Sending U.K. refugees to Rawanda

volver

Private jet, growstuff. With their Russian passport in the seat pocket.

Yeah, sure! And a certificate from the Cayman Islands in the other pocket, proving they've got a couple of billion stashed away? And an invite to Johnson to stay in their luxury villa?

Urmstongran says "come to the UK the right way". Would she like to explain how that is possible. We do not have a "right way". The right way is a properly organised, efficient and humanitarian way. That would be great. Sadly this government went for a hostile environment instead.

This scheme is one that sells these poor people to Rwanda; the UK will be back into slavery. Once there they will escape and try to get back to Europe to try once again to get here. This will lead to more people smugglers making more money out of them. Those coming after them will get here somehow - and become paperless immigrants; not daring to ask for the asylum status they are due. The idea that has been put out that this is for the sake of those who die trying to get here is absurd. All it would take to keep them safe would be to do the job properly.

Those in favour declare "numbers will come down". I am sure they will - for a couple of weeks. Loud noises will come out of number 10 praising the system in the first week or two (if we get that far). Then it will go quiet. No comment will be made as numbers go up and the 60 asylum seekers they could afford to send to Rwanda (using the costs per person from Australia) will be replaced many times over.

The only true way to have control is to stop the hate and stop the UKIP style politicking. This government does not need to squander this money selling people but they do need to do the job appropriately, efficiently and legally. Johnson doesn't have a clue and really doesn't care - his supporters are just the same. Patel, it seems, has even less ability to solve a problem.

poshpaws

The Rwanda scheme will cost over £120 million – enough money to give every refugee in Britain a decent life, instead of spending it on imprisoning them. This plan manages to combine being inhumane and cruel with being unworkable.

Is this the Diane Abbott school of mathematics? For how long would £120m 'be enough to give every refugee in Britain a decent life'? I suggest you do the maths at just the subsistence sum per day they are paid, let alone the cost of housing and 'processing' and maybe then deporting or somehow integrating them.

Not by queue jumping that’s for sure.

Germanshepherdsmum

poshpaws

The Rwanda scheme will cost over £120 million – enough money to give every refugee in Britain a decent life, instead of spending it on imprisoning them. This plan manages to combine being inhumane and cruel with being unworkable.

Is this the Diane Abbott school of mathematics? For how long would £120m 'be enough to give every refugee in Britain a decent life'? I suggest you do the maths at just the subsistence sum per day they are paid, let alone the cost of housing and 'processing' and maybe then deporting or somehow integrating them.

I suggest you do some maths too. It's going to cost a hell of a lot more than £120 million to send all those eligible to Rwanda and ensure they're supported, as the government is promising. The idea is that they will settle in Rwanda and not return to the UK. The £120 million mentioned is a down payment. The rest hasn't been costed.

Urmstongran

Not by queue jumping that’s for sure.

What are you on about?

how much per day does it cost to house someone in Yarl's wood?

I do have to wonder what plans the Labour front bench have tucked up theirs sleeves to tackle this problem?

There isn't a queue. Many asylum seekers aren't allowed passports in their home countries and leave for legitimate reasons.

Incidentally, can somebody explain why the biggest group who've been granted asylum are Venezuelans. I can understand why anybody would want to leave Venezuela at the moment, but aren't they "economic migrants"? Is it that they land at an airport and don't arrive by rubber dinghy? Or something else?

Urmstongran

I do have to wonder what plans the Labour front bench have tucked up theirs sleeves to tackle this problem?

Why? They're not in government at the moment, so can't do anything. Classic whataboutery!

So the refusal rate of asylum seekers is now a mere 28%. Why? It must take months, even years, to do a proper background check on someone from Ethiopea or Vietnam with no papers, and there are 10s of 1000s of them. The former DG of Border Force, Tony Smith, said on GBNews that thousands apply for asylum in several EU countries, and are refused each time, so they end up in Calais with a 72% chance of getting in.

Not bad odds.

would that be because 72% are credibly seeking asylum?

There has been a number of 'experts' doing the rounds on the media claiming the Australian model failed. This is a lie.

The Australian model is a great success and continues to be so. None of the interviewers has made themselves sufficiently aware of the facts of the matter, and so accept this analysis as correct.

These are the facts:
Numbers of migrants arriving by boat in Aus:
2010: 4950
2011: 4730
2012: 7983
2013: 25173
OPERATION SOVEREIGN BORDERS IMPLEMENTED 2013
2014: zero
2015: zero
2016: zero
etc

www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/pubs/rp/rp1314/boatarrivals

The critics focus on the cost per migrant held in offshore facilities - a few thousand initially and a few hundred latterly. What they never mention are the 25,000 every year who no longer make the journey.

This is the success of the scheme, not the few who end up in offshore facilities, who really represent the small number of failures in that they were not deterred by the policy.

To put this into some kind of context - based on FACTS:

In the year up to September 2021, the UK granted asylum to 13,210 people.

In the year up to June 2021, there were 31,235 asylum applications (many of which are still being processed and the applicants are living in limbo).

During the same period, Germany received 113,625 asylum applications and France received 87,980. The UK had the 17th largest number in Europe per head of population.

Where do people get the idea that the UK is such a popular destination? It evidently is not.

Somebody justified sending asylum seekers to Rwanda by mentioning Pakistani immigrants who don't integrate. That's a distraction and not even relevant. In the year ending December 2021, 29,924 Pakistani immigrants were granted visas. The came to the UK legally and didn't arrive "on boats". Many of them, by the way, have lower educational qualifications and are less skilled than the "boat arrivals". If there's a problem, it's not with the boat arrivals.

The point is that the people arriving by boat are a small percentage of immigrants and many of them don't have a legal way to apply for visas. Many of them have been persecuted in their country of origin and their own governments won't let them have passports.

So what exactly is the problem with people arriving by dinghy? They are very brave people, who have shown they have resilience and initiative to have traipsed half way round the world. They'd have to be fit to do that, so are hardly likely to be a burden on the NHS - in fact, many of them have qualifications/experience which would enable them to work in the NHS.

Above all, they are human beings!

A success for whom Urmstongran? I guess they'd have been OK if they'd been white.

GB News?

There has been a number of 'experts' doing the rounds on the media claiming the Australian model failed. This is a lie.

That's not true Urmstongran. I won't use the word lie, but let's say "dissembling". I have lived there, remember. I now about the way politics works there. I know about Dowling who turned up on the Jeremy Vine show this week to explain how successful everything had been and I know what kind of man he is.

I don't expect anything to change in your mind, so I will say this to the people who read and never post.

The Australian model doesn't work. If you think that a bunch of terrorised, suicidal and hopeless people amounts to "success", just because the Australians get to build the walls around their country even higher, you are being misled. This is not a model to follow. Have some dignity and do not fall for this story.

Downer not Dowling. Autocorrect.

Equally I'm not going to fall for the story of all these fit young men being well qualified and likely to be great contributors. Geographically, Germany and France are much larger countries than us. Population density is different.
I'm glad that Indian sub continent people are arriving here through legal channels.

Aveline

Equally I'm not going to fall for the story of all these fit young men being well qualified and likely to be great contributors. Geographically, Germany and France are much larger countries than us. Population density is different.
I'm glad that Indian sub continent people are arriving here through legal channels.

I believe they’re coming here, training up and planning to go back to India. And that’s the India that now seems to be siding with Putin. The India that we’re desperate to do trade deals with.

Last year Australia spent £461 million on their scheme. The £461 million was used to process 239 asylum seekers. [Source: Financial Times]

We intend to spend £120 million on our trial. At Australia's £2 million per person, if we were doing as "well" as some tell us Australia are, our £120 million will send 60 asylum seekers to Rwanda.

This system is meant to win the votes of those who believe there is a massive problem with the level of uncontrolled immigration and also think that Preti Petal's solution is a good one. That means these people have to believe that an extra 60 asylum seekers in the UK will break our country and its public services. They also would need to believe that spending £120 million to process 60 asylum seekers will put right this assumed huge problem with immigration. Even the uninformed and slow to compute could not possibly believe that.

Aveline

Equally I'm not going to fall for the story of all these fit young men being well qualified and likely to be great contributors. Geographically, Germany and France are much larger countries than us. Population density is different.
I'm glad that Indian sub continent people are arriving here through legal channels.

Germany and France might be bigger geographically, but the population density in Germany is only a little lower than the UK. Let me remind you ... the UK is 17th in Europe per head of population for granting asylum! Smaller countries than the UK are taking more asylum seekers. By the way, Rwanda has a higher population density than the UK.

I don't have an objection to people from the Indian subcontinent arriving, but you're missing the point. If immigration "per se" is a problem, it's not the people arriving by boats across the Channel who are causing it.

Nowhere did I say that all the people arriving on boats are well qualified, but I bet some of them are. By definition, they're fit, resilient and have shown initiative and bravery - all attributes which most employers want. Somehow or other they've managed to raise the money for the trip, so they're hardly going to be "down and outs" either.

So many glum buckets and Eeyores on here. “Oh this won’t work/oh we can’t even try it/oh this is just awful”
Yada, yada....

I dare say the proof of this particular pudding will be the eating of it. Hey - I might even want seconds! Who knows?
Not you, not me.

Let’s wait and see eh?

Feeling suicidal? Fleeing conflict in your homeland? Just seen your family die?

Don't be such a glum bucket!

Cheer up, Eeyore!