This migrant problem is going to let Reform in isn’t it?

[EvangelicalAboutButteredToast]

Honestly it’s such a bloody nightmare. Reform are making a total hash of local government from what I’ve read, putting teenagers in charge of whole departments with no relevant experience. What are they going to do if they are elected to run a country!!!! I’m honestly terrified. Labour need to be seen to be actively doing something to quell the far-right momentum that’s gaining traction from ordinary folk. I’m amazed at the average, usually pretty sensible people around me who are now telling me they are going to vote Reform.

there was an interview I saw yesterday where the minister said that thousands of people were being deported regularly. The interviewer asked why there were no videos of this and she said there could be. Well let’s see it! It would absolutely help.

Excellent points made

How can you say that all asylum seekers aren’t remotely proficient. Of course some of them will be!

English (1,456,448,320)
Mandarin Chinese (1,138,222,350)
Hindi (609,454,770)

Spanish (559,078,890)

French (309,804,220)

Modern Standard Arabic (273,989,700)

Bengali (272,828,760)

Russian (254,997,130)

@Alexandra2001 Australia have deported under 4,500 people
in the last 13 years to Manus, Nauru etc and that’s been enough to pretty much solve the problem. It’s the deterrent which is key.

Various posters have reiterated the numbers on this.

ETA the figures won’t be taken in.

And the cultural cost is not being born by the citizens of Devon.

I'm not going to argue with that, as I don't see much of a cultural cost here. The children at DD's school who speak languages other than English, do indeed speak quite a variety. There is however, a local pocket of Mayalayam speakers, which I just find intriguing from a linguistic point of view.

I have however, met a fair few asylum seekers and disadvantaged economic migrants (and practised teaching some of them English), as I gained a CELTA qualification in Bristol. I also volunteered as an ESOL TA closer to home.

If you look at the profile of the average asylum seeker, they will be a net recipient.

I think that categorising people as either net recipients or net takers, is usually misleading, because most such statistics only consider income tax. They do not calculate the economic value of the work itself, or allow for the fact that low-income workers spend a greater percentage of their income in the local economy than high-income workers.

For example, the average care worker or healthcare assistant does not earn much or pay much tax. But the cost to society of not having these workers would be enormous. More people would die prematurely and many workers (including high earners) would have no choice but to give up their jobs in order to care for their sick or vulnerable relatives at home.

@Cattenberg

Is there any evidence that lots of asylum seekers are qualified to do care work or particularly socially valuable work such as that? Many of the young men who come over who are employed are employed in delivery type work etc due to low level of language skills and the black economy opportunities. Part of the reason that the care Visa has been massively tightened up is because even those who came over legally brought multiple family members (making them far more expensive) and also because there was quite a lot of evidence that some people disappeared from the care jobs into other things because they were often just a front to bring people over. There is no evidence that very large proportions of the low income and low skilled migrants we have are saving others huge amounts of money, quite the opposite if their dependents also consume lots of services.

Since the start of this century, the population of England alone has jumped by 13 million, most of it because of levels of immigration from outside the British Isles which dwarf anything seen in the history of our island nation. That's why we face a housing crisis on this scale.

We could go back a couple of millennia and blame the Italians (aka Romans) for coming over here in their thousands and giving us roads and plumbing.

The Vikings - who took posession of half the country as well as bringing mayhem, death and destruction in their raids - were worse, and had a more lasting impact. The French even more so.

Pretty sure the inhabitants at the time suffered pretty badly from those invasions, and would have turned them away if they could have. They certainly tried, but were overpowered and killed. They didn't just decide to hand over York and the North out of concern for the Vikings' human rights.

Of course, most of us are at least partly descended from those invaders so it worked out OK for us I suppose. There was a bit more space anyway, with the population only being 2 million at the time.

Actually, I suppose it depends on your view of the British class system whether you agree that 'it worked out OK for us'.

Most of the British upper class - and still the wealthiest, most powerful families - are descended from the Norman nobility.

So if you feel oppressed by the class system, then you probably feel that our society (and you individually as a descendent) haven't recovered from that invasion 1000 years ago, and the resulting demographic changes. (it was pretty unpleasant for the Saxons at the time too)

Well i got no answer as to where we would send these migrants too from pp.... what a surprise!

So have you got a country in mind? any country would need to house them for many years, or rather imprison them, as per Nauru.

Italy and the EU have looked to do this too and got no-where.

We have a far far bigger migrant problem, so 5000 would be 4% of the numbers who have so far come here.

A migrant who has risked drowning and death crossing Africa and then the Med, might think a 1 in 25 chance of being deported is worth it...... esp if they can slip into the Black economy very easily.

All pp does is parrot the same old line "we just have to vote for it...." no, we have to find a country willing to take in 1000s of migrants permantely.

I note Reform cannot answer this very simple question either, just hot air.

@Alexandra2001whilst you persevere with the same stuff each time you can’t take on board the low numbers. Every time someone says this to you it’s forgotten by the next thread.

@Alexandra2001 4,100 people over 13 years is pretty much a drop in the ocean for Australia too given that they had 6,000 arriving illegally by boat alone in the year before the policy was implemented. And of course, like the UK and everywhere else, that 6,000 would likely be a multiple all these years later.

And as for where, well Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Austria and others are in varying stages of putting exactly this policy in place with differing destination countries.

4,100 over 13 years is very low and manageable. Most people can understand that.

No they aren't at all, none of those countries are putting into place a Nauru style policy.
Albania will accept migrants for processing, successful ones sent back to Italy, unsuccessful ones deported from Albania, despite having sent migrants there, numbers still keep coming to Italy..... because many, even if sent to Albania, will end up in the EU.... esp if Albania ends up IN the EU...

Austria is deporting some Syrians back to Syria, as the country is now deemed safe.... as we are.

Denmark is in talks with Rwanda, who must be laughing, another 1/2 billion for doing nothing at all.

Netherlands in very early talks with Uganda....

Like i said earlier, i'm not against the policy, its just that no country, so far, is willing to take in migrants that we don't want.

Well, there must be a queue of countries lining up to take them..... oh wait there isn't.

Almost 1000 migrants crossed the channel yesterday, its a crisis and i'm all for solutions...

The UK will need a country that is able to take a lot more than 4000, we are a lot further down the road than Australia.

This doesn’t make sense. You’re not understanding what the Australian system does.

A few posters now have said how and why the numbers are very low. Just read the posts, it’s all there.

Denmark is leading the way. Interestingly, their Left wing parties are on board: they see that excessive low-earning immigration is a disaster for the working class. (and they want to stay in power!)

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/denmark-migration-profile-pioneer

I find their 'temporary asylum' strategy really interesting. It hasn't been mentioned on here as a something we could adopt, but it makes perfect sense. Permanent residency is possible after 7 years, but only when the refugee has proved that they've integrated with language tests and have been employed for 3.5 out of the last 4 years. I think the type of work is taken into consideration too.

They also have far stricter rules on family reunification, which seem very sensible. Dependents must all be individually self-supporting.

They haven't got an agreement with another country for external processing yet. They considered Rwanda like us, but didn't go ahead. Italy of course are using Albania. But it seems that Denmark want to get the right solution, and bring other countries with them.

All I know is that a high proportion of care workers were born overseas. For example, my (male) next door neighbour needs a high level of care and many of his carers (both men and women) are not from the UK. Also, one of my Romanian colleagues was able to come to the UK by securing a job here as a domiciliary care worker. She no longer works in this field, but that was partly due to her dissatisfaction at not being paid for the time she spent travelling between appointments. However, two of my acquaintances (one Guatemalan and one Lithuanian) still work in residential care homes.

Other Lithuanians I know work in manufacturing and warehouse distribution, which are not popular jobs among Brits due to the low pay, unsociable shift patterns and pressure to work fast.

I understand exactly what Australia did.

The countries claimed to be adopting an Aus system are not & as Italy is finding out, its not a deterrent, if migrants get returned to Italy after processing, its hiding the problem.

In order for any off shoring to work, it has to be, like Australia's, permanent & it has to be able to take sufficient numbers to be a deterrent, that maybe 5000 or it might be 20,000 we don't know, given the numbers coming here, far in excess of Australia.

But no deterrent to irregular migration.

You can put in all the rules and regs you like but if the migrant cannot be deported, what does it matter?

Well yes they are now as we have Labour in and the numbers are going up still.

There’s no doubt it would work in the same way. People will choose other countries that don’t end in offshore location.

Aus was high then it got to near zero in some years. Just read the information. It’s been discussed for years now, each thread is as if it hadn’t been said. Other posters have said it clearly, go to one of those posts.

@Alexandra2001 Rwanda was, and in significant numbers. The proposed schemes don’t have to be identical to Australia’s to work. It’s the deterrent that matters and the ability to break the people smuggler’s business model.

I have several family members who did care work for a while and found it very personally satisfying as a job (they're caring types!) but it didn't pay enough. They did a mix of at-home care and worked in care homes. I've had the same story as the pp about at-home work not being viable due to time spent travelling between appointments.

How does it make any financial sense for the UK as a whole to bribe immigrants to do this work at below-living pay for a few years to get a visa, then have them change to more lucrative taxi/delivery work and bring over many dependents - incurring a high net lifetime cost?!

It makes sense for the care home at the time, because they don't incur the future costs. But not for the UK over a lifetime.

If we reduce this immigration, the pay for care work will have to go up, and then UK-born people will want to do it. There's nothing wrong with it as a career apart from the low pay. There's a great progression path, learning specialist caring skills like caring for patients with tracheostomy tubes, or dementia patients etc Specialist skills should normally lead to better pay. and more opportunities. Care work is also personally rewarding in the same way that nursing or any other health-related work is.

I haven't done the maths (hard to get the data) but I suspect that this would cost the UK less overall over a lifetime. It would also be a socially/emotionally positive for both the patients and the carers. It would also be healthier for society as a whole: it's not healthy for a society to have areas of work which are considered beneath most people, and reserved for a 'servant' class - immigrants in this case.

So much easier to just give up and put it in the 'too hard' bucket.

The other policies do work. Denmark has much lower immigration than Sweden, which has very loose immigration policy.

I wouldn't be surprised if Rwanda came back, if no better alternatives are found.