So who is going to be brave enough to ask whether Shabana Mahmood's proposed reforms are right/sensible/racist?

[Papyrophile]

Is Shabana Mahmood right or wrong to restrict asylum seeker's rights? In general?

What you on about?
All i said is ive seen /heard about it on the GB news.
Its not a slur to your integrity.

Nothing will happen . She won’t get it passed the same Labour back benchers who wouldn’t pass the changes to welfare .

I think it places people in limbo which may cause other problems. I guess it depends on whether they can work.

I don't think someone who has been granted asylum should have to live with the uncertainty of being sent back in a few years. To what exactly?
They can't settle into a community and children will be uprooted to a different education system if they have to return.

You need a third option.

You're not keen on any of it, but to end up with the other parties in charge would be far, far worse.

@SquirrelosaurusSoShiny "Tens of thousands of undocumented young men (often with very different cultural attitudes) arriving and flooding small towns will of course lead to a backlash."

This. I don't know why so many people find this so hard to understand. To be honest, if it was thousands of white men (all unchecked and many with no identification) I think most people would feel just as uneasy if they arrived en masse in their town.

The country is being scammed by tens of thousands of people using the current system. Labour MPs are now calling them asylum shoppers! Such hypocrisy, anyone saying such a thing were called dog whistling immoral racists by Mahmood five minutes ago.

Once your own MP job is under threat you suddenly switch accusations of other people's racism into your own personal morality.

Its too late, the damage is far too great, there's absolutely no trust, millions of illegal immigrants have to be deported. The abuse of ordinary people by MPs including Mahmood over this has destroyed Labour. Now she's claiming morality. No.

Yep exactly. What happened to all that rhetoric?

Forget it. Plus the plans are bad. The last thing was one in one out that was bad too.

If you go on Facebook there are many pages where people in Bangladesh and similar are actually posting marriage CVs in the hope of finding a British spouse so they can move here. They’ll list the things they want and invariably it’s ’British groom’ ‘groom with British residency’ or whatever. Bangladeshi Brits then peruse the page and contact the ones they’re interested in.

This is the precise opposite of integration. It’s a world away from happening to meet somebody from a different country, falling in love then applying to bring them here so they can settle down and get married.

Can you edit your original title/description to make this clear? Not everyone will read through and see your response.

Refugee status in the UK currently lasts for five years, after which people can apply for indefinite leave to remain, which offers a pathway to British citizenship.

^^this is absolutely as it should be. Refugees granted legal asylum should pretty mych guaranteed permanent residency, barring any serious crime.

Mahmood’s changes will also include people who arrive illegally having to wait 20 years before they can apply for permanent settlement. This is only expected to apply to new arrivals.

^^illegal immigrants should never have a right to residency.

The whole reason we are in this mess and migration is now the No1 issue is because we cannot seem to differentiate between refugees and illegal immigrants and have a sensible number about the number of people we can offer appropriate refuge for within our budget.

Too late to re-frame the question so it's not possible to change. Sorry.

It's irrelevant what Labour proposes. The issue is the inevitability of any new laws being challenged in the courts on human rights grounds. Such legal actions have a very high chance of success at present. Until that issue is addressed then it's just political grandstanding.

Hard to judge before the full details are announced tomorrow. But from first impressions they claim to be inspired by the Danish approach but it's not clear yet it will include all the elements of the Danish approach.

If it ends up being a watered down version and fails as a result it will end up pissing off everyone.

I’m pretty indifferent to them really. I think they will poll well which Labour need. I think we could stop the boats by allowing people to apply for asylum in mainland Europe and would like to see this. I think the Home Office needs to get better at processing asylum applications quickly, poor people left in limbo is terrible. I also think there are too many cases where unaccompanied minors don’t have their status secured and face deportation to somewhere they don’t know and have few real links to.

Agree with this. Home Secretary is a tough gig and Mahmood is handling it well so far. She also knows that this is a crucial issue where if Labour are seen in the longer term to have fluffed it, that opens the door for Reform. The fact that the Lib Dems have welcomed it in principle shows that this is the direction of travel now. Even the Greens will stall if they keep recommending accepting more refugees. I'd rather see a Labour government in control of this than any of the other potential ones. So let's hope it works.

@SheinIsShite get the inspection teams out on Deliveroo, Just Eat and the other companies taking on anyone with a bike and a phone regardless of legality. Clamp right down on that and it'll stop a whole swathe of illegal workers. People will have to get off their arses and fetch their own takeaways but it'll be worth it.

This is a good step forward, but it’s nowhere near enough to fight the Reform tide.

You first…

I'm not willing to extend settled status to anyone who is not financially independent and funding any family they bring along. If you cannot afford to support a family in the UK without recourse to public funding, then thank you for applying but no thanks; application fail.

My thread, so I have already amplified my OP. Please read on!

Why does everyone think ‘safe routes’ would remotely solve the problem? It would make things a million times worse - imagine how many people would apply if they didn’t have to do the Channel journey. And we would be obliged to agree the majority of them due to ECHR. It would be chaos. We are FULL. We are very very densely populated and unless we eventually want to end up a large city state we need to stop allowing our population to rise

It's customary to start with yours.
Or it can look like you're just poking the forum with a stick.

It doesn’t seem obvious to me that because someone is seeking asylum right now (eg because of a war in their country) there should be an expectation they are able to stay permanently there.

i’d hope that once the war in Ukraine is over Ukrainians will go back and rebuild and live in their country and be proud of it.

if the U.K. wound up in a civil war and god forbid I had to seek asylum elsewhere the U.K. would still always be my home and once it was safe I would want to come back. It’s my country.

twenty years is long enough for most wars to be over.

abd the ones that are not are not.

I think this is a good effort between the “let everyone in” and “no immigrants at all” positions and I actually really like it.

I think dedicated Labour voters will like whatever they do but it won’t pull other voters back which is what they’ll need.

Didn’t mean to quote you there was going to say op updated.

Absolutely this. Nothing they or any other party propose will ever work until they address the elephant in the room - human rights. How on earth is this any different, when a judge will simply overturn any decision on appeal? We need to come out of the ehrc and devise a new human rights act which serves OUR needs first and foremost and not the priorities of asylum seekers.