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.
Need a deterrent, now. Anything else is just hand wringing while this awfulness continues.
We have a deterrent. It’s called being the UK. It’s not working.
https://media1.giphy.com/media/uN5iwZB2v2dH2/giphy.gif
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.
Apparently the risk of drowning and trampling doesn’t deter them. Are you planning something worse?
Having 0% chance of ending up in the UK because you’re processed offshore and automatically denied entry is what actually works.
This is what Australia did and they reduced deaths from illegal crossings to 0.
They also reduced trafficking in Indonesia because it turned out a lot of that was making its way to the south coast to illegally enter Australia.
Stopping the system of exploitation from working has benefits that ripple outwards.
If we didn’t have an asylum system breaking under the strain of false and bogus claims we might actually be able to open new legal routes to those facing a real emergencies. The largest cohort arriving in 2022 was working aged Albanian men. There is no emergency in Albania. About 90% of claims were rejected at enormous cost via accommodation, legal fees, court time etc. This is grossly unfair on those we should actually be helping.
That sounds decent, but I get the distinct vibe accepting more migrants isn’t usually part of the plan. Most of the time when boat deaths are brought up, it’s a way of making something intrinsically mean seem humanitarian. They don’t actually give a shit about drownings, and definitely don’t give a shit if they die of despair back where they came from.
That’s definitely the case for some, depends what kind of politician they are.
Politicians just say what people want to hear.
Anti-migrant sentiment is common in Europe now, and it’s the whole reason boat deaths were made an issue (as opposed to any number of other things with a greater humanitarian impact).
How can you possibly have a deterrant?
You need to compare it to where they’re running from. How are we going to make things worse than threats of violence, torture, starvation, homelessness?
You need to know who exactly you’re dealing with on the French coast.
I think there should be more safe, legal routes to the UK away from danger. But I think these have to be political decisions supported by voters and passed by parliament. (Like we had for Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong, there should be more of that, so long as the UK population supports it). I think we should also take our fair share of refugees entering Europe (obviously that’s now complicated by Brexit).
The decision being made on the coast in France is not whether or not to flee some horrible thing in, say, Pakistan. They’ve already done that. The actual decision being made is whether to stay in France or risk going to the UK. So the question really is “What’s so bad about France?” (Or any other safe country passed through for that matter).
The criticism about how genuine some of these claims are is that someone actually fleeing truly terrible things would kiss the ground as soon as they got to Italy, or Greece or Germany or France and so on. Unless, perhaps, they’re not in a genuine emergency, rather they’re just fed up of home and want better economic prospects elsewhere. That’s what we find when we look back at, say, 2022. The largest cohort arriving illegally in the UK was working aged men from Albania. There is no emergency in Albania. About 90% of their asylum claims were rejected.
So why the UK for these guys? Well it’s probably due to the fact that’s it’s much easier to work here illegally partially due to us lacking an ID card system like the rest of Europe. Plus our particularly humane welfare net providing free accommodation, free healthcare and free legal costs is easily taken advantage of while a bogus asylum claim can be strung out for years and years.
That’s why a portion of them are thinking a risky channel crossing is better than staying in France. If they know their asylum claim is bogus, far better to spend some years working cash in hand (illegally) in the UK than having a rougher time in France, or be found out sooner in Germany and so on.
Many claimants are genuine, of course, primarily women and children were granted asylum in the UK. But the question again is, if one is fleeing a genuine emergency, what’s so bad about the rest of Europe?
Many are trafficked there. So their decision to cross the channel illegally is not really theirs. But rather it’s the assumption of their abuser that they’re more easily exploited in the UK. Again, the lack of an ID card system makes this more likely.
Ultimately it may be impossible to have a full window on to how the decision to get into a bad dingy is made when you’re already standing in a safe country like France. But what is certain, is they would not do it if it meant a 0% chance of ending up in the UK.
Almost all illegal crossings are intercepted. They’re then documented and put in the UK asylum system. If instead being intercepted meant you would be processed offshore and denied entry to the UK automatically then that takes away the single biggest cause of dangerous crossings. In other words, an actual deterrent.
Obviously the Rwanda plan was flawed. But the portion of it that has automatic offshore processing and automatic denial of entry to the UK are the parts that actually worked and started having an effect on decisions.
This is what Australia did too and they managed to reduce deaths from illegal crossings to 0.
I think there should be more safe and legal routes to the UK for genuine emergencies. I think we should take our fair share of refugees entering Europe that are found to have genuine claims. I think illegal crossings to the UK should be 100% precessed offshore and should have automatic disqualification from ever entering the UK. I think the asylum system needs far more investment so that cases are progressed quicker. I think we should not be afraid to deport false claimants to dangerous parts of the world. All in all I think our asylum system should be rigourously defended from false claimants, gangs and traffickers so that resources can be prioritised for those in genuine need of help and rescue.