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.

Big problems are solved by starting.

@JamSandle

the reason there are a lot of men are cultural versus some master plot and yes I am not sexist l.

also could be part of the deal why not?

it's like the war on drugs. The only sensible measure is decriminalisation. (Note not legalising) it's the same with this issue you will not stop it so best to find a way it works for all.

What are these ‘cultural reasons’?

Do you have a number in mind for what would work?

Dodgy lawyers should of course be struck off, and the mechanism exists to do that. However, there is nothing wrong with asylum seekers receiving advice as to their legal rights and how to enforce them. There is simply no point in having laws if they are not enforceable.

I'm sick of the government's narrative every time they are stopped from doing something unlawful, that it is all the fault of lefty lawyers. Obviously the lawyers would get nowhere if the government didn't keep breaking the law put in place by our elected Parliament. I don't understand why people keep falling for such obvious lies.

I agree about enforcing the law, but it’s easy for the government to point at the ability of the asylum seekers to access good quality legal help when the rest of us struggle to get a Police response to anything. I know they aren’t comparable directly but it paints a bad picture, even though it is the government’s fault.

That simply isn't the "lefty agenda", it's the fictional bogeyman made up by the right wing. IME, most left wingers recognise perfectly well that not all asylum seekers are genuine and are happy for those proved to be illegal immigrants to be deported back to their country of origin. But the right wing do tend to have an iffy relationship with the truth, as demonstrated by the likes of Johnson, Braverman, Jenrick et all in recent years.

It isn’t ‘right wing’ to not want uncontrolled immigration into a country already struggling to care for its own population.

How can we say that we will deport 99% even if we know a large proportion to be genuine? As a supposedly civilised country, we can't send people - including children - back somewhere knowing that they will be imprisoned, tortured, raped and killed.

The problem is your premise that our resources are so limited. If that were the case, why does the government admit approximately 1.4 million long term migrants every year? And why did it issue well over 3 million visitor visas last year? We do have approximately a million empty properties, so the "no room" argument simply doesn't work.

I'm all in favour of illegal immigrants being deported, and I wish the government would put in place an efficient process to make that happen. Until they do they really need to stop banging on about the backlog which is caused fairly and squarely by their own uselessness.

Absolutely, because left wingers don't want that either, contrary to what their opponents keep trying to assert. But that isn't what is happening in the UK currently except insofar as the government is being incredibly inefficient about control and wastes so many resources on nonsenses like the Rwanda exchange scheme.

It's actually pretty difficult to access legal aid in any area of the law, again due to government inefficiency and policies. That is precisely what brought about the climate in which a few dishonest immigration lawyers were able to flourish before they were found out.

@JanieEyre

well said

My ‘idea’ is for each country experiencing an influx of migrants to make a financial donation to buy a large piece of land from a less well off country, for example Kazakhstan. We can then develop it to become a small refugee nation state which is cared for by any country that would rather contribute to it than accept more asylum seekers. It wouldn’t be a nation proper but it would be a functioning society, and a safe place to live until they wish to return home.

@Jamtartforme

this country is struggling because of rank poor politics, a bankrupt talent bare government, brexit and terrible tax abuses .

it’s not immigrants atall.

@JanieEyre How can we say that we will deport 99% even if we know a large proportion to be genuine?

The same way we deal with the millions of people worldwide who are being raped, tortured, imprisoned and killed but who don't make it to the UK.

I've lived in a country where people live in unbearably harsh conditions, where people often go "missing" for political reasons, where children die pointlessly and gay men are beaten and human life is as cheap as it gets.

There is suffering and horror throughout the world and bluntly, whether we "save" 50,000 or 80,000 or 200,000 we aren't even vaguely making a dent in it.

My point is that it doesn't matter if someone is a "genuine" refugee or not. We can't save them all no matter how heartbreaking their stories are. Leaving aside the point that using "the UK government accepted their asylum claim" as the metric for "genuine" is a bit useless when people here are debating whether we should change our criteria for accepting claims, but anyway...

@Jamtartforme

you mean like Rwanda?

I didn’t say it was. But that means we don’t have money for them either doesnt it.

So do you want safe routes, how many people and from which countries?

Could someone who knows about these things, when processed who do the home office work out factually if they are genuine asylum seekers or are just economic migrants, if they have no paperwork or actual evidence on them?

@Jamtartforme

the UK has plenty of cash it just doesn’t collect things correctly and doesn’t use it well.

Proof?

YANBU

But only brave people will express this view. It's easy and cheap to say 'Welcome, everyone!' but it's not possible or sustainable.

The term 'virtue signalling' is over-used - but this is what it means: saying you think everything should be lovely and everyone should have everything they want and need...but stopping there and not following through with ideas about how this could actually happen.

I wish everyone in the world was happy, well-fed and fulfilled. But how to do this?? Hmmmm.

The vast majority of asylum seekers we are seeing are male with Afghanistan being the second highest group next to Albanian. Note that these are not now the Afghans who worked with British forces, these are people fleeing an economic wilderness under the Taliban. According to research by the Pugh foundation, 99% of Afghan men support Sharia law and a similar number believe a woman should obey their husband and be punished if they do not. Women cannot largely work in Afghanistan and have very limited access to education. I am not wholly convinced of the merits of importing large numbers of these men if I am frank. I think we need limited numbers and strong screening.

Young men fleeing would indicate they don't like that way of life. I would be interested to see how these questions were asked and when.

@Cyclebabble

the UK ( and its partners) leaving the Afghans was and still is a disgrace.

we should welcome any who want to not live under the Taliban and can accept western culture.