To think that something has to be done about the immigration crisis?

[JudesBiggestFan]

But I don't know what? More than 900 people landed in Dover today, as I discovered when reading about the terrible petrol bomb attack on a detention centre. Detention centres overcrowded, more than 7 million pounds a day being spent on hotel rooms for illegal immigrants, horrendously slow processing of applications...people drowning in the channel and local people feeling angry and frustrated because of the strain on services. Not to mention the mental health toll on people living their lives in limbo! So what is the answer? Because I just don't know anymore but it feels like the system has completely broken down.

I sort of see the point you’re making but I don’t accept it. I’m willing to bet most of the men in their late 20s and 30s have wives and children. Women and children have been named time and time again as the most vulnerable people in conflict areas and I don’t see this as any different. I strongly suspect they’re saving their own skins.

Statistics show that the UK receives a much more manageable number of asylum applications per capita than many other countries. There are 17 other European countries that receive more applications per capita than the UK. Germany receives the highest proportion at 23 applications per 10,000 people. France receives 18 per 10,000 people. The UK receives 8 per 10,000 people. Cyprus receives by far the highest proportion. More questions need to be asked about why the UK government is so slow at processing applications.

Sorry, Germany receives a higher proportion, not the highest.

I know there will be many differences between the two scenarios but that’s why the U.K. has been much more tolerant and accepting of women/children refugees from Ukraine. Because they’re truly vulnerable, and the healthy young men have stayed put to defend their homeland. It feels much more productive helping people who are trying to liberate their country than an endless stream of healthy young men fleeing and leaving their oppressors to dominate.

Besides, do you REALLY think the Home Officeand fat cat lawyers are going to give up the massive income they rake in from dealing with Asylum applications? If you think they will and that they care a jot what you think, you are seriously deluded.

Unfortunately it's pretty deluded to think tha lawyers rake in a massive income from asylum claims. The vast majority of these cases are dealt with under legal aid, which means absolutely pathetic rates of pay and long waits for payment. It does leave refugees vulnerable to exploitation and to being palmed off with unqualified assistants.

This made me chuckle.. we can't get a passport for months in end.. our public sector workforce is beyond a joke! Most off sick or pretending to be with long Covid and other such nonsense. No doubt on full pay pending a long drawn out back to work phased return blah blah blah. Soft touch government tip toeing round and archiving feck all as per usual.

I think that there is absolutely no chance of having a refugee processing centre in France. Because the truth is that this would let more people in and the government doesn't want this. And a decent portion of voters don't want it either. The number of people who might want to claim asylum is pretty limitless - at the moment, people pay a lot to traffickers for the dinghy crossings and removing this would make it even easier for more people to afford to try. Making it easier is not what the government wants at all. Unfortunately, there are so many failed states in the world and so many places that in fact you could be persecuted for being of the wrong ethnicity, sexuality, gender, political group etc, that processing in France would increase demand.

What do you mean
The Home Office was warned many times that their policies would increase boat crossings. They had their opportunity to increase budget and staffing to meet this need, yet they chose not to.
Government Departments don’t get to choose to increase their budget or staffing, they need Parliamentary and Chancellor approval to do so. If a Department could just choose to increase their budget and hire more people, the MoD would have a bigger and better equipped military than anyone else in the world. The NHS wouldn’t be on its knees…it would have just increased its funding and hired more doctors and nurses. And so on.

The Home Office have requested these increases year on year and been denied.

Without a backlog of cases, the rising numbers would not have caused the situation we have now. Without the number of cases we’re receiving, the backlog would still be causing a problem in terms of accommodation and cost.
Yes, there has always been a backlog, but it first started to increase due to the Syrian war in 2013, then it really took off due to Brexit.

The Home Office then had to implement the settlement scheme for the millions of EU nationals in the U.K.- also underfunded and understaffed by the Government to do this job.

They had to write up a new points system based set on immigration rules. In other words, the asylum seekers are not the only added workload that is causing a backlog.

Then in 2020, a Brexit rule was invoked which declared that people coming from the EU could be blocked from making an asylum claim and sent back to the safe country they had come from. But the UK has no returns agreement with the EU. Of the more than 17,000 potential returnees identified under that rule as of last June (2021), only 21 had left our shores. Some have now been allowed to make asylum claims - but it appears more than 9,000 are in a limbo: housed by the Home Office, yet blocked from even applying to legally stay and get a job. (Paraphrased from BBC www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63477371)

Then Afghanistan happened. Then the Ukraine war happened. More refugees needing visas and applications to process.

Theres a lot going on and the backlog isn’t a cause of problems, it is the symptom of the effect of the larger problem which is increased work without enough increased funds and staff to do it.

Discovereads
Arrivals are part of the problem though. The graph you were shown is deceptive in that it goes in 20,000 increments on the y-axis, and reports #s in 6month totals instead of annual totals. So it deceives the eye into thinking it’s only a small increase in arrivals that’s happened more gradually than it had. This chart from the BBC is on a much clearer scale.

But your graph only shows arrivals by small boats - not arrivals by other means?? Numbers for 2018/2019 look far too low (2020 peak Covid year).

There’s ways to do graphs that can accommodate such disparate measures. The author just chose not to use them.

@Cuppasoupmonster No, I understand your reservations. If we both agree that women and children need to be prioritised, how do they get to the UK, given how dangerous the route is?

Same as with Ukraine. Humanitarian corridors are set up depending on the location of the country etc.

Then in 2020, a Brexit rule was invoked which declared that people coming from the EU could be blocked from making an asylum claim and sent back to the safe country they had come from.
Of the more than 17,000 potential returnees identified under that rule as of last June (2021), only 21 had left our shores.

According to Home Office figures, between 2015 and 2018, 7,365 incoming requests were made to transfer people into the UK under the Dublin regulation, from which 2,365 people were transferred to the UK (some requests may still be pending).

This means that the UK accepted around 33% of requests. During the same period, the UK made 18,953 outgoing requests to transfer people to other Member States, from which 1,395 people were transferred abroad. This amounts to around 7% of outgoing requests by the UK resulting in a transfer.

In 2018, the UK received a total of 37,453 asylum applications, and made 5,510 outgoing transfer requests under Dublin III. Of these 5,510 requests, 209 migrants were transferred out of the UK under Dublin III, whilst 1,215 came in, making the UK a net recipient in 2018.

commonslibrary.parliament.uk/what-is-the-dublin-iii-regulation-will-it-be-affected-by-brexit/

@Discovereads Holy cow 😂 Ok. I see what you mean. The government had the advance warning and chose not to heed it. It’s still a failure of government. However, the problem was initiated by Home Office policies. If their budget request had been rejected, the responsibility is then on them to mitigate within their budget, for example not make changes that overwhelmed the asylum system.

As for your second point, there’s a lot going on there, but tl;dr Brexit mismanagement contributed to the backlog? 😉

Not always. Take many of the civil wars going on. Men/boys of age 10 and up are often rounded up and executed. Their bodies tossed into mass graves. Sometimes they are given a choice of “join us or die” (meaning the armed forces of whatever warlord has just driven a load of armed conscripts into their village). Often they are not given this choice due to being the wrong ethnicity or religion. Young boys are more likely to be kidnapped and turned into child soldiers than a teenager/adult man given this choice.

Women and girls are raped and either enslaved or end up as living in occupied territory paying for their lives by working the fields or factories or herding livestock to supply the warlord’s army with food and other materials. They’re not considered a threat and no one wants to rule a depopulated region or country. Armies fail or succeed on their supply lines alone, and it’s women and children that become a captive workforce to supply them. Women/children also make good propaganda tools to get the UN to send aid to the country under the pretext that it’s for these women and children, when in reality these aid convoys are often diverted straight to supplying a warlords army while the women and children are left to fend for themselves.

It’s men/boys who are viewed as only a threat, so they’re actually in just as much if not more danger than women & children.

An exception to this would be genocide where the attackers are determined to kill every man, woman and child.

I thought that one of the main reason the UK voted for Brexit was precisely because Brexit would make it much easier to deal with legal and illegal immigration.

So deal with it? You don't have to respond to the evil EU anymore. It's entirely your own responsibility now. You can do whatever you want.

Agree, it’s still government that is at fault, but this is the fault of the highest levels, not the department level. Even the Home Office policies would have had Cabinet approval….potentially the Cabinet can ghost write new policy and give them to the Home Office as marching orders….though I think everything under Patel was her idea to begin with.

Can’t believe I sound like I’m defending the Home Office! I’m not really, I’m saying the inhumanity, incompetence and rot goes all the way to the top. I have ample reason to be grumpy with them right now for what they are doing to my DH.

Arrivals by boat tend to be undocumented unlike arrival by other means. This makes identity verification and claim verification that much harder & longer.

Discovereads
So each year starting with 2020 the need has been more than double what the funding & staff given to the Home Office can complete

As above - your graph doesn't include arrivals by other means;

The shrinking area of green for 2020 and 2021 on the chart reflects the fact that the increase in small boat arrivals in large part represented a change of route by asylum seekers. Previously, lorries had been the principal means of entry to claim asylum.

freemovement.org.uk/briefing-the-sorry-state-of-the-uk-asylum-system/

@Cuppasoupmonster Yep. Where are the non-Ukraine humanitarian corridors? (Rhetorical q 😉) There was Syria resettlement scheme, the Afghan citizen resettlement scheme will take 5000 people in year 1. This scheme was massively delayed and was slated to finally open this June. Quite late. There’s also safe passage for those who helped the British army and British institutions (ARAP) which will take 1,500 in year 1. So many have been left behind that boat crossings earlier this year included Afghans who’d assisted the British in the war but had been left behind.

Humanitarian corridors are a great idea, but this govt is not interested unfortunately, despite the number of women and children it would help. They’re intentionally or otherwise prioritising young men.

Yes. I know. But then my post is saying that arrivals by boat “is part of the problem” causing the backlog to increase. Are you arguing that the increase in arrivals by boat have had zero effect on the backlog? I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here?

What are the other countries backlogs? Are we slower?

Also everything @Discovereads said in their post at 22:35 is a helpful counter to some of the rampant misandry (“they’re men so they can’t be victims/must be criminals.”)

(Sorry the HO is being a dick to your DH Discovereads. Hope you’re both holding up as well as you can 💐)

Those who think young men should stay, do you think the same of all the Russian men who have fled mobilisation and are seeking asylum in neighbouring countries? Should they stay in Russia and fight for their motherland too?

Discovereads
Yes. I know. But then my post is saying that arrivals by boat “is part of the problem”

I can't see boat/s mentioned in your post;

Arrivals are part of the problem though. The graph you were shown is deceptive in that it goes in 20,000 increments on the y-axis, and reports #s in 6month totals instead of annual totals. So it deceives the eye into thinking it’s only a small increase in arrivals that’s happened more gradually than it had. This chart from the BBC is on a much clearer scale.
The Home Office annual budget & staff requests are limited to matching the amount needed for the #s arriving from the prior year - which they never get- their budget and staff increases are always cut down. So each year starting with 2020 the need has been more than double what the funding & staff given to the Home Office can complete.

Do you have a link to the Home Office funding? Arrivals/asylum applications haven't more than doubled 2020 - 2021 in my link.