Our only far rightwinger (and he probably wouldn’t accept that definition) who gets any air time is Nigel Farrage of UKIP (the party that wants out of the European Union). He has suggested we put soldiers on the border. Luckily no one is listening to him.
We don’t have the sort of public figures that you have (Trump?) who are happy to openly brand migrants as rapists etc.
Paki is a racial slur in the UK, traditionally used to refer to anyone from the Indian subcontinent, not just Pakistanis. It’s not a name you hear publicly thrown about anymore, anymore than nigger would be in the US. This Calais border issue, however, is completely unrelated, unless you’re trying to infer that British people are particularly racist for having border controls?
I’m not sure where’ve you’ve got that from, but if that was ever true, then it hasn’t been so for decades. Besides which, this isn’t an Old Empire issue, this is ‘people escaping from war torn Africa/Middle East’ issue and ‘people from outside Europe looking for a better life’ issue.
Hmm, that was probably the case before the 1948 Nationality Act which was in response to the Canadians introducing their own citizenship laws in 1946 and a conference about the British Commonwealth conference on nationality and citizenship. The UK had a lot of colonies at that time. As the decolonisation process gathered pace, newly independent states created their own citizenship and so were no longer British subjects. There were also further modifications to British Citizenship to control immigration from the 1960s.
The EU has this huge free travel area called the Shengen agreement. The idea is to allow the free movement of labour. That and a single currency are two conspicuous strengths that the the US economy has, and the intention is to get some of that single big market goodness.
The UK does not like to go quite that far and it has its own free travel area between the UK and Ireland and immigration checks at the airports and sea ports. EU nationals are allowed free movement in both free travel areas. Passports from outside the EU can have any number of visa conditions applied to gain entry to the UK.
The refugees at Calais often do not have any identification papers, to ensure they are not sent back to their own country, which could be a death sentence. It makes the whole business of dealing with refugee claims long and difficult. Along with refugees seeking asylum there are inevitably some who are simply economic migrants and there maybe some criminals. The UK immigration courts have a huge backlog of such cases, they often take years to resolve.
The UK government is very reluctant to get involved with the rest of the EU and create a proper framework to assess refugee claims and agree to accept a quota of claims because the voters don’t like it. Immigration is a hot political subject in many other EU countries as well. Norway and Germany are the good guys on this issue. At the moment, every country has its own policy and that seems to be to shuffle them over the border as fast as they can so it is someone else’s problem. It is not as if this is a new problem, they have been talking about this for many years now. France does not really owe the UK a lot of favours with what they may regard as a UK immigration problem, they have their own immigration and refugee process their own issues at the Italian border.
But…Dover - Calais is is a major trade route and the delays to the movement of goods by trucks and trains are starting to hurt both sides. Huge lines of traffic and trade is beginning to suffer.
Furthermore, some British holiday makers are likely to be seriously inconvenienced by the delays in getting through the channel tunnel on their way to their holiday homes on the Continent.:eek:
When it gets that bad, it is surely becoming a matter of national importance.
There is a lot going on in the world today. Lots of refugees, lots of migrants, and lots of situations that look like they aren’t getting better in this lifetime. Outside of World Wars, I don’t think we’ve ever seen this many complex crises at once.
It’s gotten easier to move. Would-be migrants use social media to help plan every step of the way, from plotting the route to checking the weather before setting sail.
Libya fell. Libya actually used to be a destination of its own, where people could work and make money. That’s gone, and so are the government structures that used kept smuggling a bit more regulated.
Our asylum rules are showing their age. They come from a time of more formal conflict, less general mobility, and more defined gaps between refugees and economic migrants.
Europe hasn’t decided to act as a whole on migration and refugee issues. Technically, all these people should be seeking asylum in Spain or Italy. Nobody really thinks that’s fair, but nobody is willing to formally commit to sharing the burden.
In situations where an immigrant doesn’t have papers and won’t cooperate and saying where they’re from, what happens? Are they forcefully confined to camps? What can the authorities threaten them with if said authorities don’t know where they came from?
Standard procedure is to get a flight into the UK if you can and go straight into the bathroom where you burn your passport. Obv an issue for the smok/ing detector but you can’t be returned.
Fwiw, I know former PKK Kurds who had a route via Malta for this.
You can’t just hold people in a camp. In France, they’re ordered to leave French territory. If they don’t do so, they can then be tried and sentenced. Once freed, they still are supposed to leave, so next time they’re caught, they go back to court and jail, and so on…
The UK deals with considerably less refugee asylum applications than some other EU countries.
Here is a graph:
France has more than the UK, Germany more than any other country and Sweden the most in proportion to its population size.
These numbers are very small compared to the 4 million refugees in countries like Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon that are adjacent to the conflict in Syria and Iraq.
The crisis on the Dover to Calais crossing is a bottleneck that grabs the headlines. It really involves just a few thousand people.
It is a storm in a teacup that is causing a furore in the UK, that should really be settled by the EU agreeing a common refugee policy. That may be the straightdope but there are complications.
Cameron is currently in negotiation with the EU over wide ranging reforms that will have big bearing on the way people vote on the planned UK Referendum on EU membership in the next year. That will be very important indeed for the UK economy that the UK votes to stay in.
His words will be very carefully selected to appeal to the UK Euro-sceptics to show that he is going to be a very firm with the EU on this immigration issue. It may prove to be a useful diversion from having to negotiate a change to the free mobility of labour clause in the EU treaty. That is a red line in the negotiations with the rest of the EU.
The xenophobic sentiment in the UK makes little distinction between refugees, asylum seekers, EU migrants or migrants from the rest of the world here to prop up public services. So if Cameron makes a fuss about this, they will think he is doing something and not let the anti-EU lobby make political capital out of it.
Cameron is Public Relations man and he knows how to play this game.
Not particularly easy, the post above yours has the link.
The general perception and simplified version (it’s actually more complicated, but I don’t expect someone fleeing home to understand all the details) is that having received asylum in an EU country does not grant asylum in the rest of the EU, you’re stuck in that country until and if you can gain residency by other means. If that country is where you want to be, that’s fine; if you don’t speak the language and don’t know anybody, but there is another country nearby where you speak the language and know people, not so much.
There’s also the documents conundrum: on one hand, not having ID means you can’t deported nyah nyah. But on the other, not having ID or other documents means you can’t prove you are coming from a country in turmoil, or that the laws of your home country would put you in prison for your ideology/sexuality/religion/etc., or that you have a college degree. Undocumented immigrants would rather be sure they can stay than sure they can go back to doing the kind of jobs they’re trained to do.
The only burden that should be shared is the burden of patrolling the borders. These people should be sent home, and in case where they refuse to identify themselves to centeres where they can be detained until such a time as when they’re ready to divulge their origin. The duration of their stay entirely up to themselves. We don’t want them. We don’t need them. They’re not welcome.
If only it were so easy. In some cases, like those of migrants coming from Eritrea, sending them home is sending them directly to a lifelong prison sentence or worse. In others, like people coming from Syria, home doesn’t exist anymore.
A major factor in this is that when we built our refugee system, refugee camps were temporary. Now, they can last for decades and even generations, and people aren’t going to put up with being interned indefinitely.
Refugees in camps often are not permitted by the host government to work. Can you picture being 20 years old, in a refugee camp, and looking forward to the prime years of your life sitting idle living on meager handouts, unable to ever hold a job or improve your life? That’s the reality many people are fleeing- it’s hopeless for them.
Governments hosting refugees are already generous. But if Europe wants to slow migration, they are going to have to convince countries like Sudan and Kenya to be even more generous and start integrating the long-term refugee populations. And that’s going to be a tough sell.
And if it happens that their home country is one in which their ethnicity/religion/sex/orientation is liable to get them beaten up and tortured by the local police, well, tough shit, they’re morally obliged to stay right there where they can be imprisoned, beaten up or shot more easily. Right?
Otherwise they might inconvenience us. Perish the thought.
Given that they’re living in camps, it doesn’t seem like that much of a threat. I suppose it’s difficult to threaten people in their position short of using unsavory tactics.
Anyone know if some of them take the long way around and take a boat to Ireland or the West coast of the UK?
I’ve never heard of it. One of the big “innovations” since the fall of Libya is smugglers are using unseaworthy boats that are abandon at sea after rescue rather than returned, and are relying on the migrants themselves to navigate (with predictably deadly results.) Many migrants can’t swim, and there are rarely enough life jackets. Even the short hop across the Med is a stretch.
In Calais AFAIK, many of them have the status of asylium seekers, so they aren’t even under this threat. As long as the request isn’t processed, possibly appealed, etc… their residency in France is perfectly legal.