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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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