Boats this month…

Nearer to the centres of commence?
Their families are there?
Transport links?

Scottish weather can be challenging?
Job opportunities?

Has anyone bothered to ask them why?

Maybe Scotland isn't as welcoming as Basgetti claims? Perhaps ask Basgetti how she knows Scotland is more welcoming than England, and perhaps at the same time she can list where NI and Wales come in her table?

The UK government allocates refugees and asylum seekers to councils UK wide Rosie51, so I’m not sure what your point is?

What I do know from personal experience is that once people have been given permission to settle and have found their feet in the UK they don’t all stay where they are allocated, because they want to be near the other people who they are familiar with, have the same religion, family ties, culture etc., just as British people so often do when they move abroad, in seeking to be near other like minded Brits.

Casdon my point was that if England is so less welcoming to immigrants than Scotland as claimed by Basgetti why wouldn't the message spread and immigrants go to Scotland?
Of course it's natural to want familiarity around you, I'd never suggest otherwise. I just get fed up with England being poorly compared with Scotland. I am allowed to question on what basis Basgetti made her assertion.
My borough has the largest Nepalese community outside of Aldershot. They evidently find England very welcoming.

My nearest town in Wales is a military base for the Gurkhas, and a lot of them settle here when they retire too, so we have that in common. They are integrated well with the local community, and they have been for many years. However, small rural market towns in mid Wales don’t offer the same life to individuals or family units from other cultures who are isolated from everything and everybody they are familiar with, and I don’t know how that could be changed easily. Local people are not unwelcoming, but offering accommodation, schooling etc. is not enough in itself to make a new place your home I don’t think, and they can’t be prevented from moving to places that suit them better once they have established themselves. There aren’t any easy answers.

Just a reminder that we are more than twice as densely populated as France, which is why we can't keep taking more people. Remember this.
UK: 749 people per sq mile
France: 322 people per sq mile
Stop saying we are not taking enough people. When France gets up to 749 people per square mile then we can have this discussion.

I don't think many native Brits want the whole country concreted over to provide homes for newcomers when we don't have enough for the 70 million already here. Then we have a struggling NHS system, education system, sewage system etc. How much more evidence do you want that this country is overcrowded?

There’s also the massive costs involved with taking in these asylum seekers. £17,000 to £41,000 PER PERSON PER YEAR (at the last estimate) they cost us depending on where they are housed.

Over Friday and Saturday we took in another 700 ! This just cannot continue.

Who are you reminding Chestnut, and what logic is it that persuades you that France has responsibility for people who are using it as a staging post because they want to settle in the UK? France is no more responsible for them than any other country they pass through. This is everybody’s issue!

Rosie51

^Though Tbf, Scotland is far more welcoming to immigrants than England generally is.^
Scotland has a nearly 93% white ethnicity, England around 81% white ethnicity, London as a whole 54% white ethnicity. I wonder why so many immigrants choose to stay in England and especially London when Scotland is so much more welcoming?

If you’re working in the black economy it’s far easier to find work in a busy city.

As I'm over here for a while now, and its a boiling afternoon, I thought I'd sniff round a few French newspapers and TV Channels to see where the French are at on this one currently.

Apparently, just like in the UK, many French citizens are worried about immigration, mainly due the economic strain on social services. Then comes that French pride in cultural identity, plus security concerns.

So, like in the UK, these anxieties have fuelled support for right-wing parties, and it's no surprise that Jordan Bardella, like his friend Nigel Farage, is also promising stricter border controls for France.

Then, another French TV report, showed a French journalist intentionally accompanying a small boat across the Channel to send a report. He said he was amazed at all the different languages, which made things chaotic at times, but the overriding conclusion was, listening to their relief on arrival, that these people on the boats felt their long journey was now over, and that they would be looked after and supported.

Well, their journey might be successfully over, but the next journey on UK soil could well last a jolly long time before they are productive and of any benefit to our economy rather than being a drain on it.

The quicker the process is achieved, the sooner they are permitted to work.
And again, invest in speeding up the process.

Maremia

The quicker the process is achieved, the sooner they are permitted to work.
And again, invest in speeding up the process.

Just what we don't need is more people, whether working or not. I've just posted that our infrastructure is unable to cope, housing, NHS, education, sewage and so on, all are struggling. I fail to see how speeding up the asylum process can help. How many more people do we need for goodness sake, isn't 70 million enough?

sundowngirl

Where do these migrants go if/when they are granted asylum or leave to remain? Are they still funded by the tax payer with free housing and benefits? Presumably going above those Brits already on the housing list .

This article explains.

cpag.org.uk/welfare-rights/benefits-scotland/more-info/benefits-migrants-factsheets/new-refugees

Casdon

Who are you reminding Chestnut, and what logic is it that persuades you that France has responsibility for people who are using it as a staging post because they want to settle in the UK? France is no more responsible for them than any other country they pass through. This is everybody’s issue!

My post was really in response to Graphite who was comparing us to France as part of a longer post (enclosed).

I thought folk on here were complaining about the cost of funding people awaiting their immigration status decision.
When the process is speeded up, so will be the process of removing failed asylum seekers.
Are you implying that many of the 'boat people' are actually genuine asylum seekers?
I still think that the process should be speeded up.
Labour has achieved this better than the Tories.

France isn't really playing its part in the process though. Did you know that only 25 per cent of asylum applications in France receive positive decisions? I think that makes them one of the bottom acceptance countries in the EU.
The UK on the other hand, accepts 70% of cases, so it doesn't take a genius to work out how the process can be speeded up by France pulling its weight more.

France receives about 160,000 asylum applications annually, compared with the UK about 110,000. Last year they gave asylum to 78,782 applicants, compared to 54,887 by the UK.

Yes, France receives considerably more applications than the UK, but does not grant asylum as readily as the UK. The UK has historically had a substantially higher grant rate - that means approvals - than France.
So, the UK grants asylum to a higher overall number of individuals than France despite receiving a smaller number of initial applications.
I'm reading this in France.

That is the historic position, but the UK acceptance rate has now dropped substantially. I just checked, and according to the Government data, the initial decision grant rate dropped to 39% in 2025, falling from 49% the previous year and substantially below the historic peak of 77% in September 2022. It may well drop further this year, as the backlog is now being reduced. I think France has been managing to process applications over the years more quickly than the UK?

This board really is an echo chamber for the propaganda printed by the Daily Mail on behalf of the Tory/Reform/Restore parties, posted by people who refuse to look at data or read the thread.

The reason per capita costs have been so high is because of Reform Party Jenrick’s decision, when he was a Tory, to use more hotels to accommodate asylum seekers. Meantime, the Tories stopped processing asylum applications while they faffed around with the Rwanda Plan. They ignored a legal judgement which said Rwanda was not a safe country, actually passed an Act that said it was safe. That country was never going to take more than around 200 people - as already explained. Now Jenrick has shuffled along the opposition benches to join the Farage propaganda machine criticising the Labour government at every opportunity when it is making progress in fixing the mess the Tories left.

Hotel use is now decreasing. By March 2026, the number of asylum seekers living in temporary hotel accommodation had fallen to 20,885, roughly 35% lower than when Labour took power.

Arrivals are being processed faster. As I wrote above, the number leaving the UK, that is, turned around at the port, leaving voluntarily or deported, is the same as the number arriving so the the net result is zero more people.

Costs are around £10,000 per person in the first year where accommodation is in asylum centres, met mostly from the Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget. Total costs including Border Force are 7 billion with 3 billion coming from ODA. Money that used to go abroad in overseas aid is now used here to process and support asylum seekers. Most of the costs are because people are not allowed to work while their application is pending.

That net sum of 4 billion is peanuts compared to the over 1.3 trillion a year that the government spends. Roughly, threepence in every pound the government spends is spent on asylum seekers until they are given leave to stay and can start working and becoming net contributors.

Of course, if the rich elites of the Reform and Restore parties and their even rich buddies, who lie to us about how much asylum seekers are costing the taxpayer, would actually pay more tax themselves instead of hiding their money in offshore tax havens and complex tax-avoiding structures (including the billionaire owner of the Daily Mail), the threepence in the pound “burden” on people with average incomes would drop to a negligible amount.

Just think about how disastrous the Brexit that these same people tricked the UK electorate into has been for the UK economy.

Farage has now said the £5 million bung from Thai-based billionare Harborne was a reward for getting the UK to leave the EU. We’re all poorer while he’s a lot richer. What fools people are.

Or what about tax reform? If anyone cares to look at Richard Murphy’s Taxing Wealth report, simply aligning capital gains and income tax rates would raise 12 billion.

Instead of going around and around in circles repeating Daily Mail propaganda , let's have a fact-based discussion with some suggestions for how genuine asylum seekers can be accommodated and integrated in the UK and be self-supporting during that interim period.

Allowing asylum seekers to work with strict supervision would be a start. The arguments against allowing asylum seekers to work has always been based on an alleged “pull factor” said to encourage economic migrants but there is limited evidence of that.

www.cgdev.org/blog/lifttheban-why-uk-asylum-seekers-dont-have-right-work

I think France has been managing to process applications over the years more quickly than the UK?
You might be right Casdon, I think I read somewhere 7- 9 months.

(But it's 10pm here now, and I'm cream crackered in the heat, so I'm off for a shower and bed!)

in this hell hole if you have agreen card you have to back to the country you came from and get a hat country becasuse of rapes murdered just because of the religion sex prefer food
stupid things there are thousands are dying in the everglands thiscounrty is going down fast black voting rights on and on andon