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.

That's not correct. As you cannot apply for asylum until reaching the UK, there are many genuine asylum seekers who arrive via illegal or unsafe routes as there is no alternative. The current government has actually reduced safe routes by virtually destroying the family reunion scheme which allowed spouses/children of existing refugees to join them.

The refugee resettlement scheme pretty much ground to a halt during the pandemic and when a new scheme was started it had no targets attached so actually relatively few refugees are currently being resettled this way.

There is no humanitarian visa scheme whereby asylum visas could be granted from the country of application. You must physically be in the UK to apply for asylum.

(Source for the above - the Refugee Council).

I would also say that spending money on improving the asylum processing system here would end up being a lot cheaper in the long run.

@BewareTheLibrarians that's an interesting article, thank you. If these Albanian minors are not claiming asylum and thought to be victims of trafficking, would the right thing not be to return them on arrival before they can be picked back up by gangs? Genuine question.

I live not too far from a holding centre which is overflowing and increasing daily with new people making the scary boat journey across from France. The numbers fleeing are mind blowing, mainly men 20+

I have a friend who's based at border force and he's absolutely sick to death of the constant entitled people turning up apparently 1 in every 100 is a genuine case and the man hours and cost to our government is staggering.. he does the job because he cares about that 1.. as do I BUT we need to get tougher on this as it really is very much out of hand.

You’re right, it’s completely your prerogative if you want to post tiresome rebuffs that say bugger all. Why’s it always ‘so what’s labour got then’ when someone’s unhappy with the tories? Why not another political party or even another tory with a solution?

Neither - you have taken my (completely normal) comment in the wrong way.

"As I see it, humanity needs to reduce its impact on the Earth urgently and there are three ways to achieve this: we can stop consuming so many resources, we can change our technology and we can reduce the growth of our population.”

That is a quote from David Attenborough. Is this a sinister (and racist) comment from him too?

Top countries and success rates

Figure 3 also shows the grant rate for the top 10 nationalities applying for asylum, half of which have a grant rate above 80% (Iran 85%, Afghanistan 97%, Eritrea 97%, Syria 98% and Sudan 92%). For more detail on grant rates, see the initial decision section below.

You can see why people want to flee Iran and Afghanistan. Syria has a civil war at the moment.

So I can see why people want to flee those places.

It’s not something that will go away. It’s going to build and people will get angrier the more they feel unheard.

The cost of asylum operations to taxpayers is now £2.1 billion per year and has nearly doubled in just one year (£5 million per day is being spent to house claimants in hotels).
The backlog of claims has now surpassed 100,000 – with 40,000 people waiting a year or more for their claim to be initially considered

That's at least partly because our asylum processing system is ludicrously inefficient. It's not unknown for a single claim to take years to process, during which time we are leaving often skilled people twiddling their thumbs. I know we have had some outstandingly useless Home Secretaries in recent years, but really it can't make sense to put millions of pounds into housing claimants and not to invest in making the processing system fit for purpose.

We voted for this, so stop moaning.

@Myunclesmustache Your last point is completely wrong.

“The key document in international refugee protection is the 1951 Refugee Convention, which the UK played an important part in drafting. The Convention does not require refugees to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach, or make it illegal to seek asylum if a claimant has passed through another safe country.”

www.unhcr.org/uk/uk-immigration-and-asylum-plans-some-questions-answered-by-unhcr.html

Can you give citations for the rest of your claims please?

The solution is simple. When they arrive give them a meal and a bed for a night then take them straight back to the french coast. Of course the french would have to agree to this, but if this happened our illegal migrant problem would be solved, the illegal migrant problem on the french coast would be solved as there would be no point in travelling there as they would know they would be returned immediately. In time people will realise there is no point travelling to france as a stopover to england and will stop the nonsense of illegal migration. The lorry situation at Dover is vastly improved with more stringent checks, we need to agree with a similar solution at the coast. The vast majority are not fleeing persecution they are financial migrants.

@LaGioconda do they want to integrate into society and western cultural norms? Are they skilled? Essentially, will they be an asset? That's what should determine who stays and who doesn't - when it comes to young men I mean, not minors.

Return them to the country that they were trafficked from? They’d either be trafficked again or punished for leaving “the system”.

They have the choice of all those other countries not surrounded by a sea.

So you don't think the UK should take any asylum seekers at all, simply because we happen to be an island? Greece, Turkey who have millions in camps, tough. Perhaps they should have built canals or 50ft high walls round their borders.

@notmyrealmoniker asylum seekers aren’t illegal migrants, so I’m not sure what that’s relevant to.

Ok. So let’s say that the Government allow people to claim asylum outside of the UK. There’s then hundreds of thousands of applicants per year claiming asylum for religious/gay persecution etc. Do we have to allow them all to come over here immediately, or within a set period, or can we say only a set amount per year?

In 2015 Angela Merkel invited 1 million refugees to Germany. Germany has since been forcibly deporting thousands of those migrants on secret flights by armed police. Many of the migrants who fear the same fate are the ones in Calais heading here.

The reality is that there’s close to 8 billion people in the world. It’s unrealistic to think that all of the countries in the western world can take the tens of millions of people who want to emigrate.

10,000 single Albanian men. These men are not fleeing persecution. They are economic migrants who have paid traffickers to get them into the UK.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/oct/27/albanians-arriving-in-uk-could-get-bespoke-route-for-immigration-cases-to-be-heard

And they won't be deported because the system is not fit for purpose and cannot cope with the strain of 1000 people a day arriving.

@lannistunut You can't run a country this way. The Tories have fucking broken everything.

Wrong.
The rot set in with Tony Blair. In the years before Blair’s government net immigration was running at around 50,000 a year, but in 1997 the floodgates were opened and numbers quadrupled with the result that over three million migrants came to Britain and stayed here plus, perhaps, a further one million who came and stayed illegally.

Really? You want the French and British navies to bat the boats back and forth like fucking tennis balls till they sink?

Why should France take them instead of England, and what’s to stop the French just sending them back again, if you can ever prove they’ve crossed the channel and you’re not just trying to send random people over?

And, as someone pointed out already, pre Brexit France did make more of an effort to stop people coming over.

And you really think people are so desperate for £40 a week and then an unskilled manual labour job that they’re risking their lives making such an unsafe journey?

I'd like to see more people apply for asylum in the first safe country they arrive in. A number of asylum claimers in the UK have been found to have already claimed in other European countries but actively chose not to stay there because whether we want to admit it or not, the economic and social benefits of claiming asylum in the UK are far more favourable for claimants than in other European countries. I don't mean welfare benefits before anyone takes that literally either. What I mean is you don't get to come and go as you like, demand social housing and other free commodities when you claim elsewhere, you are detained securely instead until you are either accepted or removed.

The day they announced there was consideration for migrants living in tents in London parks is the day it has to stop . How though is anyones guess because nobody wants them

Maybe we just build gigantic refugee camps like they have in some countries until it's safe to return to the countries people have come from?

It's what happens in countries like Turkey, etc

www.unrefugees.org/news/refugee-camps-explained/

There are 103 million refugees in the world :

Low- and middle-income countries host 74 per cent of the world’s refugees and other people in need of international protection. The least developed countries provide asylum to 22 per cent of the total.

69 per cent of refugees and other people in need of international protection lived in countries neighbouring their countries of origin

What we see in the UK is just the tip of the iceberg and is nothing compared to what some countries experience.

@FamilyTreeBuilder wheres the evidence that they’re all economic migrants? You’re going to need more than “Jenrick says so”

Oh yes

the solution is to break international law