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Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

How would you suggest the UK "stops the small boats"? Any attempt to stop them by force or push them back would result in a large number of drowned migrants. The only way to stop them is to discourage them from getting in the boats in the first place. It would be nice if the French did that on their side of the channel, but they don't.

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.

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Why this false dichotomy? Either we do whatever authoritarian crap the Home Office are pushing this month or it's pushing people back into the sea and drowning them? No. What will discourage people from getting into boats is to provide safe routes in. Literally a desk in Calais where you can walk up and say "I'm going to request asylum and need a ferry ticket, have Borders Agency meet me at the other side please" would undercut the people smugglers to the extent that you wouldn't have boats any more. The French offered us almost exactly this but we turned them down.

And when an asylum claim fails, what happens to the asylum seeker? The French won't take them back, so what generally happens is that they stay in the UK regardless of whether the claim is justified. That's equivalent to having open borders, which I suspect is the underlying objective of many who strongly object to this scheme.

Plus, of course, they are already in France. They could claim asylum there.

> And when an asylum claim fails, what happens to the asylum seeker?

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.

"That's totally irrelevant, and not what we're talking about though."

Well yes, we were originally talking about shops selling American candy...

Sigh, yes I was thinking something similar. Not sure how we got from suspect sweet stores to illegal immigrants ...

Thanks, your comment made me smile.

Few are willing to say it outright, but the objective is not to discourage them from getting into small boats, but to discourage them from coming at all.

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.

Refugees' lives are rarely at risk. The reason that refugees leave 'safe' camps is that they, more often than not, will live with with the prospect of living their whole lives in a tent and subsisting off WFP rice bags. It's incredibly grim; life expectancies in long established camps are often under 45. Technically these people are economic migrants.

> https://www.habitatforhumanity.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/201...

> Refugees' lives are rarely at risk... It's incredibly grim; life expectancies in long established camps are often under 45.

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!

And what is the solution then when the population of the UK is 100 million, Or 200 million, and more still want to come? The government already lie about the genuine population because the numbers are so alarming. There has to be an upper limit on the desirable population of the UK before life becomes miserable: this is a small island and already one of the most densely populated places on earth in parts and little space to expand without further significant impact, no genuine wilderness, increasing pressure on the pockets of decent biodiversity left etc. etc.

There's plenty of room if there's still single story buildings in London.

Residential housing take up only ca 5 percent of UK land. The only reason it's that high is due to huge amount of low density housing (e.g. my terraced road w/houses and gardens take up ca. 40,000m2, near my local station the same number of people will soon be housed on ca. 2,000m2). Space is not an issue. Other infrastructure, maybe, but UK is going to need increasing amounts of immigration over coming years to offeset below replacement fertility rates to prevent a demographic crisis.

With fertility rates plummeting worldwide, there's no realistic scenario where the UK will be overrun.

Then you should be happy because Rwanda will do exactly what you said the French should have done.

Except they won't. The deportations are for asylum application in Rwanda, not to process them for onward passage back to the UK. This is trivial stuff.

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?

Given that failed asylum seekers will almost never be deported, you are essentially arguing for unlimited migration here.

And you're arguing for zero, which is frankly ridiculous.

No one is arguing for zero immigration. That's a fiction you've invented. I'm arguing for controlled legal immigration: i.e, the UK gets to decide who comes to live here. I was entirely supportive of the recent scheme for Ukrainians and the earlier BNO visa scheme for Hong Kong residents.

On what basis have you earned the right to reside in the U.K.?

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?

Yes — a society should preference it’s own children over outsiders.

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.

Funnily enough, that describes UK’s policy towards others for the past few hundred years.

There's a responsibility under refugee conventions to take on people needing asylum. The conflation of them with illegal immigration is quite ridiculous. The UK is a rich country (~6th highest in the world), we should shoulder some of the (small) burden that we're asked to - many other, poorer, countries take on much higher refugee burdens.

As in not feasible or ridiculous as a matter of principle? Would it be ridiculous for any other country or is the UK specially situated?

> almost never

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-...

What does it mean for an application to be "withdrawn"? If an asylum seeker gets a marriage/family/work visa and stops a now-unnecessary asylum process, is that a withdrawn application?

I suspect that "withdrawn" normally means the UK government has paid them to cancel their asylum request and leave the country (after which, admittedly, they might try again) but I don't have the figures to know how common that is.

This doesn't solve the problem.

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.

> The only way to stop them is to discourage them from getting in the boats in the first place.

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.

> Which does not work because to quite a lot of people drowning in the Channel is preferable to what they fled back home

But France is presumably a lot nicer tho?

I would not say that. Maybe a bit nicer, but they would not have the community effects they could find in the UK, where there are strong Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Iraqi networks. You would not guess from reading the British press, but there is actually a large population of migrants who stop in France, mostly from Africa though.

> but there is actually a large population of migrants who stop in France, mostly from Africa though.

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

> How would you suggest the UK "stops the small boats"?

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.

>How would you suggest the UK "stops the small boats"?

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.

Handing out cash does not solve any problems. Cf. Afghanistan.

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 ?

What do you mean by handing out cash cf. Afganistan? Last I heard Afganistan's billions of cash reserves were seized by USA. You mean handing out Afgani cash to US oligarchs does not solve any problems? I can agree with that.

"Half a billion dollars of aircraft that flew for about a year. A huge $85 million hotel that never opened, and sits in disrepair. Camouflage uniforms for the Afghan army whose fancy pattern would cost an extra $28 million. A healthcare facility listed as located in the Mediterranean Sea.

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...

You can't honestly be comparing the heinous wastefulness of an out-of-control military industrial complex' spending, with the civil desire to instead be funding schools and water treatment plants and hospitals and universities, and roads and bridges and clinics and other civil institutions targeted for destruction in the initial hours of the Wests bombing campaigns against the people caught in our targeting reticles...

It's fascinating that you specify "the English". As if the Scottish, French, Spanish, Turkish, and many others don't have a history of colonialism. Plus, your argument seems to imply that English people today must pay for the actions of their ancestors, which is quite a strong claim.

To be fair, Scotland did try and be a colonial power - but was incredibly incompetent at it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

It's kind of interesting that the area is to this day pretty rough, devoid of big settlements and the single reason you can't drive the length of the Americas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap

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.

My favourite bit is that the organisation set up to handle the English "bail out" money eventually became RBS which, a few hundred years later ended up requiring yet another epic bailout from the UK government.

I had no idea about that, what an interesting fact :D

I got that from the book "Shredded: Inside RBS: The Bank that Broke Britain" by Ian Fraser.

Another interesting fact: for a short while before it imploded, RBS was actually the largest bank in the world by assets!

The Spanish and Turkish have nothing to do with refugees crossing the channel, though. Why these people do that is because of the previous presence of the British Empire in their corner of the world, otherwise they'd have stopped on the way; there are several countries they have to cross that are not really any worse than the UK for people in their situation.

The Spanish have their own share of problems at their border with Morocco and along their mediterranean coast.

What has the former British empire got to do with choice of destination? Do you mean English speaking?

I though the reason they aim for the UK is the impression of a good quality of life.

For Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East in general, yes, the language and some kind of cultural knowledge. The same reason why a lot of Vietnamese, Laotian, or Lebanese refugees went to France some decades ago. They need to know about the quality of life, which happens mostly if there is some kind of cultural contact.

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.

The reason they desire to come to the UK is that is where the bombs are not being dropped by UK's forces and their allies.

Unless I've been unusually inattentive, I think I'm right in saying the UK isn't currently dropping bombs on France.

Its fascinating that your sly xenophobia has been applied in an argument posited in a thread specifically about Oxford Street, a very English institution, in an attempt to deflect from the very real crimes against humanity for which the English people, as recipients of war treasure, are indeed responsible.

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.

did the UK sold bombs (and other armaments) to the regimes of Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Libya... responsible for some of the refugee crisis you're talking about?

Yes. In fact, they did. And they also dropped bombs on those states, causing immense suffering for the civilians that became refugees.

Which wars are you talking about?

Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan .. and now Ukraine.

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...

The UK is bombing Ukraine?

It is certainly delivering weapons specifically for the purpose of making Ukraine into a living hell.

For invading forces you mean? The ones making life hell for the native population?

Given even the Home Office, an organisation which has basically institutionalised cruelty, is finding this one hard to stomach, I think the point is more that you have to look at the motivations for why they went with this idea: red meat for the mouth breathers.

If by "mouth breathers" you mean the majority of the UK population who would like immigration reduced, then yes, it probably is meant to appeal to them.

I think by "mouth breathers" they mean folks who are willing to dehumanise folks less lucky than themselves to have been born somewhere with relative economic prosperity because this is "our country".

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.

and the pushback policy has now been withdrawn - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/apr/25/uk-refugee-p...

Shocker /s

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.

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