Is Albania really a safe place?

Primrose53

There is a business in our village which employs people to work on the land. Most come from Eastern Europe but we have had a few Albanians. The Albanians get absolutely drunk as skunks as soon as they are paid and the gangmaster was always getting calls from concerned people who have seen them collapsed on pavements or in hedges.

Oh well, if they're comatose in hedges or on pavements they can't be drug running, can they? Or doing any of the myriad nasty things that asylum seekers apparently do...

Primrose53

There is a business in our village which employs people to work on the land. Most come from Eastern Europe but we have had a few Albanians. The Albanians get absolutely drunk as skunks as soon as they are paid and the gangmaster was always getting calls from concerned people who have seen them collapsed on pavements or in hedges.

Sounds like a weekend in Newcastle, except the bodies lying around are usually very drunk girls

There is a business in our village which employs people to work on the land. Most come from Eastern Europe but we have had a few Albanians. The Albanians get absolutely drunk as skunks as soon as they are paid and the gangmaster was always getting calls from concerned people who have seen them collapsed on pavements or in hedges.

The Albanians do, but not those coming from other war-torn countries.

MOnica
They aren’t coming here to join our criminal classes
They rule the whole drug trade in the uk.
The migrants who came over in the boats were just the same as a worker going for a job. Some were to replace the ones who had been disappeared

irpimedia.irpi.eu/en-albanian-mafia-uk-cocaine-supply/#:~:text=This%20is%20the%20modus%20operandi,British%20Ministry%20of%20the%20Interior.

I think the drug and criminal involvement among the immigrants themselves, as distinct from the criminal gangs who organise the travel is really very small, Albanians excepted.

But the idea of them all doing these long dreadful journeys for the uncertain pleasure of joining our criminal classes, is as farcical as the idea that they do it for benefits.

However it is good propeganda for both our main parties, either promulgated, or not contradicteed as the case may be.

Yes, it's safe. No wars, no persecution. It's not that law abiding, apparently, but few places are.

Goodness knows how immigration officers are able to tell who is a legitimate asylum seeker from a potential drug dealing gang member. They destroy all paperwork and plead ignorance of English. No wonder there's a huge backlog of claims.

We didn’t feel unsafe at all in Bulgaria, and again, we hired a car, and drove around the country, because we’re not really sitting on a beach type people. What we did notice was a lot of poverty, but not everyone was poor.
We see poverty in Greece too when we get off the beaten track.
I think the worst poverty was in Mississippi, but certainly not everyone was poor. The black people were poor, and the white people much richer. There we stayed in some ex plantation houses, and some antebellum houses and it was incredibly interesting to talk to the people who owned these houses. People who claim discrimination in the UK need to take themselves off to Mississippi and understand what discrimination is.

Oldbat
I probably didn’t notice the young boys driving cars as I lived in Bulgaria at the time so it was no surprise. The same with the state of the buildings, and the money boys as they were known.

I’ve been to and travelled around Albania. It’s no more precarious than driving in, let’s say Spain where you have the highway pirates to be aware of when driving a hire car.
Locals and police were very polite mainly because they were fascinated by the smart car which we towed behind the motohome which they wanted to look at.
To the general public it is no different than any other ex communist country, except Romania.

maddyone

There are people all over the world who might want to leave their home country for various reasons. That doesn’t mean that they all have a claim to come to the UK or to Europe. There are wars raging in a variety of countries over the globe, but again, it doesn’t mean that Europe should be obliged to accept them. With regard to Albania, it has long been known that there is much crime and various blood feuds operating there. When we were on holiday in Montenegro some ten years ago, we warned by the car hire company that we were not to take our hire car into Albania because of the high rate of crime and therefore possibly of the car being damaged or stolen.

This

We went to Albania on a trip from Corfu and I honestly felt quite unsafe. Witnessed boys aged 11 or 12 driving about in mercedes cars. We also witnessed youngsters standing on street corners with wads of money. Lots of the buildings had bullet holes in. The person leading trip advised us to be careful where we went. We also saw some very elderly folk staring out from flats which had bullet holes and broken windows - really upsetting as they looked so sad. Having said that the scenery was beautiful and the archaelogical site at Butrint along the coast was amazing.

What might be safe for one group of people may not be safe for others.

Well, precisely, that is the job of the immigration officers to work out and make the relevanr decision.

I then wrote what you have written maddyon but not so well or as succinctly

There are people all over the world who might want to leave their home country for various reasons. That doesn’t mean that they all have a claim to come to the UK or to Europe. There are wars raging in a variety of countries over the globe, but again, it doesn’t mean that Europe should be obliged to accept them. With regard to Albania, it has long been known that there is much crime and various blood feuds operating there. When we were on holiday in Montenegro some ten years ago, we warned by the car hire company that we were not to take our hire car into Albania because of the high rate of crime and therefore possibly of the car being damaged or stolen.

I dare say you could say a lot of countries aren’t ‘safe’, in the way we understand it in the relatively fortunate U.K.
That is so true. Unfortunately a lot of posters on GN don't understand that and keep wanting to send people back to a "safe" country. What might be safe for one group of people may not be safe for others.

Fact check.
miclu.org/blog/fact-check-albanian-boat-arrivals

I saw that programme Glorianny it was a very small snapshot of a country ravaged by a corrupt government and extreme unemployment, particularly for young men. Neither reason qualify for asylum status in another country.

I dare say you could say a lot of countries aren’t ‘safe’, in the way we understand it in the relatively fortunate U.K.

But AFAIK Albania isn’t suffering from war, civil war, or any catastrophic natural disaster, so I’ve never understood why they’re allowed to claim asylum here.

I expect a lot of them are just hoping for a better life here, which is all very well, but we don’t have nearly enough decent, affordable housing, doctors, etc. for our current population.

The Albanians are running drugs in most UK cities.
Men that could fly in legally are coming n on boats.