At least 15 migrants in and around the French port of Calais have died in the past year as an influx of young men and women from east Africa take ever greater risks to get the UK, according to an investigation by the Guardian.
He said the UK – along with other northern European countries – had to “provide a mechanism” that allows those with legitimate claims to seek asylum when they first arrived in southern EU countries.
Whut?
The system is quite simple and very clear. You have the right to asylum in the first non-dangerous country you can get to. You do not have the right of choosing which country you will try to claim asylum in. Those who are in Calais should be claiming asylum in France: if not in whatever countries they were in in transit to get to Calais.
This really is nothing at all to do with Britain. Someone walks off a boat from Syria into Rotherhithe and claims asylum then they get it (or should). Someone gets off a plane from North Korea into Heathrow and claims, they get it. But someone already in a safe country like France does not have the right of asylum in Britain. That’s just not how the system works.
I recall listening to the today programme some months ago interviewing someone in Sangatte.
“Why do you want to get to britain?”
“To seek asylum”
“Why not in France?”
“There are no jobs here.”
To be fair the asylum system as presented is a lie, since roughly half the population of the world would be hypothetically eligible for asylum if they had the means and wherewithal to get to Western Europe from whichever murderous theocracy / civil war / dictatorship / junta-infested banana republic they had the misfortune to be born in. We do not intend to, and logistically probably could not even if we wanted to, provide asylum to the billions nominally eligible for it…and since it’s so obviously a lie, what blame to the few who have the means or luck to call us on our disingenuous promise for gaming it?
The alternative to harsh conditions for asylum seekers is to provide them with comfortable and safe transport direct from their own front doors in Africa etc to Dover / Heathrow. But that would result in the UK being a country of about 200 million people, mainly African, Muslim, etc in fifty years time, which of course is exactly what The Guardian wants. But The Guardian can’t be quite that open about its “let’s destroy Britain” agenda. So it does the next best thing: deplore travel arrangements for asylum seekers.
“That’s just not how the system works.” Oh balls. The system works as “asylum shopping”. They’re looking for one or more of (i) a welfare state to sponge off, (ii) jobs, (iii) cousins, (iv) a feeble police force.
A well run country would exclude the shoppers; it might even consider how to wean its own off (i) and (iv). Or how to expel them; the world should have room for another Botany Bay.
This really is nothing at all to do with Britain.
Well, it is. As others have pointed out, not least the French, the reasons why so many people are trying to come to Britain (and dying in the process) are largely caused by British policies. Okay, that they speak English is probably one they can’t help, and having an economy which allows them to find work is probably not a bad thing when compared to France, for example. But there are a lot of other quite optional pull factors that most other countries don’t have.
There are millions living in tents in the closest safe country to home. So the system does – sort of- work. (The refugees are seen as a threat by the tyrant back home, so he’s quite keen to move them on.)
Likewise if we tried to apply the letter of the Dublin accord – as Switzerland has tried and failed to do – Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria would be full, and the rest of Europe would have no asylum applications. So in that respect the system wouldn’t work even if it worked.
There’s a nice lady in Calais who charges the jungle dwellers’ mobile phones for them.
So clearly these are economic migrants not refugees, as they have family back home with enough left over to fund the travel.
They probably view it as a Gap Yah back home in Eritrea.
But someone already in a safe country like France does not have the right of asylum in Britain. That’s just not how the system works.
Of course they do. Of course that is how the system works. As we see every day. The lawyers like appeals. They run up large bills. Anyone can claim asylum and they are quite likely to get it.
There is one sure way to reduce the number of deaths to zero. Do not give citizenship to a single asylum seeker. We lure them to their deaths by offering them a chance of picking lettuce. Refuse to take a single one. Then they won’t come and hence won’t be drowned. Anything else will result in deaths.
However this is not weird. Jessica Valenti over at the Guardian bemoaning Christmas as sexist is weird.
@ SMFS
That’s not weird. Adita Chakkrabroty over at The Guardian claiming that London has too many restaurants, that they’re too popular and attract too much foreign investment and this is bad for the economy because **handwaves the questions away vaguely**. That’s weird. And by weird, I mean infuriating.
French UN bureaucrat thinks Les Rosbifs should shoulder France’s burdens. Ho hum.
I liked this bit though:
Juliette Delaplace, who works for Secours Catholique, a charity that has been assisting migrants in Calais for 10 years
Give it another couple of generations and it’ll be Secours Islamique. Look at what’s happening to Sweden.
Unless we want our grandchildren to enjoy re-enacting the life and times of El Cid, mashed up with the adventures of Max Rockatansky, our one and only asylum policy should be “fuck off, we’re full”.
Which is harsh, to be sure, but we can’t solve the problems of the Third World by becoming a Third World country.
Merry Christmas!
Peripherally.
Every time I bump off the Dunkerque/Calais>Dover ferry I go straight through customs & onto the Quay Road for Folkestone. There are zero checks done on the UK side of La Manche. UK Border Control & all security is in France.
As an interdiction solution, it’s a nightmare. There’s the point of embarkation you’re trying to defend & the whole of France as a staging post for attempts. I’ve regularly been stopped on roads 50km back from the coast by the Gendarmerie/Douane. The Froggies really are going to extraordinary lengths to defend the UK border. But they’re overwhelmed.
Question:
UK side of the Channel & you have all potential illegals neatly buttoned up on a ship. All you need to do is put disembarking vehicles through an ‘airlock’ consisting of a high, guarded fence with searches at the exits. Go look at an aerial view of Dover Port & there’s plenty of room to do it. Most of the embarkation holding areas aren’t used. OK, might require a bit of construction work. Fly-over or something to solve circulation problems. But this is an £x billions problem needs solving.
The illegals you catch? Plenty of room on the Dover/Folkestone road for a bloody great secure camp. Wire, dogs, CCTV. Only route out of the camp is due east, back where they came from.
If there wasn’t the good chance of making a successful home run, there wouldn’t be all those people hanging around Calais.
If they are not Eu citizens no benefits. No problem
IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT WE ADMIT ONLY GENUINE REFUGEES.
Once in the UK, genuine Asylum Seekers are currently, thanks to Gordon Brown and Teresa May, treated worse than middle-class dogs. Forbidden to earn a wage, condemned to survive on HALF the benefit for an unemployed citizen, frequently deprived of any income whatsoever by mere incompetence of some DWP clerk.
You think that 30% of food bank claims are just due to DWP errors?
There is a charity in Glasgow for which the most numerous grants are a bus fare to the food bank or to Liverpool or Croydon (yes, these are where Asylum Seekers in Glasgow have to go to appeal) to appeal a wrong decision by a clerk. New Labour’s bureaucrats made it virtually impossible to appeal against any mistakes they made because the refugee would have to walk hundreds of miles to do so.
Go to Glasgow and ask Asylum Seekers – face it! these aren’t economic migrants: these are vulnerable people who have been dumped in flats in Glasgow which are vacant because the locals won’t take them!
There are economic migrants trying to game the system, whom we can do without, but they are not living in flats in Glasgow that the locals do not want.
How does any asylum seeker who is not an asylum shopper even reach the UK? An occasional stowaway on a plane? I can’t think we get many from Norway or the Irish Republic.
It is all too late. Once you decided to be ‘fair’ or ‘reasonable’ the game was up. You all first of all let the feminists take over and they let the lawyers take over.
The politicians live only for the day.
When golliwog became bad you all started to be obsolete.
@ dearieme
One who passes through a number of unsympathetic countries.
Kurds who are fleeing persecution in Turkey as a side-effect of the Marxist rebellion get little sympathy in Greece, or Italy, or France. They don’t get much sympathy in the UK either, but after they get here there is nowhere else to go (unless hey can swim to Iceland)
@john77: bugger sympathy, the only question is whether they are safe in, say, France. If they are then thereafter they are just shopping around, not seeking asylum.
This is a point I’ve made many times. The argument for Iraqi and Afghan asylum seekers arriving in Australia is that the nearby SE Asian countries they have transited through have not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, so they therefore don’t count. My response is usually “tough luck. Were you being persecuted in Indonesia? No.”