To think it’s easier to want open boarders if you’re privileged?

[Theselfishsister]

Having an ongoing conflict with my sister regarding refugees, she’s very ‘let everyone in’ I would say I’m somewhere in the middle.

She’s given up spare bedrooms to refugees, spends weekends in Calais helping them and is posting everywhere on SM about letting them all in. As well as attending protests regularly for the last 4 years or so.

What strikes me is that her and her other friends going to all of the events are white, MC (although she is by marriage, we grew up very WC) and live incredibly comfortably. She’s a SAHM and her husband owns his own company, they have never needed benefits or social housing and her children are privately educated with all of them receiving private medical care.

A massive increase in people here are unlikely to ever have much affect on her life, she won’t have to fight for jobs or wait for a house or deal with benefit cuts when too much is paid out, as well as the increase in waits for Medical care and school admissions. Whereas for someone like me, this is obviously a more worrying factor and the thought of just opening our borders to everyone does scare me. As much as I would love to be able to take every person fleeing a great life, it just causes me worry and I don’t think I could support completely open boarders.

She obviously just thinks I’m a selfish heartless bitch for not protesting to remove our borders or similar. When I asked why she let refugees sleep in her spare rooms but never the homeless man on the road behind her (who’s been in the same spot since she moved there 5 years ago!) she called me a racist!

So AIBU to think it’s easier to want open boarders if you’re privileged or am I just a selfish cow?

Your attitude of abandoning people disgusts me

Happily your opinion means jack shit to me

What this thread does highlight is how well successive governments have managed to split peoples views.

@thighofrelief101

And you think anyone will have the incentive to go out and work? Communism has been tried already

Open boarders would be a mistake. Our nhs is struggling already as would most other services.

We can't be a free for all.

Virtue signalling of the highest order. So much sympathy for everyone else in the world and none for our own.

Equal sympathy for Brits and foreigners does not mean sympathy for them and none for 'our own'. How is it 'virtue signalling' to think that human beings are equal? If you had two people standing right in front of you, one of them a total stranger from your own country and one a total stranger from a different country, and it was in your personal power to save only one of them, would you find it so obvious that you should just pick 'your own'? Who knows - your fellow countryman could be a thief, a rapist? The foreigner could be a doctor, a scientist. Why should we decide people's fate on the basis of where they happen to have been born?

With regard to young fit males coming to the UK, it is a time bomb waiting to happen. These young guys have not been raised in British values and many will have attitudes to, for example, women, that are profoundly anti-western. For an example, look at Cologne, New Years Eve a couple of years ago. What happened there was shocking, yet the liberal media tried to ignore it.

I'd prefer families coming over together - it's the women and children who suffer most and should be prioritised. Yes, it will cost more, but it is more compassionate way of doing things, and in the long run it wont cost more because families are stable units, unlike groups of young, troubled, volatile men.

It's very easy to see refugees as equally deserving when it's not you in the hostel. I think much of this thread is proving the OPs point.

Everyone in the hostel is deserving. All of them, men and women.

It shouldn't be a choice there is enough money out there if it was shared equitably.

But the wealth isn’t shared. Maybe from a big house with enough money in the bank to not worry about how you’re going To pay the electric this month, it’s easy to make general sweeping statements like ‘the UK is rich’ or ‘there’s enough money if only we shared it’
We don’t. People are struggling. People are living in poverty in our own country. Nurses are using food banks, children are sleeping on duvets on the floor in studio rooms in a hostel with their siblings and parents, people are sleeping on the streets getting pissed on by twats that think it’s funny. The UK is not an amazing rosy place for everyone, but it’s easy to think it is when you’re rich. It’s easy to dismiss that woman in the hostel when it’s not you.
And yes, thank god we’re not in a war zone and I feel desperately sorry for those that are and agree we should support those that are most in need of help.
But if we keep increasing numbers of people with no means to support themselves, homelessness will of course rise, because there is nowhere for them to go. People also ignore the fact (because you can’t say it IRL obviously) that attitudes in neighbourhoods will change and who knows what the UK will become?
If Your neighbourhood had an increase of say, 100 men who are early 20s, grown up in a country resentful of the UK and what they’ve done, a country with no rights to woman.. do you think it may change your neighbourhood? Or does that not matter because you know it won’t be your street.

Yes the wealth isn't shared and that is the problem. That is the long term, serious, we can't get over it problem.

Inequality is the issue coupled with a regressive tax system.

The poor people are fighting each other. It is easier to punish the 19 year old man, cut off from his family in an unfamiliar and unfriendly world than to look at the real problem.

Playing a game of who is poorest and most deserving while demonising anyone who is foreign plays into the hands of the wealthy. While you are blaming foreigners you are not looking at where all the money is.

I spent most of last year in a classroom of 20 asylum seekers and migrants - all young men and boys. I know a little bit about the subject.

Open boarders would be a mistake.

It certainly would be A mistake.

Everyone knows where the money is, no one thinks the foreginers have the money. The point is, we can’t do anything to share out the money, it is never going to happen, the government can’t turn around and say ‘right rich people, share out your money’ because they will move their businesses/themselves to a country that doesn’t do that and by them leaving, we will lose their taxes and be in a worse situation.
But to open up the borders to anyone who wants in, will have a knock on effect on the poorest in society - in terms of housing, deprivation and attitudes in neighbourhoods, public services and most likely benefits.

We can't do anything about the rich people but we can turn round and savage other poor people?

It's easier to kick other people who are poor, tired and homeless.

I know which fight I'd rather have.

People from the UK that are poor, tired and homeless are already getting kicked, is it because they’re born here that you don’t see them as deserving of help as a migrant? Should they just be greatful they were born in the UK and stop moaning?

I’m assuming you’ve worked with the UK homeless as well as the migrant homeless, just curious as to what part of your work made you see the British ones needs as less of a priority?

I see them both as a priority. I keep on saying that. The poor of all countries are the priority.

What I will not do is priorities the feelings of the very rich, the individuals and the corporations that make the money from the hard work of others.

If I have to fight someone, and we do, I will be fighting to make sure we get rid of austerity.

What I won't do is get in a gutter fight between the poor. Why is it easier to attack someone else who is also poor than point out austerity has cost the country a level of human decency.

I won't play which child is starving most - which one is hungriest?

The U.K. government has cut funding for vital services for its own political ends that is the issue.

The bit I don't get is why the British think it's fair that the whole burden of refugees should be laid on other European countries instead. France already takes 3 times as many as UK, yet people think it outrageous that they aren't all made to stop in France. Sweden takes twice as many as UK, and their population is about 1/8 of that of the UK. Denmark again takes far more: have you seen the size of Denmark? The poorer countries in the Middle East take in refugees on a scale we can't even imagine.

The UK is a wealthy country. The poverty is a direct result of deliberate political decisions, not of any actual lack of resources. It's about zero contracts, lack of affordable housing, low wages, an exploitative job market, a divisive education system. Other European countries, with no greater resources, have chosen to go down different routes, with more resources spent on welfare and equality. The UK has chosen not to.

Austerity as a solution to the recession delayed the financial recovery of the UK while other European countries recovered far more quickly. That was not an unforeseeable result: plenty of economists warned that it would. Austerity was a political decision.

The decision to make serious cuts to the NHS is at least partly driven by the desire, in some quarters, to privatise the NHS for profit.

Taking no refugees wouldn't change those decisions. It wouldn't force the people who are currently making huge profits from an exploitative system to act differently. It wouldn't force the people who like the idea of a country idivided by class to feel differently.

I think a lot of the Brexit vote is about the class divide

I live in quite an affluent area and it was one of the biggest leave votes in the country.

The analogy of taking a village of 40 people and adding 10 refugees/immigrants is missing the point that in some parts of the UK the hypothetical village of 40 people has been added to by 400 refugees/immigrants.

The indigenous population is reduced to being the ones who are unemployed because the populations language has changed.

I understand why they voted leave. A friend said the next time I am in this particular town to stop and listen and see if I could hear an English persons voice.
She is right you cannot hear English being spoken.

Friend has now moved abroad (she wasnt very well off, lived in a council owned property and had lost her minimum wage job and didn’t speak the language of the town anymore). Her reasons for moving was she felt like a foreigner in her own country and so she might as well be a foreigner in a foreign country.

Unless you have experienced living in those conditions I don’t think you can call someone out on how they feel.

Those of us who live in big cities frequently go to places where other languages are spoken. I love it.

We often go into shops where English is not the language of the shop keeper and all the goods are unfamiliar.

When we go to supermarkets there are Polish, Caribbean, African aisles I think it is brilliant.

I can hear punjabi, Pashtun, Polish, French, Italian and I think it is brilliant.

One of the classes I teach has 13 different nationalities in it. It's not a threat it's an opportunity.

I visited Lincolnshire and was told I had no idea what it was like to live with foreigners. I couldn't find a polite response.

'Open' borders are absolutely nothing to do with refugees. Our obligation to receive people who are seeking asylum is established under international law and to attempt to overturn this would be a truly shocking thing to do. I think you could make a very good case that we ought to be welcoming more asylum seekers than we currently do, actually. By virtue of being an island north of most of Europe, it's hard for most asylum seekers to get here. Top ten countries taking the most refugees:
Jordan (2.7 million+)
Turkey (2.5 million+)
Pakistan (1.6 million)
Lebanon (1.5 million+)
Iran (979,400)
Ethiopia (736,100)
Kenya (553,900)
Uganda (477,200)
Democratic Republic of Congo (383,100)
Chad (369,500)

Number of refugees in the UK: 118,995.

What the government are trying to do and what lots of Brexiteers want to do is limit immigration. This is a DIFFERENT THING from seeking asylum (which is what refugees are doing), and the arguments about the economy, jobs and so on relate to this, but not to refugees.

*How long do we have to pay for this? Germany has been forgiven for WW2 - when we will be forgiven?

We will be forgiven when people are no longer suffering from the actions of this country. Helping the innocent people we have affected is a step towards forgiveness. Abandoning them because they were not born here is a step back*

I want to know how this works.

My family are from an area affected by the UK but moved to the UK after being affected by Germany trying to capture us and send us to the gas chambers. Yet now just by the UK being the nearest safe country at the time. You tell me we are responsible for all the ills that have befallen our family so should atone in some way by giving up everything we have got.

When you throw open the borders and let in those that have been affected by the British Empire do these immigrants realise that as soon as they step on to this land they become responsible for all the ills that have befallen their families.

I believe in open borders too if that meant every country then had to open their borders.

Or are we just supposed to accept everything

Moussemoose

I presume that you have experienced going to a job interview and not being able to communicate with the interviewer because you don’t speak the language.

You are talking about speciality retailers.
In this area we are talking about every store. You can’t order a Costa because you can’t make yourself understood.

If you go into those lovely foreign shops have you ever been told that you weren’t welcome because you are British and these shops are not for British people.

Tell me how you would feel then.

As you say you only visited or have all different nationality shops and people around so you have no idea about living in an area where one nationality has taken over and you can no longer work

No one is saying we are responsible for all the ills. No one is saying we should impoverish ourselves. No one is saying we should "accept everything".

This is not being suggested by anyone.

However, we should "help" people and take "steps towards forgiveness" - not allow ourselves to be economically ruined.

We need to do our fair share and at the moment we aren't.

We need to take a nuanced, balanced approach.

Having come face to face with the hostility towards foreigners faced by incomers to some areas of the U.K. I can kind of understand why they won't communicate in English.

Have you ever visited one of these areas and been called a foreigner, had people laugh at your accent and claim they can't understand what your are saying. Have you been made to feel unwelcome because you don't fit in.

I have and I'm from fucking Manchester! God knows how 'real' foreigners were treated.

It's weird that in some areas of the U.K. foreigners are welcomed as part of the community and in others they aren't. Whose fault is that - in both instances - those who come from the U.K. or foreigners.

Moussemoose

its not always as simple as is it the foreigners to blame or the community.

Sometimes its the government that has dumped a large number of people in areas that are not able to cope with the influx.