The point of the Rwanda scheme is to make getting in the boat an undesirable option, because you'll just end up somewhere you don't want to be. The hope is that few people will have to be sent to Rwanda because they'll stop paying people smugglers to make the trip.
The UK remains nominally committed to providing asylum for people who fear for their lives in their home country, so the latest scheme is designed to call the asylum seeker’s bluff: “we will guarantee your safety, but it will be in Rwanda”. Anyone genuinely fearing for their lives will presumably be happy to take the offer of safe haven. The economic migrants presumably will not.
> https://www.habitatforhumanity.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/201...
Sounds to me like their lives are at risk, just more slowly than previously.
"Economic migrants" is a category invented to justify atrocities. After you've financialized basic necessities, of course the the reasons for "migrating" are economic!
With fertility rates plummeting worldwide, there's no realistic scenario where the UK will be overrun.
Plus, of course, they are already in France. They could claim asylum there.
That's totally irrelevant, and not what we're talking about though. This scheme pre-judges that. It exposes the scheme for what it is: it's not about the boats, it's about the people in them.
> Plus, of course, they are already in France. They could claim asylum there.
And the vast, vast majority of them do. The ones that don't have their reasons, which they are best placed to judge.
Well yes, we were originally talking about shops selling American candy...
Thanks, your comment made me smile.
Just to ground this discussion in some actual data, here are the figures from a 2019 news article[0]:
"It shows how, of the 80,813 applications that were refused or withdrawn between 2010 and 2016, only 29,659 individuals were removed, leaving 51,154 failed asylum seekers in the country from that seven-year period."
So it would be better to say that "only 37% of failed asylum seekers are deported". Also, I don't think that 51,154 people in seven years entering a country of 69 million really represents "unlimited migration".
[0] https://news.sky.com/story/fewer-than-half-of-failed-asylum-...
Don’t say “I was born here” - you didn’t earn that. How would you fare on the points based visa scheme? Would you support an initiative to strip undesirable people (i.e. all those who have inadequate points) of their citizenship, so “better” people with more points can replace them?
That’s essential to its continued existence. You’re simply arguing that you have a right to loot UK families, destroying their society in the process, to give their money to people you feel are “more deserving”.
I think that’s borderline genocidal.
Apparently it's also a communication thing.
Smugglers have motivation to say how good it is if you make it.
People hear and share weird information.
Besides which, costs per applicant under a "desk in Calais" scheme would cost peanuts. Remind me how much the Rwanda scheme costs, per asylum seeker?
Which does not work because to quite a lot of people drowning in the Channel is preferable to what they fled back home if there is the tiniest of chances that they can actually make it to a place where they or their children can actually make a living. This line of reasoning is like "let's use harder punishments to dissuade the others". It never worked that way, and still does not now.
> The point of the Rwanda scheme is to make getting in the boat an undesirable option, because you'll just end up somewhere you don't want to be.
That's not the calculation they make. Their issue is being shot at, disappeared, bombed, or tortured if they stay. Most of the time their risk analysis does not go beyond leaving the country and you see quite a lot of them drifting from country to country once they are in Europe. The ones who show up at Calais are those who come from former regions of influence of the British Empire. No amount of dissuasion is going to change that.
> The hope is that few people will have to be sent to Rwanda because they'll stop paying people smugglers to make the trip.
It won't work and they won't stop. Again, these people take risks assuming that they have a chance of not being caught or to actually get granted asylum once they arrive (fat chance; most of them don't have a very accurate image of the UK). How is the British government paying to export them to Africa going to change anything in this calculation? Could the UK actually pay to deport all these asylum seekers? Could Rwanda actually welcome them in anything that looks like decent conditions? The most likely answers are "no" and "no", and the examples of Australia's refugees camps out in the Pacific are really not encouraging.
But France is presumably a lot nicer tho?
I'd say the migrants that stop in France are from the French-speaking/former French colonies of Africa, taking advantage of the support network that already exists for those countries
We don't. We treat humans with dignity and accept them on to our shores to process their asylum claims.
We allow asylum seekers to work and pay taxes while that happens. As a society we both demonise asylum seekers for "not contributing" whilst also making it illegal for them to do so.
Instead of financing the wars that create the poverty that these people are fleeing from, use that financing to improve services in their society and create better standards of living.
Its not like the English don't have a long history of colonialism and imperialism to pay for. The debt is due. More should be done to make up the damage done by hundreds of years of exploitation by English lords.
You don't just build a modern country or civilization by dropping some helicopter-dollars, that's not how it works. Unless you tell me you want to send doctors, engineers, school teachers, etc, there, to "civilize" them, but i thought you were against colonization ?
These are part of a catalog of "waste, fraud and abuse" complaints made against the United States' reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan -- an effort totaling $145 billion over 20 years -- made by the United States' own inspector general into the war. But the in-depth audits detailing these findings have, for the most part, been taken offline at the request of the State Department, citing security concerns."
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/07/asia/us-afghanistan-spend...
Though to be clear I agree that it was incompetence that scuppered the scheme, reading little snippets on the scheme itself the colonists were woefully ill equipped for the task of creating a settlement.
Another interesting fact: for a short while before it imploded, RBS was actually the largest bank in the world by assets!
The Spanish have their own share of problems at their border with Morocco and along their mediterranean coast.
I though the reason they aim for the UK is the impression of a good quality of life.
Quality of life in the UK is good, don't get me wrong, but not orders of magnitude better than what they could find on the continent.
Whataboutism is the last resort of cowards. The fact is, the UK (euphemistically referred to as the "English" by most of the rest of the non-Anglo world) has the blood of millions of innocent victims on its hands TODAY. Not just generationally, but in the context of the current zeitgeist, the "English" are recipients of a great deal of war treasure in the form of direct arms sales to extremist, totalitarian-authoritarian fascist entities across the globe. TODAY.
It is why there are 34 million refugees from our wars out there, today, desperate to escape the bombings that have been carried out on average every twenty minutes, for the last twenty years...
Those bomb sales are war treasure to more than just the denizens of Oxford Street.
The UK military-industrial oligarchical system has its fingers in all of these heinous pies. Yet the UK social system is not prepared to subject itself to the indignity of a single war refugee finding solace from the Wests' incessant bombing...
Also, those same people who are willing to buy newspapers that _gleefully_ employ columnists who also dehumanise these humans on an almost daily basis.
People who fall for populist nonsense just before an election spouted from a government who have, over more than a decade, entirely failed to reduce immigration and yet convince the electorate that they're the best people for that particular job.
I also reject the notion that the majority of the population would like immigration reduced (I certainly don't, especially refugees fleeing wars that we are at least, in part, responsible for). Considering the chronic shortage of skilled workers in the UK (due to our underfunded education system), I don't see how that's possible.
Almost like they knew it was going to end like this but now they can say that they tried, only to be stopped by the "activist judges". (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54687081)
This government's attacks on the judiciary is nothing short of awful.
Many UK public services are in real need of meaningful investment, but to connect that to this phenomenon without any kind of evidence is incredibly tenuous.
https://www.ft.com/content/8751e754-6e3e-11e7-bfeb-33fe0c5b7...
I would guess the situation has only got worse in the meantime.
the data doesn't seem to show this:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-sta...
spending on social protection and health have been going up like crazy. almost 500 billion gbp in a single year on those two alone.
spending as a whole has been going up, now accounting for 51% of GDP.
> Close to 10% of the entire country are currently on an NHS waiting list
covid
> Meanwhile, the tax burden in the UK has reached it's highest point in 70 years
covid + nhs.
While the pandemic was an extraordinary expense that has to be paid back, there is no easy solution for the NHS. People are living longer and longer, and the required pot of money for running the NHS is getting bigger and bigger. Something will need to change, and I think it will be more private healthcare.
Couldn't a solution be to outsource to countries where healthcare is cheaper? Taking advantage of the cheap flying options like Ryanair or Easyjet...
As for immigration, why not use their (the immigrants) minds and manpower to deindustrialise agriculture and help turn England into a fruit and veg powerhouse... I mean the climate certainly has to have some advantages...
In immigration it's interesting that Denmark is pursuing a similar deal with Rwanda https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/denmark-talks-with-rwan...
UK tax payers pay in the same ballpark as much per capita for unicersal healthcare as American taxpayers pay per capita for Medicare and Medicaid without getting anywhere close to universal cover.
As you say little or no official follow up to deal with the issue or stop it happening again.
I don't see why they'd bother with VAT and attract more attention to themselves when they're already evading insane amounts of tax, and since they're not filing any accounts it's not like the 80k£ threshold (where VAT registration is mandatory) applies to them.
EDIT: I think the parent poster has added a last line to clarify, or maybe I missed it to begin with. Makes sense now.
Do you have any sources that make the argument for austerity? This is a genuine question - as I say I have no formal background in the subject but from what I've managed to find I have found little in the way of convinvcing arguments.
If your personal debts had grown exponentially over the past year, and your income showed no signs of exceeding your outgoings, would you not make some effort to reduce your outgoings?
It's really nothing like an "I've spent £5 on a beer and now that fiver is gone forever" outgoing, in scale or effect.
It might help keep a lid on that crisis of unaffordable housing as well that tends to follow when an excess of £££ is sloshing around.
the top 1% of UK earners account for 30% of all income tax.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/13/richest-bri...
The stratospherically wealthy dont have salaries they own yield bearing assets and have a much lower tax burden. This is where the real fat is.
Nonetheless to the average person it's easy to confuse the two groups.
I would be quite surprised if the policy ever actually comes into effect given the timing of its announcement before the local elections.
That said, it reminds me of the EU paying Libya and Turkey to keep migrants/asylum seekers from crossing over to Europe. I'm not convinced the migrants are being treated fairly.
The "fix" for reducing migration isn't to raise up walls and barriers, but to help improve circumstances in the country of origins; improve stability and economic outlook and the like. That said, another approach to reduce migration to the UK seems to be to make it less attractive.
Migrants are typically among the most motivated people in the source country. They are the ones that can get it together to organize transport, travel a great distance, maybe learn a new language… altogether a great effort. Perhaps one way to improve circumstances in the country of origin would be for those people to stay at home and put their effort into their own country.
But it turns out we actually like the economic consequences of having those type of immigrants in our country. They are, by and large, hard working and skilled. And so we continue to brain-drain the countries of origin, at their expense.
Which depending on which organisation you speak to, may or may not be legal:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61122241
Personally, I'm embarrassed at how xenophobic and closed-minded my country has become.
I ask as most people who claim asylum seekers should do so "properly & legally" are unable to describe what that process is and I find it odd that people keep referring to a process they have no idea about.
most posts about the UK now on HN turn into a /r/unitedkingdom whingefest about government policy mostly unrelated to the topic
can you imagine if every post about something in the US was the same?
mods need to step it up
Obviously not true.
Anyway blaming government failures such as social housing on immigration is a well known trick.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/oct/04/how-did-the-...
"Not building enough social housing is largely irrelevant to dealing with the social housing crisis." Hmmm.
If this is controlled, why has the number of people arriving in this manner grown enormously in recent years?
Also way to misrepresent the other commenter’s perfectly valid point.
The proportion of crossings by boat has increased relative to other means (air/lorries) because the technology for detecting undocumented entries via those other means has improved.
All this is easily looked up. The argument that "some people have done this therefore it is uncontrolled" is absurd.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-statist...
So this isn’t true at all. You’ve just demonstrated that your own justification is false.
The shortfall in UK's social housing can be traced back to Thatcher's policy of forcing councils to sell off their housing stock at firesale prices, and forbid them from using the money to build new ones.
Calling that an act of vandalism would be grossly unfair to the relevant Germanic tribes.
Any kind of source would be useful for such claims.
> It's not the middle classes who are struggling to find social housing or any housing at all.
I guess it depends on your definition of middle class. Middle class is currently the part that's being squeezed, way more than the poor (you can't get money from someone who hasn't any). So yeah, the middle class does get by marginally better than the poor (who often live in Dickensian conditions, true). But bringing down the middle class is not going to solve any of this. On the contrary, the middle class is what you need to develop to get a healthy democracy. The problem is the long tail of high incomes, roughly from the 8th decile up. Including the well-to-do conservatives who fan the flames and keep spreading the idea that the culprits are everybody but themselves.
Criminal Barristers are currently on strike because the legal aid system is so broken. Close to 10% of the entire country are currently on an NHS waiting list, with that number expected to continue to rise until atleast 2024. Meanwhile, the tax burden in the UK has reached it's highest point in 70 years - putting us in a similar position to the 1950s where the UK was paying back the debts from WW2. The Home Office has just announced that after years of failing to stop immigrants from reaching the UK by boarding small boats to cross the channel, the government has entirely abandoned its responsbility to grant asylum to asylum seekers and instead will pay millions of pounds to have Rwanda do it for us (in order to deter the immigrants that we've failed to stop crossing the channel, because we can't stop them crossing the channel).
Essentially we see this story repeatedly and the underlying question is "Why has no one actually investigated what seems to be an obviously illegal enterprise" and the answer is "Because we don't employ anyone to do that anymore".