Furious French mayors accuse UK of ‘being in denial’ over migrant crossings in demand over cross-border deal

14 comments

1. Is this the same France that uses their navy to escort them into British waters?

2. [deleted]

3. > She said: “When the migrants arrive in Britain they work easily without documents… the British government must stop being in denial.

   I feel like this point is completely disregarded in domestic debates about the issue here. The arguments are entirely about how people are arriving and processed, as opposed to the largest pull factor.

4. Or, you know, you could get a grip on the gangsters operating in your towns and cities.

   There’s been a couple of stings recently carried out by UK news agencies that have identified people involved in migrant smuggling. Seems to me this could easily have been investigated by French authorities if they were sufficiently motivated.

5. Those migrants that entered France illegally, travelled all the way through France illegally and camped illegally on the north French coast?

6. Maybe you could fucking arrest them walking down the motorway towards the ports?

7. Easiest way to stop them crossing over is to give them less here than the French give them there.

   Genius isn’t it?

8. Fair point by the french and therefore likely to be ignored.

9. We’re not in denial. We know there are employers who will illegally take on these cheap workers to cut costs. This is not the problem we are complaining about. The whole point is that French authorities do *absolutely nothing* to stop these people from crossing, because once they’re on the water, they become *our problem*. Why should the French government spend a penny on a problem when they can hand it over to someone else with a smile and a wave?

10. We’ve noticed a trend of deliveroo drivers not matching their profiles. Apparently accounts can be subcontracted out. Just one way illegals can make money without encountering any issues.

11. When they come to the UK they should be put in a camp in a field not in a fucking hotel.

    If they cannot prove who they are or where they have come from they stay in that camp. If they wreck the camp then tough shit they have to live in it.

    They will soon stop coming here if there are no benefits, they are already safe in France and if they have family in the UK then the family are welcome to fuck off to France to be with them.

12. It translates as:

    “We want more money from the #10 mugs in addition to the blank cheques we’ve taken for doing nothing”

13. No one should blame France for doing the bare minimum to stop illegal migrants from leaving France for the UK – it’s absolutely in their self-interest for as many illegal migrants to leave as possible, so the french taxpayer has fewer welfare-dependants to support.

    The blame lies solely with the UK government for

    1. not introducing a national ID card scheme (this is a **big** draw for illegal migrants), it’s the easiest country in Europe to disappear into the black economy and access government services like welfare and healthcsre, because the government finds it incredibly difficult to verify who a anyone actually is

    2. We could, if we wanted to, leave the legal treaties which tie our hands with asylum claim obligations – and then introduce a zero tolerance approach where every illegal migrant is permanently barred from ever settling into the UK and is swiftly deported to a safe third country or their home country, (the decision should of course be up to them, if we could offer 2 different safe third-countries that would be ideal).
    Doing this would end the migration flows overnight because it would render the journey completely pointless. But our politicians choose to continue the status quo which is once you dip your toes in British waters you can file a spurious asylum claim and we will put you up in abotel for £45k+ per year, for free

14. The thing that no-one wants to actually say, but everyone knows, is that *nobody wants these people*. We don’t, the French don’t, the people of the other six countries they crossed to get to France in the first place don’t. They are a burden, a cultural problem and compete with other people already in your country for resources, employment and housing. And most of them are economic migrants … asylum advocates will say things like “fleeing poverty” to make it sound the same as refugees from war, but for most of them it isn’t. Even if you support large scale immigration, these people are taking spaces from other immigrants who would be more valuable.

    So from the perspective of a French mayor, the deal is bad because it keeps the burden in their territory and they’d like to see it become our problem, not theirs.

    But because no-one dares actually say that, there’s no real attempt to put up the walls around Europe as a whole to keep them out. Marginal countries got so sick of it that they are trying to pay external countries to make it their problem (for example Greece pushed for a deal with Turkey; Italy with Libya).

    The answer is not really to send them back to France, the answer is to send them back to wherever they came from. But we’re still too tied up in post-WW2 asylum and human rights mindsets. These people are not displaced German Jews, they are people choosing to move to Europe for economic reasons (in many cases, to leech off our welfare states), and our systems should not enable that.

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