)

The Vikings - who took posession of half the country as well as bringing mayhem, death and destruction in their raids - were worse, and had a more lasting impact. The French even more so.

Pretty sure the inhabitants at the time suffered pretty badly from those invasions, and would have turned them away if they could have. They certainly tried, but were overpowered and killed. They didn't just decide to hand over York and the North out of concern for the Vikings' human rights.

Of course, most of us are at least partly descended from those invaders so it worked out OK for us I suppose. There was a bit more space anyway, with the population only being 2 million at the time.

We could go back a couple of millennia and blame the Italians (aka Romans) for coming over here in their thousands and giving us roads and plumbing.

Since the start of this century, the population of England alone has jumped by 13 million, most of it because of levels of immigration from outside the British Isles which dwarf anything seen in the history of our island nation. That's why we face a housing crisis on this scale.

@Cattenberg

Is there any evidence that lots of asylum seekers are qualified to do care work or particularly socially valuable work such as that? Many of the young men who come over who are employed are employed in delivery type work etc due to low level of language skills and the black economy opportunities. Part of the reason that the care Visa has been massively tightened up is because even those who came over legally brought multiple family members (making them far more expensive) and also because there was quite a lot of evidence that some people disappeared from the care jobs into other things because they were often just a front to bring people over. There is no evidence that very large proportions of the low income and low skilled migrants we have are saving others huge amounts of money, quite the opposite if their dependents also consume lots of services.

And the cultural cost is not being born by the citizens of Devon.

I'm not going to argue with that, as I don't see much of a cultural cost here. The children at DD's school who speak languages other than English, do indeed speak quite a variety. There is however, a local pocket of Mayalayam speakers, which I just find intriguing from a linguistic point of view.

I have however, met a fair few asylum seekers and disadvantaged economic migrants (and practised teaching some of them English), as I gained a CELTA qualification in Bristol. I also volunteered as an ESOL TA closer to home.

If you look at the profile of the average asylum seeker, they will be a net recipient.

I think that categorising people as either net recipients or net takers, is usually misleading, because most such statistics only consider income tax. They do not calculate the economic value of the work itself, or allow for the fact that low-income workers spend a greater percentage of their income in the local economy than high-income workers.

For example, the average care worker or healthcare assistant does not earn much or pay much tax. But the cost to society of not having these workers would be enormous. More people would die prematurely and many workers (including high earners) would have no choice but to give up their jobs in order to care for their sick or vulnerable relatives at home.

Various posters have reiterated the numbers on this.

ETA the figures won’t be taken in.

@Alexandra2001 Australia have deported under 4,500 people
in the last 13 years to Manus, Nauru etc and that’s been enough to pretty much solve the problem. It’s the deterrent which is key.

How can you say that all asylum seekers aren’t remotely proficient. Of course some of them will be!

English (1,456,448,320)
Mandarin Chinese (1,138,222,350)
Hindi (609,454,770)

Spanish (559,078,890)

French (309,804,220)

Modern Standard Arabic (273,989,700)

Bengali (272,828,760)

Russian (254,997,130)

Excellent points made

@Cattenberg

i don’t think you live in a part of the country that has any real level of difficulty from immigration, legal or otherwise. I think if you visited other parts of the country, you’d be surprised.

If you look at the profile of the average asylum seeker, they will be a net recipient. It’s just a fact. It was also true of the average non-EU migrant before Brexit too according to the government’s own statistics (that’s not to say that all non-EU migrants are not contributors, obviously, but many migrants from certain nationalities will on average migrate to low wage professions and bring dependents, so they may not cover their tax take. Which is fine if there are genuine shortages that cannot be covered any other way, but not so good if the reality is that we are paying benefits to people to be under occupied and underinvesting in training our own nationals). When you consider that American, NZ, Aus immigrants are statistically net contributors on average, that does mean that there are some nationalities that are generally associated with being net recipients. That doesn’t mean that individual migrants from particular countries are not net contributors and no one on this thread is arguing that we should not let people who will be valuable net contributors in from whichever country they come from, only that we can’t just assume that all immigrants will be net contributors without knowing where they come from and what skills they arrive with as this is just not what the statistics say.

I totally understand that you want to be kind to people that you see as vulnerable and that’s worthy of discussion as to what we should do as a country and whether we are doing enough, but that’s separate to the objective fact that there is a financial cost to the country in taking both asylum seekers and low wage immigrants. And the cultural cost is not being born by the citizens of Devon.

Yes we need to change this

too much of a pull factor

Full marks to the pp perseverance. If nothing else is offered up bar ‘weather’ as I’ve seen recently then I’m fairly confident the voters will give mandate for change.

Asylum seekers aren’t native English speakers. Or not even remotely proficient. They come here because they know that the UK Govt welcomes them with open arms and throws money at them in a way that most European governments don’t.

Full marks for perseverance but you can never answer where we - the UK - would send enough migrants to act as a deterrent....

If its 1 or 2% as per the Rwanda scheme that cost £1/2 billion and never deported a single migrant, then a few 100 per year will not stop 40 or 50k people crossing pa.

I'm not against such a scheme per se but i want to see some details, sch as where we could send migrants? which country wants to take in say 5k to 10k men of, according to many on here, are a collection of rapists, robbers and sexual deviants.

Australia managed it because they had a strong economic hold over Nauru and PND, plus numbers sent far lower than we have had, will have crossing.

I await your non- answer..... or no answer!

English is spoken around the world more than French.

The fact that if there’s a news item the Daily Mail reports and it’s not reported by the BBC and Sky, that does not necessarily make the story false. Other media outlets no longer have the same objectivity as they had 12-15 years ago and if you are able to look at what they report (without bias), there’s a clear pattern that’s emerges, that what they report is as much based on an agenda as the Daily Mail (assuming you insinuated that the Daily Mail was biased)

Calling people racist is how grooming gang rapists were protected by the public sector.

The word has been discredited by this and can be legitimately turned back on it's user as evidence that they too would use it in those circumstances without hesitation.

That's your reputation now.

A system that reduces people arriving stops this problem anyway. If we ever look to countries who have done it.