RyanioBirdio
Well-known member
- Joined
- 1 May 2018
- Messages
- 8,763
The ability to exercise the Dublin III legislation ended for the UK on January 1. Which ironically means that we can no longer apply to send anybody back to other EU countries that they had been in on their way through like we used to, which means that if you actually reach British shores you’re pretty much golden. That’s why crossing numbers are through the roof this year, because we now have nowhere to send them to as we aren’t members of the club, so the risk of anybody being deported or transferred out if they make it over is virtually nil. We’ve made the prize of rocking up infinitely more attractive than it ever was previously. This is why we’ve been throwing tens of millions of pounds at the French to try to beef up security on their coastlines, because we’ve scrapped our own ability to move them on once they arrive if we so wish.It will do absolutely nothing to stop them coming. They have already risked life and limb to travel the thousands of miles to the French coast and put themselves and their families in huge peril as a result, so it is fanciful to think that not having a nice friendly yatchsperson to fish them out of the drink, will make all the difference to their journey choice! There is a 235% increase in numbers attempting it from last year. Probably because those considering it realise how successful it actually is. And it's quick compared to stowing away on a lorry, where the journey is now measured in months, not weeks, because of additional security measures along the route.
It will be interesting to see the first person tried for assisting a drowning migrant under the new legislation and how that argument pans out if it ever got to court. Legislation that encourages/forces inhumane behaviour towards another human being....? I don't think that's a very good place to be. I'm not sure if you know many people who would simply stand by and watch if they saw someone dying, no matter where they might've come from? Thankfully, I don't.
Whilst we're fixated and getting all het up, trying to address the symptoms, nothing will change. Talk of "rights" and "moral obligation" is utterly pointless. It solves nothing, but gives some on the Katie Hopkins end of the spectrum a reason to get angry about it.
And yet, for all this, we are still well behind the numbers of asylum seekers that our European friends are dealing with. Some 29,450 applications for asylum were lodged in the UK in 2020, according to government figures. That's down from a 2002 peak of 84,132.
More than 416,600 new asylum claims were lodged in European Union member states last year, including 102,500 in Germany, 81,800 in France, 37,900 in Greece and 21,200 in Italy, according to Eurostat.
The UK is also not, comparatively speaking, an especially popular destination for unauthorised boat arrivals. In 2020, Italy received 34,000 people who arrived without authorisation by boat, while Spain received over 40,000.
And you wait until we start trying to stem the flow of/getting angry about climate migrants.....we ain't seen nothing yet!
But I’m sure everybody knows that, because we knew what we were voting for.