To think people who want "safe routes to migration" into the UK are hopelessly naive

[ForestGoblin]

We could spend every penny of public money on bringing refugees to the UK in comfy and safe boats and planes. We could make it mandatory for every home to provide accommodation and food. We could ban healthcare for anyone except refugees.

And there would still be thousands and thousands of boat crossings every year and millions more people languishing in bad situations and trying to figure out how to get here or elsewhere in northern Europe.

It's a crap situation. Life is bad. I feel dreadful for them.

But "safe routes" is a load of glib nonsense that can't work.

Think it depends on implementation, tbh.
Won't stop the economic migrants, of course.

There are 8 billion people in this world. Many of whom live in war zones or supposedly peaceful hellscapes like taliban controlled Afghanistan. How do you think it could be "implemented" to help in any remotely meaningless way on our cost of living crisis public service catastrophe cork on the sea?

And how do you think we might avoud bringing the hellscapes and strife there over here as we do it?

I would love if there were a serious solution to the awful suffering in this world. But "safe routes" is nonsense.

There are safe routes. It's called buying a ticket from the home country and entering a safe nation legitimately. Those coming from France are not fleeing a war zone or persecution in France and should not be considered asylum seekers. As OP said we can't accommodate everyone.

These people are naive. They regurgitate soundbites from the twitterati and people who move in the same circles as them. They have no experience of the real world in which economic migrants exist. If you have safe routes the economic migrants will still want a way in and will continue to pay to cross illegally.

The problem is that UK asylum system is set up to grant almost everyone asylum who applies. Why do France only accept 40% of the claims. UK governments use illegal migration and all other types of low skilled migration to massage economic growth figures. This country’s economy has been growing at not much more than 1% a year for over a decade. It’s practically stagnant. But when you add over half a million migrants on top, our economy per capita is actually shrinking. Our governments are actively making the existing population poorer by adding low skilled migration to cheat the economic growth numbers.

This started under Blair and is is so easy to fool people that it has been going on for 20 years. The safe routes argument is just a distraction from the actual point. That these are mostly economic migrants and our government wants them to come. They have no intention of stopping the boats. Why make the administrative effort of dealing with low skilled migrants. When they just get here illegally and will end up staying anyway.

Just make it possible to process uk asylum claims from outside the uk? Worth a try.

I agree OP, YANBU.

The concept of assisting refugees based on their need/plight is one that made sense in the 1950s when demand was naturally curtailed by expensive travel and no internet.

In an age of cheap flights and facilitators on tiktok/whatsapp, we have to confront the fact that we need to limit our help based on our capacity to support.

This is uncomfortable for many people because many of the people we would turn away are indeed in desperate straits (and even some "economic migrants" who can't feed their families and whose children are dying of easily treatable diseases can also be in desperate straits). But the current model is not the solution.

About 2bn people currently live in conflicted affected areas. Roughly 30 times the total UK population. "Safe routes" my bum.

That is the real naivety. Without a visa in their hands they will get turned away at the airport. They won't even get to the the departure gate

Over and over and over again people say stupid things like this.

Its repeated on so many threads that a person can claim asylum in the UK after coming through a number of countries yet this sort of thing gets repeated all the time

Why?

Dont people listen, dont they understand the law?

It baffles me

It's going to be an increasing problem as climate change has its impact.

There are areas of the world that have spare resource - for example whole villages have been abandoned in Japan and some parts of Europe because of falling birth rate. Managed settlement might be possible but would require building whole communities with skilled workers - drs, teachers etc.

I agree. Sadly we can't fix the whole world.

It's shit, though.

Climate change will make this problem ten times worse.

So should France have to take them all just because of their geographic position? In the end, these are people, by pure chance born into shitty situations who are trying to make a decent life for themselves and their families. How can they "buy a ticket" and get correct passports and visas from a refugee camp when all they have ever owned has been bombed or taken? Why did we have a Ukrainian scheme to house those victims of war but not Syrian or Iraqi..oh yes, because Ukrainians are more like "us".
The long term, large and difficult solution to this is a global approach to reduce conflict and improve conditions so people won't want or need to come here..but that's far too long term and far reaching to appeal to politicians who need to win local votes every few years.

@bellac11 they don't want to understand because then they would have to acknowledge that life isn't straightforward and things get complicated.

Because you have to missing brain cells to not realize that France is not an unsafe country. If you are feeling France, you are an economic migrant. Accepting this would be a good starting point to actually facing into the problem.

It’s probably because it doesn’t fit whatever they read on Twitter and on the BBC. Even though it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to acknowledge that illegal economic migration is a reality.

I always wonder why people can't understand we do not have the resources and infrastructure to support a large influx of people .
I also wonder if those that support uncontrolled immigration would put their money where their mouth is and pay highest taxes to support them . I personally would be a lot more supportive if it wasn't predominantly young men arriving who are very culturally different in their treatment of women .

@Wsmi how many asylumseekers do you think it's fair for France/Greece/Italy to accept if we only take the few for whom we have set up safe routes?

So you dont understand the law

Would you like someone to explain it

Again?

It's an example where the law is out of step with public feeling .

You must struggle to think for yourself. Try it. It’s useful.

@BibbleandSqwauk I think the Ukrainian scheme was allowed simply because the vast majority of Ukrainians want to go home and resume their lives in Ukraine.
Because it is a temporary emergency. Because it was mostly women & children while the men stayed to fight Putin.

The law is out of step with public feeling.
This, in spades.

Of course illegal economic migration is real. And the biggest deterrent for that would be a functioning appraisal process that detected andreturned those people quickly. But once we finally get round to processing people the majority of asylum seekers claims are accepted but by then they've spent a couple of years or more with their skills degrading instead of being able to contribute to the economy.

YANBU and you're right that however many 'safe routes' are provided, the desire of people from poor countries to seek a better life far outstrips the ability of rich countries to accommodate them, even if there was the political will to do so.

The simple and blunt fact is that most of the people who come here are not desirable migrants from the UK's (or any other rich nation's) POV. They're ill-educated, they don't have skills that we have shortages of, their English is generally poor, if they speak it at all, and the financial support they require on arrival in terms of education, healthcare, housing, etc far outstrips any contribution they'll make to the country's coffers through tax. We simply don't need tens of thousands of young male migrants, besides which, the vast majority are NOT the most needy or deserving refugees. On the contrary, they are the strongest and healthiest members of their families, yet 90% of migrants who arrive via illegal routes are young men.