Several people, including a small child, died when overcrowded boats were trying to cross the Channel to the UK, French authorities said. The interior minister said the child was trampled to death on board.
France’s interior minister said that several people, including a small child, died on Saturday trying to cross the English Channel in overcrowded boats.
“Today several people died trying to cross the English Channel,” Bruno Retailleau said. “A child was trampled to death in a small boat.”
Retailleau said the “tragedy” again highlighted the need to crack down on people smuggling groups organizing the dangerous crossings.
“The people smugglers have the blood of these people on their hands and our government will intensify the fight against these mafias who are getting rich by organizing these crossings of death,” he wrote.
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It’s a joke. You see, the standard of living in the UK is tanking along with the economy, and levels of racism and bigotry are spiking. This means that the quality of life for an expat settling here is not all that great, especially if they are outwardly foreign. So the UK is its own deterrent. And yet people are still emigrating to the UK.
Oh I get it now. Gave me a giggle.
Joking aside. The state of the UK is no deterrent to economic migrants who are coming to work cash in hand. The largest cohort arriving illegally in 2022 was working age Albanian men. There is no crisis in Albania. About 90% of male asylum applications were rejected. It was a bunch of guys taking advantage of the fact that they were one dodgy dinghy ride away from grifting in the UK. Our lack of ability to deport most people means they get free accommodation, free healthcare free legal representation for years on end.
A special agreement to allow deportation to Albania was signed last year but that’s just one country out of many.
Having a more efficient asylum system won’t deter anyone that we can’t actually deport. The incentives are basically all wrong and encourage fake asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
They generally don’t stop in other safe countries in Europe because I) for many their goal is not safety, it’s the UK ii) the lack of ID cards in the UK makes working illegally trivial compared to many other European countries iii) the UK is more attractive because it’s more easily taken advantage of (generous legal system, free housing etc) compared to other countries and especially compared to when they’ve come from.
I think there should be safe ways to claim asylum from actual disaster zones that parliament has approved. There are a couple, but getting more agreed is something that voters should support.
I think the UK should take its fair share of refugees arriving in Europe. Again, this should be a formal legal process. Not dangerous illegal boat crossings.
The last piece then had to be a guarantee that if you arrive via an illegal boat you will not end up in the UK. That is the only thing that will stop them. Nearly 100% of illegal crossings are intercepted, it’s just that current that means they’re housed in the UK and enter the legal system.
If that was changed so that 100% of illegal boat arrivals are processed outside the UK without any prospect of asylum then illegal boat crossings (and deaths) would end. This is exactly how Australia stopped the same problem.
Obviously the Rwanda plan did not work. But an actual deterrent means arranging a safe 3rd country when illegal entrants are moved to automatically.
I think legal paths into the UK should be more generous. But again that needs to be a voter / political process.
I don’t actually think economic migrants are a drain on our economy. Are you paid what you are worth? Nobody is, because then the company would be losing money on you. If the boss pays the expat 40 quid an hour, then he’s making 60 quid an hour off them, otherwise it wouldn’t be profitable. The boss is the winner, all the way up to the top of the company. Even if these expats are all working cash in hand and avoiding taxes (I don’t think that’s true: the vast majority of expats are decent and hardworking according to the government figures) they are stimulating the economy by doing the jobs nobody else wants to do, and making their companies/bosses rich in the process.
I’m going to have to disagree on the conditions in other countries as well. France, for example, has a much more socialist approach to refugees. It takes more refugees than we do, and it shelters and supports them better. The main reason people choose to pass through France, which offers a better life for refugees than the UK, is because either they speak English (often because they are coming from a country we colonised) or they have family or friends who are settled here already. I mean, put yourself in their shoes for a second. What would be more important to you if you were fleeing your country, or even if you were just sick of it and wanted a new life somewhere. Would you go somewhere you didn’t know anyone and didn’t speak the language to be totally alone and lost, even if there was an extra 100 quid a month in it for you? Or would you go to the country where you have an existing support network and the ability to communicate and negotiate without the need for a translator. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not borne out by any of the studies we’ve seen.
Totally agree on the legal routes. It needs to be sorted NOW though, because while there are no legal routes, people are dying in the channel and there’s nothing we can do that will stop that.