Cameron proposed that when the refugee crisis started. He wanted to go directly to camps and take I think 20,000 of the most vulnerable people, who were verified as genuinely in urgent need of asylum. Anyone arriving independently via smugglers would be removed.
At this point in my life I was fully 'refugees welcome' and remember thinking that was the perfect solution which would hopefully be expanded once it was shown to work. It should stop people funding the smugglers - who were funding the war that caused the refugee crisis - and prevent people from risking their own lives, and the lives of their children. Plus the money saved could be spent improving the camps for the majority who would have to remain there until they could return home. Excellent, I thought.
But the 'left' screamed that it was racist for some reason and so we should continue to allow people to pay fortunes to terrorist-linked criminal gangs, and if that meant more dead children, so be it. And the Tories being the Tories just gave in and abandoned the plan. And I realised 'refugees welcome' lot were not remotely interested in actually helping refugees, and that there was something sinister at play.
And so now we have more boats than ever carrying people from countries all over the world that are entirely safe, we have people continuing to die trying to get here (if they've not been robbed, raped or murdered before they even get to France), the camps which still house the vast majority of refugees are still horrifically underfunded hellscapes - and the smuggling gangs are richer than ever so can easily afford to cause more wars, which create more refugees, and thus ever more customers.