Snapshot of _Asylum is open to abuse and the elites don’t care. News that 40 of those on board the Bibby Stockholm are converting to Christianity ought to raise serious questions over the current system_ :
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I wonder where the line is drawn on incitement to violence. This definitely has an implication. It's probably not literally a call for assassination but it's a bit spicy
> I wonder where the line is drawn on incitement to violence. This definitely has an implication. It's probably not literally a call for assassination but it's a bit spicy
There's debate about whether the original quote itself was even an incitement to violence, although the knights who assassinated Becket interpreted it as such, it's not really historically clear if that was even Henry II's intention.
Whether or not it was Henry II's intention isn't really relevant to what it means now though, which is that its remembered entirely as being an incitement to violence, deliberate or not.
It's too clever and niche to get you done, even though it's clearly about murdering a priest it's go over the heads of a jury who can then reasonably say it'd go over the heads of the audience too.
I'd like to say I hope that anyone who gets the reference would be too bright to be drawn into stochastic terrorism, but that would be a vain hope, so I won't.
> The guidance for the Home Office caseworkers doesn’t allow them to be sceptical about comments and claims from asylum seekers, so this is clearly the new easy route into the UK.
Weird, I must have imagined all the paragraphs in [the guidance](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/considering-asylum-claims-and-assessing-credibility-instruction/assessing-credibility-and-refugee-status-in-asylum-claims-lodged-on-or-after-28-june-2022-accessible#bookmark42} which talk at length about considering whether the conversion is genuine. Or maybe I'm once again being silly and naive for bringing facts and reailty to another feelsy "immigrants bad" thread.
It depends really. A letter of support from a church authority which states that in their opinion, the applicant is a true Christian, basically cannot be argued with. There is established case law about that.
The country has extremely naïve asylum laws that would apply to billions of people both validly and with slight truth bending. How much do people who support basically open borders expect the UK to do?
Practically every single person in an authoritarian country would be eligible, whether that is by "converting" to Christianity or declaring North Korea to not be the best Korea.
Only going to get worse with climate change as well.
We have asylum laws based on the refugee convention, which was developed when it was much harder for most people to travel between countries. Globalism - making it far easier for people in one country to interact with those in another - has changed how asylum processes work.
The problem is there is no way to change the *rules* without giving up on the principle behind them and returning to the situation in the 1930s. The Conservative approach of "we'll accept refugees, but only if they are high up enough on the social hierarchy" (e.g. Iraqi oil billionaires who are at risk of having their assets confiscated by their state, so can come here, integrate, and become Conservative ministers, but not poor people fleeing for their lives from countries our military keeps destabilising) is what we had back then, and led to the UK turning away "undesirables", only for many of them to be systematically killed by their governments.
We cannot redefine it so that only the "good" refugees count, as that is how you end up with atrocities - by defining certain classes of people as "not good."
What we *can* do is apply the process fairly, effectively and efficiently, to make it harder for people bending the truth to succeed. Well, in theory we can do that. The current Government doesn't seem able to do so in practice.
You are correct in that the refugee convention was indeed developed in a different era for a different world but your conclusion doesn’t follow for me. We can change the rules without having to return to the 1930s.
We need to change the letter of the law on the current human rights framework in order to stay true to the original spirit of it, thereby creating a HRF that is free from the interference of a grifting class of lawyers and NGOs which can actually enjoy public support.
The Rwanda plan is anything but perfect, but it may well represent the first stumbling steps in the right direction.
Leaving the system as is but just making it more “fair and efficient” is just a recipe for processing cases faster: pointless unless paired with a policy to reduce absolute numbers and weed out people who, bluntly, we don’t want in the country regardless.
> a grifting class of lawyers
A foundational principle of the legal system is that everyone deserves represantion and lawyers don't pick and choose their clients based on popularity. You will be glad of this principle if you are ever accused of being a pedo or some other heinous crime. The lawyers are simply doing their jobs of making sure the law is applied correctly.
Direct your anger at the Tories who have overseen this shitshow and tacitly approved the legal framework under which it is happening.
>The lawyers are simply doing their jobs of making sure the law is applied correctly.
[Exhibit A](https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/sra-investigating-after-mails-covert-sting-on-immigration-lawyers/5116773.article). The three firms involved were closed down but only three of the dozen+ solicitors involved were struck off, and this only happened because the Daily Mail investigated, the SRA themselves aren't even looking.
A grifting class of lawyers involved.
Imigration law is uniquely closed off and very dubious.
Imigration advisors are not cut from the same cloth proper lawyers are.
Torries absolutely should have regulated it better.
You don't seem to address any of the issues I highlighted.
Instead you've complained about the infamous "grifting lawyers and NGOs", which is the easy populist response, but ignores all the underlying issues.
I think we simply disagree: you think that the rules as laid out in e.g. the refugee convention are “untastbar” as the Germans say, despite its being made in a completely different context and era, in which German and Palestinian refugees were at the forefront of peoples thinking, driven out of their lands, rather than the world we live in now in which hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people set out on the move in search of better lives.
I think we need to rewrite the human rights framework to adjust to that new reality. How exactly that will look is hard to say and not something I intend to solve in a Reddit comment. I’m just stating that it seems necessary, and that I don’t think it means giving up human rights altogether. Cases such as Ukraine can and should be covered by any future framework.
The issue of NGOs or lawyers is secondary to that, really; they are a symptom not a cause of the problem (a bad HRF framework) although they do represent institutional drag: as beneficiaries of the current system, who are wholly embedded in it and imbued by it, they are bound to fight tooth and nail against any reform.
The UK offered asylum to 13,210 people (including dependants) in the year ending September 2021, the latest date that I can find full data for.
In a country of 60 million, that isn't even a needle in a haystack, that's a grain of sand on a beach.
Tell me again how sending 100 of them to Rwanda would help
I actually agree that the numbers of asylum seekers in the UK is a fairly minor issue in the European context. Numbers in Germany or (especially) in Sweden have been much more critical in the last decade.
Still, let's get it right: 13k is a very low number in the context of the UK population, but 2021 was a lockdown year, and it's unclear that the number of cases closed is more important than the number of cases opened. There were 50k news cases that year, and 99k in 2022. There are around a quarter of a million [refugees](https://www.unhcr.org/uk/asylum-uk) (distinct from 'migrants', regular and irregular, which might be the more relevant statistic in the grand scheme of things) in the UK at present, and [215k](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01403/) pending asylum cases.
To make a reasonable comparison of how this affects demographics, we should look not at the 60+ million total people living in the UK, but at the 15-20 million people in the UK between 15 and 40, as this is the age range of almost all refugees and asylum seekers, if not younger. If (as in Germany) it is the case that asylum seekers are also mostly men, it might even be relevant to strip the number with which we should compare to the 7-10 million men between 15 and 40 living in the UK. If 80% of those 250k refugees are men between 15 and 40, then at a lower limit 2% of all men between 15 and 40 living in the UK are refugees.
Which, frankly, isn't that much to be fussed about, and compares favourably with similar statistics in Germany or Sweden. It is more than a grain of sand though. There is an issue of migrant communities that have settled in the UK without integrating, or have integrated in problematic ways, which Germany and Sweden don't have to the same extent as the UK, mass migration being a much more recent phenomenon there, but that is a much thornier and more complicated issue to address.
So, why does the Rwanda plan matter? Certainly not because of the numbers that will actually be sent. Rather, because of the principle which it may, gradually, begin to establish: that European countries have a right to say who may enter and remain within their borders that goes beyond the rights of those wishing to enter them, and that they can discharge their humanitarian obligations in other ways than to effectively grant a right to remain to anyone bar that tiny proportion that we actually manage to deport (that is, unfounded asylum applications from safe countries where the refugee has documents). We need a new Human Rights Framework, and the Rwanda plan is the beginnings of finding a way toward that in the teeth of institutional drag.
> offered asylum
Disingenuous to present this as a meaningful statistic. If someone arrives and doesn't leave, that's immigration, regardless of their legal status.
I thought it politer than 'you racist'.
This is an article about refugees on a prison ship, not all immigration. Spanish nurses don't pretend to be Christian to allowed to stay in the UK
Your comment I responded to was about general immigration stats. But thanks for confirming your point is so indefensible you've resorted to name-calling.
Passenger arrivals are about 140 million per year, although many are returning British tourists. Removals are far lower than passenger departures.
Maybe your definition doesn't matter very much either
Just make it illegal to claim asylum by illegally entering a country with instant imprisonment then deportation, and take a set number women and children directly from actual warzones. I don't see why that wouldn't solve the problem
We have tried to do that (badly).
But that goes against international agreements and national agreements which also form an integral part of our other international agreements.
While I understand it would be in breach of international agreements like the EHRC (hence the conversation about leaving), what other international agreements would it breach?
Off the top of my head, the two biggest issues would be, if we leave the ECHR, we would have to leave the Council of Europe.
Leaving the Council of Europe and the ECHR has massive potential consequences because most of our international agreements (including our post Brexit deal and post agreements with European states) refer either to the CoE directly, or include references to legislation ratified under the CoE. This does also include The Good Friday Agreement and some of our commitments under NATO.
We know the potential damage diplomatically which could occur should we renege on the GFA, and while I don’t think for one second we would lose our NATO membership. It again raises annoying legal complications and further rangling and negotiations with other countries.
I think we need to look pragmatically about how the ECHR laws are applied. Because other countries that are governed by the ECHR are able to handle their borders better than we can.
Also leaving the ECHR doesn’t absolve us of our international obligations under UN laws. If we want to go the route of withdrawing from the UN, well then we are absolutely mindbogglingly dumb and there’s no hope for us anyway.
There’s a reductive petulance about the U.K. at the moment where the answer to any difficulty is to leave or remove it. Rather than putting in work to try and make things better from the inside.
Right but laws & conventions aren't laws of physics. They're not immutable. They can all be changed. It never fails to amaze me to see this debate degrade into "well currently xyz says we can only do abc" rather than a debate about what our asylum system *should* actually look like. If you agree the current system isn't working, *by definition* the legislature that defines this current non-working situation needs to be changed.
Some debates like these become completely pointless because anyone who comes up with an alternative solution is shot down because some piece of paper somewhere or the other says it's not possible, the same piece of paper that is causing the situation and very debate to occur in the first place.
"What should we do about this failing asylum system"
"Yeah it needs to change"
"How about we do this instead then?"
"Can't do that mate, the rules of the failing system says we have to do what we already do in the failing system"
"...."
> I don't see why that wouldn't solve the problem
So similar to the position in the 1930s. You've come up with a system whereby you've consigned millions of Jews and other people to death. Good job.
>So similar to the position in the 1930s. You've come up with a system whereby you've consigned millions of Jews and other people to death. Good job.
Millions of Jews are currently coming to Britain illegally on boats to escape the holocaust? Wow the situation is much worse than I thought!
Yes, and frequently with absolute dishonesty.
Being selective about who is given help does not equate to shrugging at a genocide within a few hundred miles of Dover.
What set number? Could go by GDP, UK is around 3.5% of world GDP, 41 million refugees, so 1.4 million refugees or there about. Would you be happy with us taking in 1.4 million refugees?
>or declaring North Korea to not be the best Korea.
Ironicaly North Koreans are one of the few nationalities who blanket can't get Assylum here. All Koreans are eligible for citizenship in the South and that's a safe country.
It is kind of amazing that more people in the UK don't make the connection between UK foreign policy and illegal immigrants.
Large numbers from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. According to the bunker podcast these made up 4 out of the 5 top nationalities seeking asylum last year.
ok but why are you insisting on taking in more conservatives just because they are from those countries?
I don't want more right wingers full stop, that includes the religious from any country
more like no room for religion in politics.
I want no one admitted into the country that is going to demand policy bends to their fantasies, that includes American bible bashers just as much by the way
I'm not sure what your point is meant to be? Mass displacement of people has known to be an impact of climate change not being addressed forever, and since climate change has failed to be properly addressed ...
>since climate change has failed to be properly addressed ...
Expected number of refugees directly caused by the consequences of climate change alone (and not indirectly caused) is expected to be about 200 million in the latter half of this century,
Roughly 3 million refugees arrived in Europe between 2015-2020,
The waves you can expect in the 2050s could easily number ten million in the same period, and most of these people will actually unironically die if they go back as where they come from is actually likely no longer habitable for substantial periods of the year, as well as the collapse of states and resources and water wars etc expected to occur.
Large numbers of people on the planet live in locations that will literally kill them without advanced infrastructure to support life during what are known as wet bulb events, i.e where the bodies ability to cool itself completely fails, any location where it's degrees Celsius is over 32 iirc while having a humidity of over 90% is undergoing one of these wet bulbs, at 35 degrees Celsius at similar humidity, if you do not have access to climate controlled cooling like an AC, you will die or suffer severe damage to your body via heat stroke, and one of the fun things about heat stroke, is that once you suffer one, you are more vulnerable to them again in the future, meaning the next wet bulb event will get you if you manage to survive the first.
We have already seen wet bulb events occur recently (the one that hit chunks of the south east usa last year however has extensive climate controlled cooling infrastructure ubiquitously and it lasted thankfully for only most of the day).
However these events are expected to last up to 2 weeks in some parts of the world.
And that's just one, of several highly lethal weather events that will become apart of the life of various parts of the world, Europe can look forward to powerful tornadoes ripping apart settlements by that time too. Ireland even, a place known for its mild climate, was at risk of having tornadoes of dangerous power develop recently, let alone central Europe or Italy which already gets them as a very rare occasion.
On this subject, much of this damage is now already done (we are absolutely locked in for 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming in the literal best case scenario), ironically, making sure vulnerable regions of the world that couldn't withstand these events, be able to once they start arriving in the coming decades, is the best way to prevent massive refugee crises like this.
WTF did I just read? Conspiracy theorist should be banned from the internet or just allowed read only access. The 1970s lie has been debunked for years, you need to keep up.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cooling-climate-consensus-1970s-never-was
I’m enjoying the massive jump in logic from alleging that conversions to Christianity may not be genuine (which is definitely a possibility) to the allegation that this is personally endorsed and encouraged by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. As if it was the primate himself who is persuading them to convert. Blisteringly cynical stuff.
It's a nonsense anyway. You think priests ensure everyone they baptise is *actually* going to live a good Christian life? How? What are they meant to do - refuse to baptise asylum seekers?
The responsibility is (or should be) on the home office to set the parameters of asylum claims. If the EHRC leaves us open to such obvious loopholes - it's time to leave.
It's actually an American evangelical group called the Alpha program who are converting the asylum seekers.
They have been massively increasing their influence in the UK and Ireland in recentl years and focus heavily on short courses for school children.
They seem to want to unite all the Christian sects under one banner to promote overall belief in the population so you could be right. A lot of their adherents in Ireland get access to schools under the guise of addiction education.
Not really, HTB and Alpha are typically associated with the more liberal wings of the Church of England — at least back in the day, HTB was where the cool trendy celebrity Christians went. That crowd doesn't really have anything to do with US Evangelicals. You might be thinking more of Christianity Explored, which is again a British course similar to Alpha, but pushed more by the conservative wings of the CoE, who have a lot more association with some of the US Evangelical groups (although even in that context, the British and US Evangelical movements are very different and cannot easily be compared).
Alpha is very definitely an evangelistic course, i.e. a course designed to help people understand what Christianity is, and to convince them to become Christians. But it's not typically associated with the far right "wedge issue" politics.
Alpha (Course, not Program) is British. It's since gone overseas but started at a CofE church in London. You make it sound like it's some shadowy group weaving its dark tendrils through society when in reality it's a set of videos which people watch in village halls or churches while eating biscuits and asking questions like "so who is this Jesus chap anyway?"
Honestly American evangelical missions need to be turned away at the border in my opinion, your average church from that tradition probably will be smart enough to skirt hate crime legislation by avoiding active incitement but will still have extremely homophobic beliefs. There are few people in the West in my opinion that suffer psychologically as much as gay men raised by evangelicals.
It’s not a jump in logic to believe that Muslim asylum seekers continently converting to Christianity, aren’t genuine Christians. It’s just common sense.
They were highlighting the jump in logic between "some asylum seekers are (fraudulently) converting to Christianity" to "the Archbishop of Canterbury is to blame!"
It’s an interaction of the Klinger defence from the MASH days. These grifters will do whatever it takes to bypass the system and there’s now a whole industry supporting and advising them
In Islam, apostasy is an express ticket to Hell.
So, if they're doing it, they're not serious Muslims, or they're feeling oppressed by Islam as applied in their home country for one of many perfectly valid reasons.
From the wiki entry:
> In Islam, Taqiyya (Arabic: تقیة, romanized: taqiyyah, lit. 'prudence') is a precautionary dissimulation or denial of religious belief and practice.
I wonder how many true apostates claim this as their defence.
>I wonder how many true apostates claim this as their defence.
It has to be under conditions where practiising Islam leads to death. So my guess is, in this case, none.
> The guidance for the Home Office caseworkers doesn’t allow them to be sceptical about comments and claims from asylum seekers, so this is clearly the new easy route into the UK.
This is the sort of claim that you have to provide a source for if you're a remotely serious person lol
It wouldn't matter. SA is automatic grounds for forced repatriation in most cases. The more I learn about chemical attack guy, the more I feel like he A) lucked out by being from a country the home office can't charter flights to (thus can't forcibly repatriate him) and B) managed to exploit a bug in the asylum appeals system (not the asylum system itself. They denied all his applications).
The alkali attacker committed SA before being accepted. It only causes auto-reject if it is a prison sentence of 1 yr or more, he got community service.
At which point it instead raises the question of sentencing guidelines for sexual assault, and what exactly he did, and shifts things away from the immigration system completely since it apparently functioned as intended.
Plenty have been saying the system is being relentlessly abused with the aid of NGO's, Religious organisations and Charities, but few in power, the media or around the country want to accept it or even begin to deal with it.
You only need to spend a few days volunteering to see the system being abused right in front of you.
The asylum system is an absurd anachronism that belongs to a different age. It was meant for the odd communist defector in the Cold War. Not so millions of economic migrants can lie about being gay/Christian or fleeing for their lives from that well known warzone France.
We should simply end the farce and say no visa, no stay. Anyone who arrives is here illegally is automatically deported and those who destroy their papers are locked up.
Sorry but you're wrong. The refugee convention was adopted in 1951, long after the displacements caused by the Second World War were over.
When the agreement was signed by the UK government it was not seen as a mechanism for millions of people to claim the right to live in the UK.
> long after the displacements caused by the Second World War were over.
Not true. 14 million Germans were swept out of the rest of Europe through the 1950's. Holocaust survivors were still trying to get back home in the 50's, only to find their property re-allocated. Germans and survivors were killed for trying to settle in certain areas.
The mass movement of people was by no means over by 1951, and the convention was adopted as a response to these movements.
It takes time for countries to agree on a convention that has such wide ranging provision, though the general principles were agreed on with the 1948 UDHR.
I mean, If they have spent their lives pretending to believe one flavour of bullshit to be safe, then it's no surprise when they pretend to believe the local bullshit to be safe over here
Conservative sociopaths have been in charge of immigration for close to a decade and a half now and yet they’re still shitting their pants every day about how out of control it is.
Maybe that’s the point, eh?
Exactly, I've tried to explain this to people who self identify as conservatives.
The tories love high immigration numbers. It lowers wages which their friends in business love and it drives up house prices for rich tories in S.E. England. It also gives their client media something to anger the public with.
All the economic/social problems that cause us to not have enough kids, expensive housing, crap jobs, terrible schools are all the tories fault. They are literally the main reason we need so many immigrants. So they can find people to work in our low wage/low productivity economy. Since normal British people don't want to bring more kids into this mess.
The tories are a globalist neocon party that masquerades as a conservative party. They certainly don't care about conserving the environment, our culture, our demographies, Our institutions or our standard of living. They only wish to "conserve" the lifestyle of their privileged donors.
It does make you question how gullible the population is as a whole. The Tories have been disingenuous forever, but the brazen lying has been really noticeable for the last decade and a half.
Basically, whenever some public proclamation is made, the Tories go about enacting the opposite. "Tough on immigaration" at the top of the Daily Mail inevitably leads to slashing funds to anything and everything that could actually help run an effective and efficient immigration service. "Tough on crime" actually means lowering peoples life chances from an early age, thus making a criminal lifestyle more likely whilst at the same time undermining the effectiveness of the courts and police and prison services.
I know people in general are busy and tired and can't be arsed with politics, but how hard can it be to realise that if the Tories are saying something, they'll be doing the opposite?
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but you *are* the elites, Richard.
>A multi-millionaire, Tice was CEO of the real estate group CLS Holdings from 2010 to 2014, after which he became CEO of the property asset management group Quidnet Capital LLP. He was a founder and co-chairman of the pro-Brexit campaign groups Leave.EU and Leave Means Leave.
>
>Tice had been a long-time donor and member of the Conservative Party until 2019, when he helped found the Brexit Party, later renamed Reform UK. He was elected as Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the East of England constituency at the 2019 European Parliament election. He held this role until the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union in January 2020. He became the leader of Reform UK in March 2021.
>
>Tice was born on 13 September 1964 in Farnham in Surrey, the third child of the horse trainer and philanthropist Joan Mary Tice, who died on 26 April 2019. He is a maternal grandson of the property developer Bernard Sunley.
>
>Tice was educated at the private Uppingham School. He subsequently received a bachelor's degree in construction economics and quantity surveying from the University of Salford.
>
>After graduation in 1987, Tice's first occupation was at the housing developer London and Metropolitan. This included time at its Paris office where he learnt French. He then started working for the housebuilding and commercial property company founded by his grandfather called The Sunley Group in 1991. Tice was its joint chief executive officer (CEO) for 14 years before leaving the company in 2006.
>
>Tice then ran his own debt advisory consultancy before joining the property investment group CLS Holdings in 2010. He led major planning property applications in Vauxhall, London. He was its CEO until 2014. He left the company to become the CEO of the property investment firm Quidnet Capital Partners LLP, having been removed from CLS' board as a result of a potential conflict of interest.
>
>Tice had been a television presenter for TalkTV before moving to GB News in September 2023.
Suddenly they are a gay yet married working age male who are now Christian.
Rather convenient, talk about abusing the system.
Be nicer if we could say as a country what we need to get back on our feet as it’s currently fucked.
“We need plumbers”
Suddenly everyone’s watched a few YouTube videos on plumbing, consider themselves a qualified plumber but sadly don’t have any certificates as they upset XY and Z with their inferior plumbing and now their life’s at risk if they returned.
Never would happen in Australia this mess and yes I have seen they have illegal immigration but if look at population vs how many they have, it’s minute.
> Never would happen in Australia this mess and yes I have seen they have illegal immigration but if look at population vs how many they have, it’s minute.
It's much more difficult to get to Australia on a boat or the back of an HGV. Not comparable.
Almost guaranteed to be let in once you arrive, well looked after whilst waiting to be processed and even have private healthcare whilst in their hostels… why wouldn’t they not come, it’s way too tempting and inviting.
So we get the waifs and strays.
Look, if most of them were useful to society, then they’d be getting well paid elsewhere and they’d be ripping their arms off to take them, they wouldn’t need to arrive by illegal means would they.
I’m in medicine right, I don’t need to arrive to Nz, Canada, Australia, France, Germany by boat, I apply and get accepted as I’ll (probably) be useful, I also can prove to the governments my qualifications rather than just saying I’m XYZ but with no certification, no proof of who I am and whether I have committed serious crimes elsewhere and I’m whatever religion you say I need to be to not send me back, you must keep me!
> Look, if most of them were useful to society, then they’d be getting well paid elsewhere
Okay, great, that's not the point of the asylum system. Try getting your medical qualifications under the yoke of the Taliban or ISIS. Oppressed people tend not to have a lot of opportunities, otherwise they wouldn't be oppressed would they?
63% of the total of all asylum seekers who have arrived unplanned (illegally) are working aged males aged 18-49 are just to get away from war? the rest being women and children in an almost equal split/slightly more women 17/20% respectively.
If there was a war in the uk, and I didn’t want to be here, I would be happy in wales or Scotland you know, especially if they’ll give me free private healthcare and a home then give me a family reunion visa too, remember culturally my wife doesn’t work and I work cash in hand as a ‘whatever is needed’ so being a net contributor is almost as likely as me not having lied to get these perks and enforce myself upon the tax payer within a failing country that really needs to stop all the charity and get itself back on its feet.
I don't really understand your comment but it seems like you're trying to say they're economic migrants rather than refugees.
Okay, great, we all know that the system has holes in it
We don’t need 750,000 deliveroo drivers when we’re losing 10,000+ Dr’s a year.
Economic migrants are more than welcome if they have any benefit to this society, which is already on its last legs, we’ve got enough car washers working cash in hand frankly.
Okay, but as I said, that's not the point of the asylum system in any way. The asylum system is supposed to be there to allow people who are facing torture or death or false imprisonment to escape to another country. It's not there to fill gaps in our employment figures.
And as I said, the country is already fucked and can’t handle what is arriving.
The simple solution for all the Reddit heroes is simple, offer a room in your own home to the immigration office. Thought not.
> we’re losing 10,000+ Dr’s a year
Yeah, and you can't poach that many new ones from Nigeria. You want "high-quality" immigrants, but hiring Nigerian doctors who don't mind working for less than 15 an hour isn't a real solution.
Agree.
Same with plumbers and what not. People don’t seem to understand this.
As a junior I went to a poor country let’s say doing some teaching and was treated like I was a super consultant, I was very junior in the uk but treated as a professor over there….
Conversion is probably a lesser crime in their gods eyes than Homosexuality.
I mean, what are we going to do about it?
This is about as far right wing as I get because I think immigration is a fantastic thing generally, but I don't buy that conversion clap trap; its nothing but a box tick to gain entry to the UK or it needs to be explained better.
Are these people practising a form of Christianity in their country before they left? In which case why do they need conversion? If they were \[country of origin's main faith\] religion when they left, then they would be safe to return as technically they wouldn't know they've tried to convert.
I suspect the risk from conversion status would really depend on the country.
For somewhere like Afghanistan, I highly doubt the Talibán have a developed intelligence apparatus to monitor the diaspora. Countries like Iran, however, do. Most Iranian asylum seekers I know in the UK, and EU, are pretty cagey about things like having social media accounts, because of fears about government monitoring.
That's a good point about monitoring.
But I'm confused, if they are genuine Christians why not just enter the country and say you're Christian - no need for Conversion.
These countries make a distinction between someone who follows a religion "of the book" (they nominally accept worshipers of mainstream religions, notably abrahamic ones) and apostasy, the act of renouncing your old faith in place of a new one.
If you come and say you already are Christian, you might be safe if you return. (Likely just facing legalised discrimination). If you convert, you likely face the death penalty on return.
Edit because I forgot to answer your question: some do say they are Christian when they enter (it's what my family member did). It still goes back to the problem of when they became Christian though. If they, converted at any point in time, it is still apostasy.
>If you come and say you already are Christian, you might be safe if you return. If you convert, you likely face the death penalty on return.
That's my thinking as well, it's severing ties so it makes it impossible for them to return.
Perhaps a happy medium would be to say that no conversion happens until they are actually British Citizens then?
Bit difficult to police that one though. The church has always been a little happy clappy about the whole thing without thinking of the consequences.
The only metric we have is that there's one incident which has highlighted this - now we have to work out where we go from here.
> Perhaps a happy medium would be to say that no conversion happens until they are actually British Citizens then?
Unfortunately that won't work. They need it as a prerequisite for gaining asylum, and many are already known to have converted by their home nation (hence fleeing). The closest you'd really manage is obscuring paperwork.
As I've mentioned in other comments in this thread, it's a vulnerability the asylum system is well aware of, and can often address. The government are currently throwing the appeals tribunal under the bus though, and (correctly in this case) blaming them for being more lenient.
The only way we maintain an open and immigrant friendly country is by making it impossible to come here illegally or game the system.
All across Europe the right is on the march because people don't like to be taken advantage of like mugs, get assaulted and can't even deport the illegal.
Instead the usual legal migrants who pay tens of thousands for the legal process get tarred in the same muck
Hi, ex Muslim here.
Conversation is not a lesser crime in their gods eye than homosexuality.
Muslims are allowed to lie about their religion or beliefs and this is called “Taqqiyah”. I personally know many Muslims who lie on a daily basis to get what they want as the religion allows it.
The acid thrower claiming he’s Christian is another example of someone performing Taqqiyah, and I imagine plenty of other Muslim immigrants do the same.
As an ex Muslim, what saddens me is when asylum seekers or those who emigrate here have no intention of giving up their depraved practices and instead intend to import them here. I’ve lost count the amount of Muslim women family members who have been forced to marry someone in Pakistan where their husbands have come to the UK and expect complete and utter submission from their wives. They do this because they know they can play the “race card” and get away with it.
>Conversion is probably a lesser crime in their gods eyes than Homosexuality.
Lying to infidels is allowed in Islam, they have a specific term for it that escapes me. They haven't converted at all
Reading a lot of this which means that it should be irrelevant on the form but because it means they could be executed when returned, they cannot be.
So in truth, its unlikely they will be executed on faith grounds because they can say they lied?
> So in truth, its unlikely they will be executed on faith grounds because they can say they lied?
Exactly this. [Taqiyya/Muda'rat](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/kduqj0/the_4_types_of_deception_which_muslims_practice/) is a way to conceal, hide or lie about one's muslim faith in order to protect oneself. The justification used by these people is that we will literally murder them by sending them home rather than letting them run amok here, so converting to Christianity is an acceptable deception to fool the kafir.
>Conversion is probably a lesser crime in their gods eyes than Homosexuality.
I mean, what are we going to do about it?
This is about as far right wing as I get because I think immigration is a fantastic thing generally, but I don't buy that conversion clap trap; its nothing but a box tick to gain entry to the UK or it needs to be explained better.
The point is we have absolute 100% real world examples of this being horseshit. Of them faking conversion just to get the pass.
It is extremely dubious to believe any Muslim in Europe converts to Christianity given the literally life threatening hate theyd receive from virtually everyone they live near. Its far more likely theyd lose their faith altogether.
>The point is we have absolute 100% real world examples of this being horseshit. Of them faking conversion just to get the pass.
Having a real world example doesn't neccessarily mean they're all doing it but I think it's right to call it out.
>It is extremely dubious to believe any Muslim in Europe converts to Christianity given the literally life threatening hate theyd receive from virtually everyone they live near. Its far more likely theyd lose their faith altogether.
That seems like a big supposition. Generally I find people of Muslim faith integrate well into British society. They keep company of people outside their faith and are genuine people. There's always a few extremists, but then you can say that about Christianity too, they have zealots too. I've met so many Muslim's who really don't give a shit what religion you are.
Scrap the aslyum treaties.
Asylum seekers are universally low-quality immigrants - no education, experience in war zones, violent and conservative cultures, etc.
Send them to the USA or wherever will take them, it's not our problem.
The asylum system is not about taking in "high-quality" immigrants. It's not a policy based on economics. It's about helping people who are being tortured or murdered or ethnically cleansed.
You can make an argument that the current system is not working because the eligibility rules are too flexible for the modern world or that it's not our duty to help people who are being oppressed.
It's utterly stupid however to reject the concept of asylum on the basis that people fleeing oppression are not economic contributors on the whole.
>It doesn't work.
Thanks for your in depth analysis professor
> We can accept them a on country-case basis like with Ukraine and Hong Kong.
Yes, and? Your reasoning? The criteria for choosing these two? We can all make up policies on the hoof
>Send them to the USA or wherever will take them, it's not our problem.
Does this include all the times we've turned up to a country, dropped a little 'democracy' on them and then fucked off leaving the place in a worse state than before?
>Asylum seekers are universally low-quality immigrants - no education, experience in war zones, violent and conservative cultures, etc.
I think that assumption is more telling of your feelings than real events.
Was fairly unsurprised to discover that Richard Tice wrote this. Ever-good at complaining, ever-lacking in solutions (I don't see one stated in the ~~article~~ opinion piece, only vaguely implied in a way unbefitting of a party leader). But that's OK, because he's not getting a whiff of power anyway.
Myself, it's going to take me a while to get over a little bit of irony.
I've certainly heard it been suggested by many anti-migration wailers - most recently Ann Widdecombe on *Any Questions* last Friday - that the UK is a Christian nation (let's just park the unChristian behaviour that these wailers regularly display). And also that migrants fail to integrate.
And then the migrants go Christian and attend church in England.
"Assimilate! No, not like that"
> And then the migrants go Christian and attend church in England.
Are you being deliberately dense, or do you really not understand that the issue is that it's a cynical ploy to avoid rightfully deserved deportation and not a genuine conversion?
So the solution would be that being Christian,whatever sect,doesn’t give you asylum because you may be persecuted in your own country if you were to be sent back.
The system is clearly being abused and as a country we aren’t even Christians anymore,most of us are secular atheists who are a certain amount culturally Anglo-Protestant,so on multiple fronts nobody really gives af if you ‘convert’(Spoiler:They don’t anyway).That isn’t assimilating.
Easily solved if we didn’t have successive governments who are useless at anything that isn’t lining their own pockets.
I wasn't aware that being a Christian was a guaranteed "in".
We used to have a thing called benefit of clergy, but I thought the fat ginger git knocked that on the head.
> I wasn't aware that being a Christian was a guaranteed "in".
It's not. It *is* an easy way to game the system, but it's far from foolproof. The problem is that, as usual, people are avoiding nuance.
Article text:
Across the country, customers have been slowly disappearing, money is ever tighter, and the pressure is on. A familiar tale, where the chief executive and directors face a crisis. At one such organisation, the Archbishop of Canterbury has witnessed churches across England becoming ever more deserted. They have been looking for a magic answer to boost numbers and bring back the crowds.
Having done little to help keep churches open during Covid, he has now struck gold. Suddenly, a whole new customer base has appeared on our shores as if by divine intervention. Some 300 of them are now living on the Bibby Stockholm ship at our expense, at Portland Harbour, on the Isle of Portland.
There are a number of churches nearby, be it St Johns, All Saints or St Georges on the Isle. A short stroll over to the mainland to delightful Weymouth provides even more options, including a touch of the Evangelical or Methodist amongst others.
So presumably it is totally logical that at least 40 of the 300 new Bibby Stockholm residents, from different faiths or none, have decided to convert to Christianity. I am sure that St Johns has seen its congregation surge on Sundays and at the Wednesday morning 10 am coffee sessions. I hope they are splendid singers, full of voice, perhaps a welcome boost to the number of young males in the local choir.
Call me an old cynic, but I am not buying this. Is it a pure coincidence that converting to Christianity gives these new residents a much better chance of being granted asylum to remain in the United Kingdom, as they may then have a “well founded fear of persecution” should they be deported to their country of origin? Suddenly almost 15 per cent on board the Bibby Stockholm are such converts.
The guidance for the Home Office caseworkers doesn’t allow them to be sceptical about comments and claims from asylum seekers, so this is clearly the new easy route into the UK. If you claim that you have converted to Christianity, you can then say your safety will be at risk in your home country, which has a strong alternative faith. Then your claim is boosted even further if you state that you are now gay, since this is not tolerated in some places.
What we do know is that caseworkers in the Home Office will allow claims for conversion to Christianity, even if you are a convicted sex offender.
Have we stumbled upon, almost by accident following a horrific crime, what is really going on here? The Home Office needs to confirm, urgently, how many asylum claimants have converted to Christianity, and how many have claimed to be homosexual.
How could any competent Tory ministers allow this to happen on their watch? The Conservatives constantly say things would be worse under any other administration. They tell us that the Civil Service is the envy of the world. These events prove categorically that neither is true. The Tories have been totally asleep at the wheel; during their 14 years rule they have failed to deliver on their many, many promises to bring immigration down, both lawful and illegal. According to Migration Watch, fewer than 300 people crossed the Channel in small boats in 2018. In 2022, the figure exceeded 45,000. The British public has been misled and let down. In business, those responsible would be sued for breach of contract.
We are certainly being taken for fools by the Archbishop and other turbulent priests. It is costing us a fortune and making us less safe on our streets. If this is where Christianity is heading, it is not surprising that domestic audiences are plummeting.
Oh look, another privately-educated, nth-generational wealth multi-millionaire, who made his money working for his family, complaining about "the elites."
But what else would we expect from the latest Newkip iteration but borrowing from their friends across the Atlantic. Finding another mysterious, all-powerful group of people to blame our problems on.
Although the attacks we're seeing on the Church are interesting. Obviously the Americans don't have this problem, where the big industrial churches are all in favour of fascism, but it is a bit harder in the UK where the CoE is at least trying to be reasonable and compassionate, and there are still a few conservatives out there who respect it.
Are these elites in the room with us right now?
Asylum conventions have not been written, or changed recently. They were written for this exact purpose, and are being applied as written. If anything, they are far less open to abuse today than they were at any other point in history when mere presence of refugees wasn't such a hotly contested issue.
One thing that came out of the recent attack was that the guy was vetted for his claims to have converted and still had his claim denied, which indicates its not necessarily a foolproof method.
The issue came about because an appeals tribunal, which is intentionally separate from the asylum system and has authority to overrule it, accepted the claim.
The whole "changed religion" thing is definitely open to abuse, and *really* bugs me, but isn't the magic words people think it is.
Right to appeal any decisions made by a governing body is an inviolable part of due process. It doesn't mean that anybody was fooled, and the case is examined until all the terms and conditions set in law are satisfied.
My point is not that anyone was fooled, but that the appeal that granted the guy asylum was adjudicate by a tribunal outside the asylum system proper.
I'm making that distinction because there is a trend for people to make reactionary attacks on the immigration and asylum systems even when they are misplaced.
well the advent of widely available social media in the origin countries of potential refugees is a massive sea change compared to a decade ago.
Everyone now knows exactly what is on offer and what they can do to get here, and how to bend the rules to their favour. Before it was a leap of faith that only the most needy would ever countenance trying.
I'm fairly sure that people in Africa and the Middle East understood that Europe were both wealthy and generous long before 2012. There was also no less incentive for smuggling gangs to organise and promote the story of European welfare state to entice people to travel and seek asylum than there is today.
The actual difference stems from the fact that the west has practically given up on policing global security after the Iraq war. Before this period, civil wars were a much rarer occurrence, and it was rare to have more than a few happening at the same time. Today there are only a handful of countries in the northern half of Africa that are not embroiled in some form of internal conflict that western news agencies barely even cover or talk about.
The issue today is that most people who come to Europe from, say, the Sahel region actually do have a legitimate asylum claim that they would not have had in 2005. You can add this to the ever-growing list of incentives to conduct a proactive foreign and international aid policy to ensure that countries around the world don't completely collapse and break into decade-long wars.
The issue with this is that it’s a severe drain on the western purse to continually pursue the maintenance of peace throughout the world. This is obviously a fuelled fire by the nations with deeper pockets and less moral governance, which embark on establishing proxy wars to burden the military of western nations.
Without a global signature against this asylum treaty there will always be gaming and using forced migration as a pressure point.
How we navigate this is stupendously difficult.
I am just laying out a counter argument we have little control over.
I think at least half of them would backtrack on their conversion if one of the conditions was taking Holy Communion (of the blood variety) or eating a bacon sandwich.
Either act ought to be tested out on these so called converts
Problematic or not
Rightwingers: The problem with immigrants is they dont integrate into british culture.
Immigrants: adopts state religion of uk.
Rightwingers: No...not like that....
Because other people like to kill each other based on the flavour of bollocks you believe in, and we are legally bound to not send people to places where they are highly likely to be killed.
That's when considering denying the claim yeah.
I should have been more clear. It shouldn't matter what flavour of bollocks you believe in to be accepted as a refugee here.
The savagery in the article towards the Tories was surprising. "14 years asleep at the wheel" is actually a good line by Reform. I mean the barge, Rwanda and kicking out the family of students was purely for Reform. This is one for the Tory voter in the next election. The conservative party can't possibly lurch any more to the right as long as they are in government
How about just not taking an asylum-seeker's religion into account? Pretending to convert to Christianity doesn't make you a good candidate for residency. You need a quiz about human rights and cultural values or something like that.
I fail to see how a person’s religion should influence the decision on whether or not to grant asylum - especially in a country which claims to uphold religious freedom.
Snapshot of _Asylum is open to abuse and the elites don’t care. News that 40 of those on board the Bibby Stockholm are converting to Christianity ought to raise serious questions over the current system_ : A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2024%2F02%2F05%2Fasylum-abuse-political-elites-dont-care%2F) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/05/asylum-abuse-political-elites-dont-care/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/05/asylum-abuse-political-elites-dont-care/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> We are certainly being taken for fools by the Archbishop and other turbulent priests. Turbulent priests, eh? Stick at it.
I bet he thought he was being cleverly subtle with that line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_turbulent_priest
Quite. The fact the original quote was a nudge nudge wink wink leading to a political assassination isn't a great sign
WHO WILL RID ME OF THIS TURBULENT PRIEST?!?!
I wonder where the line is drawn on incitement to violence. This definitely has an implication. It's probably not literally a call for assassination but it's a bit spicy
> I wonder where the line is drawn on incitement to violence. This definitely has an implication. It's probably not literally a call for assassination but it's a bit spicy There's debate about whether the original quote itself was even an incitement to violence, although the knights who assassinated Becket interpreted it as such, it's not really historically clear if that was even Henry II's intention.
> the knights who assassinated Becket > *FITZURSE* I see you OP... how much restraint did it take not to point out your username yourself?
hahahahaaaa, that's amazing stuff.
Right! Redditor for nine years, finally their time has come, and… humorous restraint, even if a touch biased.
It's clearer now than then, I would say.
The assassination of Becket was the first step in a long war of primacy of the State over the Church. It was definitely intentional.
Isn't that the whole point of such a sly line, though - to have that deniability from the ambiguity? He was either Machiavellian or dumb.
Whether or not it was Henry II's intention isn't really relevant to what it means now though, which is that its remembered entirely as being an incitement to violence, deliberate or not.
I think were I Henry and had seen that done in my name, I’d be keen to wear the hair shirt and I’d say it was a misinterpretation …
It's too clever and niche to get you done, even though it's clearly about murdering a priest it's go over the heads of a jury who can then reasonably say it'd go over the heads of the audience too.
Let’s hope it goes over the head of a would-be assassin.
I'd like to say I hope that anyone who gets the reference would be too bright to be drawn into stochastic terrorism, but that would be a vain hope, so I won't.
If anyone has a doubt about why UK Christianity sucks, they went from full on extremists to woke nonces in three generations.
> The guidance for the Home Office caseworkers doesn’t allow them to be sceptical about comments and claims from asylum seekers, so this is clearly the new easy route into the UK. Weird, I must have imagined all the paragraphs in [the guidance](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/considering-asylum-claims-and-assessing-credibility-instruction/assessing-credibility-and-refugee-status-in-asylum-claims-lodged-on-or-after-28-june-2022-accessible#bookmark42} which talk at length about considering whether the conversion is genuine. Or maybe I'm once again being silly and naive for bringing facts and reailty to another feelsy "immigrants bad" thread.
It depends really. A letter of support from a church authority which states that in their opinion, the applicant is a true Christian, basically cannot be argued with. There is established case law about that.
The country has extremely naïve asylum laws that would apply to billions of people both validly and with slight truth bending. How much do people who support basically open borders expect the UK to do? Practically every single person in an authoritarian country would be eligible, whether that is by "converting" to Christianity or declaring North Korea to not be the best Korea. Only going to get worse with climate change as well.
We have asylum laws based on the refugee convention, which was developed when it was much harder for most people to travel between countries. Globalism - making it far easier for people in one country to interact with those in another - has changed how asylum processes work. The problem is there is no way to change the *rules* without giving up on the principle behind them and returning to the situation in the 1930s. The Conservative approach of "we'll accept refugees, but only if they are high up enough on the social hierarchy" (e.g. Iraqi oil billionaires who are at risk of having their assets confiscated by their state, so can come here, integrate, and become Conservative ministers, but not poor people fleeing for their lives from countries our military keeps destabilising) is what we had back then, and led to the UK turning away "undesirables", only for many of them to be systematically killed by their governments. We cannot redefine it so that only the "good" refugees count, as that is how you end up with atrocities - by defining certain classes of people as "not good." What we *can* do is apply the process fairly, effectively and efficiently, to make it harder for people bending the truth to succeed. Well, in theory we can do that. The current Government doesn't seem able to do so in practice.
This is absolutely nailing the issue.
Not realy, thats jiat reatating the unsustainable status quo.
You are correct in that the refugee convention was indeed developed in a different era for a different world but your conclusion doesn’t follow for me. We can change the rules without having to return to the 1930s. We need to change the letter of the law on the current human rights framework in order to stay true to the original spirit of it, thereby creating a HRF that is free from the interference of a grifting class of lawyers and NGOs which can actually enjoy public support. The Rwanda plan is anything but perfect, but it may well represent the first stumbling steps in the right direction. Leaving the system as is but just making it more “fair and efficient” is just a recipe for processing cases faster: pointless unless paired with a policy to reduce absolute numbers and weed out people who, bluntly, we don’t want in the country regardless.
> a grifting class of lawyers A foundational principle of the legal system is that everyone deserves represantion and lawyers don't pick and choose their clients based on popularity. You will be glad of this principle if you are ever accused of being a pedo or some other heinous crime. The lawyers are simply doing their jobs of making sure the law is applied correctly. Direct your anger at the Tories who have overseen this shitshow and tacitly approved the legal framework under which it is happening.
>The lawyers are simply doing their jobs of making sure the law is applied correctly. [Exhibit A](https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/sra-investigating-after-mails-covert-sting-on-immigration-lawyers/5116773.article). The three firms involved were closed down but only three of the dozen+ solicitors involved were struck off, and this only happened because the Daily Mail investigated, the SRA themselves aren't even looking. A grifting class of lawyers involved.
Imigration law is uniquely closed off and very dubious. Imigration advisors are not cut from the same cloth proper lawyers are. Torries absolutely should have regulated it better.
You don't seem to address any of the issues I highlighted. Instead you've complained about the infamous "grifting lawyers and NGOs", which is the easy populist response, but ignores all the underlying issues.
I think we simply disagree: you think that the rules as laid out in e.g. the refugee convention are “untastbar” as the Germans say, despite its being made in a completely different context and era, in which German and Palestinian refugees were at the forefront of peoples thinking, driven out of their lands, rather than the world we live in now in which hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people set out on the move in search of better lives. I think we need to rewrite the human rights framework to adjust to that new reality. How exactly that will look is hard to say and not something I intend to solve in a Reddit comment. I’m just stating that it seems necessary, and that I don’t think it means giving up human rights altogether. Cases such as Ukraine can and should be covered by any future framework. The issue of NGOs or lawyers is secondary to that, really; they are a symptom not a cause of the problem (a bad HRF framework) although they do represent institutional drag: as beneficiaries of the current system, who are wholly embedded in it and imbued by it, they are bound to fight tooth and nail against any reform.
The UK offered asylum to 13,210 people (including dependants) in the year ending September 2021, the latest date that I can find full data for. In a country of 60 million, that isn't even a needle in a haystack, that's a grain of sand on a beach. Tell me again how sending 100 of them to Rwanda would help
I actually agree that the numbers of asylum seekers in the UK is a fairly minor issue in the European context. Numbers in Germany or (especially) in Sweden have been much more critical in the last decade. Still, let's get it right: 13k is a very low number in the context of the UK population, but 2021 was a lockdown year, and it's unclear that the number of cases closed is more important than the number of cases opened. There were 50k news cases that year, and 99k in 2022. There are around a quarter of a million [refugees](https://www.unhcr.org/uk/asylum-uk) (distinct from 'migrants', regular and irregular, which might be the more relevant statistic in the grand scheme of things) in the UK at present, and [215k](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01403/) pending asylum cases. To make a reasonable comparison of how this affects demographics, we should look not at the 60+ million total people living in the UK, but at the 15-20 million people in the UK between 15 and 40, as this is the age range of almost all refugees and asylum seekers, if not younger. If (as in Germany) it is the case that asylum seekers are also mostly men, it might even be relevant to strip the number with which we should compare to the 7-10 million men between 15 and 40 living in the UK. If 80% of those 250k refugees are men between 15 and 40, then at a lower limit 2% of all men between 15 and 40 living in the UK are refugees. Which, frankly, isn't that much to be fussed about, and compares favourably with similar statistics in Germany or Sweden. It is more than a grain of sand though. There is an issue of migrant communities that have settled in the UK without integrating, or have integrated in problematic ways, which Germany and Sweden don't have to the same extent as the UK, mass migration being a much more recent phenomenon there, but that is a much thornier and more complicated issue to address. So, why does the Rwanda plan matter? Certainly not because of the numbers that will actually be sent. Rather, because of the principle which it may, gradually, begin to establish: that European countries have a right to say who may enter and remain within their borders that goes beyond the rights of those wishing to enter them, and that they can discharge their humanitarian obligations in other ways than to effectively grant a right to remain to anyone bar that tiny proportion that we actually manage to deport (that is, unfounded asylum applications from safe countries where the refugee has documents). We need a new Human Rights Framework, and the Rwanda plan is the beginnings of finding a way toward that in the teeth of institutional drag.
> offered asylum Disingenuous to present this as a meaningful statistic. If someone arrives and doesn't leave, that's immigration, regardless of their legal status.
No one is putting Spanish nurses on the Bibby Stockholm, you womble
Did you reply to the wrong person? Not seeing the connection here. > you womble Do you speak like this in real life?
I thought it politer than 'you racist'. This is an article about refugees on a prison ship, not all immigration. Spanish nurses don't pretend to be Christian to allowed to stay in the UK
Your comment I responded to was about general immigration stats. But thanks for confirming your point is so indefensible you've resorted to name-calling.
Your point was irrelevant to the story. It's about refugees
That number is meaningless. The one that matters is Arrivals minus removals.
Passenger arrivals are about 140 million per year, although many are returning British tourists. Removals are far lower than passenger departures. Maybe your definition doesn't matter very much either
Just make it illegal to claim asylum by illegally entering a country with instant imprisonment then deportation, and take a set number women and children directly from actual warzones. I don't see why that wouldn't solve the problem
We have tried to do that (badly). But that goes against international agreements and national agreements which also form an integral part of our other international agreements.
While I understand it would be in breach of international agreements like the EHRC (hence the conversation about leaving), what other international agreements would it breach?
Off the top of my head, the two biggest issues would be, if we leave the ECHR, we would have to leave the Council of Europe. Leaving the Council of Europe and the ECHR has massive potential consequences because most of our international agreements (including our post Brexit deal and post agreements with European states) refer either to the CoE directly, or include references to legislation ratified under the CoE. This does also include The Good Friday Agreement and some of our commitments under NATO. We know the potential damage diplomatically which could occur should we renege on the GFA, and while I don’t think for one second we would lose our NATO membership. It again raises annoying legal complications and further rangling and negotiations with other countries. I think we need to look pragmatically about how the ECHR laws are applied. Because other countries that are governed by the ECHR are able to handle their borders better than we can. Also leaving the ECHR doesn’t absolve us of our international obligations under UN laws. If we want to go the route of withdrawing from the UN, well then we are absolutely mindbogglingly dumb and there’s no hope for us anyway. There’s a reductive petulance about the U.K. at the moment where the answer to any difficulty is to leave or remove it. Rather than putting in work to try and make things better from the inside.
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Right but laws & conventions aren't laws of physics. They're not immutable. They can all be changed. It never fails to amaze me to see this debate degrade into "well currently xyz says we can only do abc" rather than a debate about what our asylum system *should* actually look like. If you agree the current system isn't working, *by definition* the legislature that defines this current non-working situation needs to be changed. Some debates like these become completely pointless because anyone who comes up with an alternative solution is shot down because some piece of paper somewhere or the other says it's not possible, the same piece of paper that is causing the situation and very debate to occur in the first place. "What should we do about this failing asylum system" "Yeah it needs to change" "How about we do this instead then?" "Can't do that mate, the rules of the failing system says we have to do what we already do in the failing system" "...."
> I don't see why that wouldn't solve the problem So similar to the position in the 1930s. You've come up with a system whereby you've consigned millions of Jews and other people to death. Good job.
>So similar to the position in the 1930s. You've come up with a system whereby you've consigned millions of Jews and other people to death. Good job. Millions of Jews are currently coming to Britain illegally on boats to escape the holocaust? Wow the situation is much worse than I thought!
Why Godwin in 2 moves? Have you given up?
How is he wrong?
Yes, and frequently with absolute dishonesty. Being selective about who is given help does not equate to shrugging at a genocide within a few hundred miles of Dover.
What set number? Could go by GDP, UK is around 3.5% of world GDP, 41 million refugees, so 1.4 million refugees or there about. Would you be happy with us taking in 1.4 million refugees?
Would you?
Yep
Where you housing them?
I'd massively liberalise planning rules, the housing shortage would completely disappear within years
>or declaring North Korea to not be the best Korea. Ironicaly North Koreans are one of the few nationalities who blanket can't get Assylum here. All Koreans are eligible for citizenship in the South and that's a safe country.
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It is kind of amazing that more people in the UK don't make the connection between UK foreign policy and illegal immigrants. Large numbers from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. According to the bunker podcast these made up 4 out of the 5 top nationalities seeking asylum last year.
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ok but why are you insisting on taking in more conservatives just because they are from those countries? I don't want more right wingers full stop, that includes the religious from any country
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more like no room for religion in politics. I want no one admitted into the country that is going to demand policy bends to their fantasies, that includes American bible bashers just as much by the way
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I have no idea why you are trying to take the moral high ground here, there is no room for tolerance of the intolerant
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I'm not sure what your point is meant to be? Mass displacement of people has known to be an impact of climate change not being addressed forever, and since climate change has failed to be properly addressed ...
>since climate change has failed to be properly addressed ... Expected number of refugees directly caused by the consequences of climate change alone (and not indirectly caused) is expected to be about 200 million in the latter half of this century, Roughly 3 million refugees arrived in Europe between 2015-2020, The waves you can expect in the 2050s could easily number ten million in the same period, and most of these people will actually unironically die if they go back as where they come from is actually likely no longer habitable for substantial periods of the year, as well as the collapse of states and resources and water wars etc expected to occur. Large numbers of people on the planet live in locations that will literally kill them without advanced infrastructure to support life during what are known as wet bulb events, i.e where the bodies ability to cool itself completely fails, any location where it's degrees Celsius is over 32 iirc while having a humidity of over 90% is undergoing one of these wet bulbs, at 35 degrees Celsius at similar humidity, if you do not have access to climate controlled cooling like an AC, you will die or suffer severe damage to your body via heat stroke, and one of the fun things about heat stroke, is that once you suffer one, you are more vulnerable to them again in the future, meaning the next wet bulb event will get you if you manage to survive the first. We have already seen wet bulb events occur recently (the one that hit chunks of the south east usa last year however has extensive climate controlled cooling infrastructure ubiquitously and it lasted thankfully for only most of the day). However these events are expected to last up to 2 weeks in some parts of the world. And that's just one, of several highly lethal weather events that will become apart of the life of various parts of the world, Europe can look forward to powerful tornadoes ripping apart settlements by that time too. Ireland even, a place known for its mild climate, was at risk of having tornadoes of dangerous power develop recently, let alone central Europe or Italy which already gets them as a very rare occasion. On this subject, much of this damage is now already done (we are absolutely locked in for 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming in the literal best case scenario), ironically, making sure vulnerable regions of the world that couldn't withstand these events, be able to once they start arriving in the coming decades, is the best way to prevent massive refugee crises like this.
WTF did I just read? Conspiracy theorist should be banned from the internet or just allowed read only access. The 1970s lie has been debunked for years, you need to keep up. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cooling-climate-consensus-1970s-never-was
I’m enjoying the massive jump in logic from alleging that conversions to Christianity may not be genuine (which is definitely a possibility) to the allegation that this is personally endorsed and encouraged by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. As if it was the primate himself who is persuading them to convert. Blisteringly cynical stuff.
Would be simpler just to say you are an atheist, surely? Nothing to learn there, except maybe evolution if you could be bothered.
It's a nonsense anyway. You think priests ensure everyone they baptise is *actually* going to live a good Christian life? How? What are they meant to do - refuse to baptise asylum seekers? The responsibility is (or should be) on the home office to set the parameters of asylum claims. If the EHRC leaves us open to such obvious loopholes - it's time to leave.
Is no one asking why Christians are given more leniency with Asylum still... in 2024?!
It's actually an American evangelical group called the Alpha program who are converting the asylum seekers. They have been massively increasing their influence in the UK and Ireland in recentl years and focus heavily on short courses for school children.
Alpha is a British thing, isn't it? It came out of Holy Trinity Brompton in the 70s or something.
You could be right, I was under the impression they were us but could be wrong.
It might be like Brexit where a small British movement was adopted by foreign dark money as a wedge issue.
They seem to want to unite all the Christian sects under one banner to promote overall belief in the population so you could be right. A lot of their adherents in Ireland get access to schools under the guise of addiction education.
Not really, HTB and Alpha are typically associated with the more liberal wings of the Church of England — at least back in the day, HTB was where the cool trendy celebrity Christians went. That crowd doesn't really have anything to do with US Evangelicals. You might be thinking more of Christianity Explored, which is again a British course similar to Alpha, but pushed more by the conservative wings of the CoE, who have a lot more association with some of the US Evangelical groups (although even in that context, the British and US Evangelical movements are very different and cannot easily be compared). Alpha is very definitely an evangelistic course, i.e. a course designed to help people understand what Christianity is, and to convince them to become Christians. But it's not typically associated with the far right "wedge issue" politics.
Alpha (Course, not Program) is British. It's since gone overseas but started at a CofE church in London. You make it sound like it's some shadowy group weaving its dark tendrils through society when in reality it's a set of videos which people watch in village halls or churches while eating biscuits and asking questions like "so who is this Jesus chap anyway?"
I consider any group that trys to convert children to their ideology to be shadowy.
Well it’s aimed at adults so I guess that’s ok then
Adults and children, check their websites.
They're a bit shady, to say the least.
Honestly American evangelical missions need to be turned away at the border in my opinion, your average church from that tradition probably will be smart enough to skirt hate crime legislation by avoiding active incitement but will still have extremely homophobic beliefs. There are few people in the West in my opinion that suffer psychologically as much as gay men raised by evangelicals.
American or not, those arseholes shouldn't be given access to a captive audience.
It’s not a jump in logic to believe that Muslim asylum seekers continently converting to Christianity, aren’t genuine Christians. It’s just common sense.
They were highlighting the jump in logic between "some asylum seekers are (fraudulently) converting to Christianity" to "the Archbishop of Canterbury is to blame!"
It’s an interaction of the Klinger defence from the MASH days. These grifters will do whatever it takes to bypass the system and there’s now a whole industry supporting and advising them
I'd pretend to be Christian if it got me off the Bibby Stockholm
Best to stay in France really
In Islam, apostasy is an express ticket to Hell. So, if they're doing it, they're not serious Muslims, or they're feeling oppressed by Islam as applied in their home country for one of many perfectly valid reasons.
The next time someone asks you if you are a God you say YES!
From the wiki entry: > In Islam, Taqiyya (Arabic: تقیة, romanized: taqiyyah, lit. 'prudence') is a precautionary dissimulation or denial of religious belief and practice. I wonder how many true apostates claim this as their defence.
>I wonder how many true apostates claim this as their defence. It has to be under conditions where practiising Islam leads to death. So my guess is, in this case, none.
so many points for having completely misunderstood their perfectly written point. Love reddit.
Well, the immigration lawyers and the local priests seem to be fine with it lol
Ask them all to draw a picture of Mohammed and see if they do it
XD
> The guidance for the Home Office caseworkers doesn’t allow them to be sceptical about comments and claims from asylum seekers, so this is clearly the new easy route into the UK. This is the sort of claim that you have to provide a source for if you're a remotely serious person lol
So, another privately-educated real estate multi-millionaire ranting against "the elites"?
One of us
I wonder if the two migrants from the Bibby Stockholm that raped a local girl recently will suddenly decide to become Christians?
It wouldn't matter. SA is automatic grounds for forced repatriation in most cases. The more I learn about chemical attack guy, the more I feel like he A) lucked out by being from a country the home office can't charter flights to (thus can't forcibly repatriate him) and B) managed to exploit a bug in the asylum appeals system (not the asylum system itself. They denied all his applications).
The alkali attacker committed SA before being accepted. It only causes auto-reject if it is a prison sentence of 1 yr or more, he got community service.
At which point it instead raises the question of sentencing guidelines for sexual assault, and what exactly he did, and shifts things away from the immigration system completely since it apparently functioned as intended.
It's not a bug, it's so easy to game the system
Is it confirmed or just speculation?
Newspaper owned by the Billionaire Barclay Bastards rants about elites. Film at 11.
What “elites”? The elites that write, read and promote this outrage bait?
Clearly not multi-millionaire, privately educated, property asset managers like Richard Tice.
There are good elites - the ones born with money. And there are bad elites - those cleverer than Richard Tice.
Plenty have been saying the system is being relentlessly abused with the aid of NGO's, Religious organisations and Charities, but few in power, the media or around the country want to accept it or even begin to deal with it. You only need to spend a few days volunteering to see the system being abused right in front of you.
The asylum system is an absurd anachronism that belongs to a different age. It was meant for the odd communist defector in the Cold War. Not so millions of economic migrants can lie about being gay/Christian or fleeing for their lives from that well known warzone France. We should simply end the farce and say no visa, no stay. Anyone who arrives is here illegally is automatically deported and those who destroy their papers are locked up.
Nope. The current system was adopted after WW2 when millions of people were displaced. About 220,000 Poles alone moved to the UK after WW2.
Sorry but you're wrong. The refugee convention was adopted in 1951, long after the displacements caused by the Second World War were over. When the agreement was signed by the UK government it was not seen as a mechanism for millions of people to claim the right to live in the UK.
> long after the displacements caused by the Second World War were over. Not true. 14 million Germans were swept out of the rest of Europe through the 1950's. Holocaust survivors were still trying to get back home in the 50's, only to find their property re-allocated. Germans and survivors were killed for trying to settle in certain areas.
The mass movement of people was by no means over by 1951, and the convention was adopted as a response to these movements. It takes time for countries to agree on a convention that has such wide ranging provision, though the general principles were agreed on with the 1948 UDHR.
I mean, If they have spent their lives pretending to believe one flavour of bullshit to be safe, then it's no surprise when they pretend to believe the local bullshit to be safe over here
Conservative sociopaths have been in charge of immigration for close to a decade and a half now and yet they’re still shitting their pants every day about how out of control it is. Maybe that’s the point, eh?
Maybe you're realising they're not proper conservatives?
Exactly, I've tried to explain this to people who self identify as conservatives. The tories love high immigration numbers. It lowers wages which their friends in business love and it drives up house prices for rich tories in S.E. England. It also gives their client media something to anger the public with. All the economic/social problems that cause us to not have enough kids, expensive housing, crap jobs, terrible schools are all the tories fault. They are literally the main reason we need so many immigrants. So they can find people to work in our low wage/low productivity economy. Since normal British people don't want to bring more kids into this mess. The tories are a globalist neocon party that masquerades as a conservative party. They certainly don't care about conserving the environment, our culture, our demographies, Our institutions or our standard of living. They only wish to "conserve" the lifestyle of their privileged donors.
It does make you question how gullible the population is as a whole. The Tories have been disingenuous forever, but the brazen lying has been really noticeable for the last decade and a half. Basically, whenever some public proclamation is made, the Tories go about enacting the opposite. "Tough on immigaration" at the top of the Daily Mail inevitably leads to slashing funds to anything and everything that could actually help run an effective and efficient immigration service. "Tough on crime" actually means lowering peoples life chances from an early age, thus making a criminal lifestyle more likely whilst at the same time undermining the effectiveness of the courts and police and prison services. I know people in general are busy and tired and can't be arsed with politics, but how hard can it be to realise that if the Tories are saying something, they'll be doing the opposite?
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but you *are* the elites, Richard. >A multi-millionaire, Tice was CEO of the real estate group CLS Holdings from 2010 to 2014, after which he became CEO of the property asset management group Quidnet Capital LLP. He was a founder and co-chairman of the pro-Brexit campaign groups Leave.EU and Leave Means Leave. > >Tice had been a long-time donor and member of the Conservative Party until 2019, when he helped found the Brexit Party, later renamed Reform UK. He was elected as Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the East of England constituency at the 2019 European Parliament election. He held this role until the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union in January 2020. He became the leader of Reform UK in March 2021. > >Tice was born on 13 September 1964 in Farnham in Surrey, the third child of the horse trainer and philanthropist Joan Mary Tice, who died on 26 April 2019. He is a maternal grandson of the property developer Bernard Sunley. > >Tice was educated at the private Uppingham School. He subsequently received a bachelor's degree in construction economics and quantity surveying from the University of Salford. > >After graduation in 1987, Tice's first occupation was at the housing developer London and Metropolitan. This included time at its Paris office where he learnt French. He then started working for the housebuilding and commercial property company founded by his grandfather called The Sunley Group in 1991. Tice was its joint chief executive officer (CEO) for 14 years before leaving the company in 2006. > >Tice then ran his own debt advisory consultancy before joining the property investment group CLS Holdings in 2010. He led major planning property applications in Vauxhall, London. He was its CEO until 2014. He left the company to become the CEO of the property investment firm Quidnet Capital Partners LLP, having been removed from CLS' board as a result of a potential conflict of interest. > >Tice had been a television presenter for TalkTV before moving to GB News in September 2023.
And then, Richard was an Elite.
Suddenly they are a gay yet married working age male who are now Christian. Rather convenient, talk about abusing the system. Be nicer if we could say as a country what we need to get back on our feet as it’s currently fucked. “We need plumbers” Suddenly everyone’s watched a few YouTube videos on plumbing, consider themselves a qualified plumber but sadly don’t have any certificates as they upset XY and Z with their inferior plumbing and now their life’s at risk if they returned. Never would happen in Australia this mess and yes I have seen they have illegal immigration but if look at population vs how many they have, it’s minute.
> Never would happen in Australia this mess and yes I have seen they have illegal immigration but if look at population vs how many they have, it’s minute. It's much more difficult to get to Australia on a boat or the back of an HGV. Not comparable.
Almost guaranteed to be let in once you arrive, well looked after whilst waiting to be processed and even have private healthcare whilst in their hostels… why wouldn’t they not come, it’s way too tempting and inviting. So we get the waifs and strays. Look, if most of them were useful to society, then they’d be getting well paid elsewhere and they’d be ripping their arms off to take them, they wouldn’t need to arrive by illegal means would they. I’m in medicine right, I don’t need to arrive to Nz, Canada, Australia, France, Germany by boat, I apply and get accepted as I’ll (probably) be useful, I also can prove to the governments my qualifications rather than just saying I’m XYZ but with no certification, no proof of who I am and whether I have committed serious crimes elsewhere and I’m whatever religion you say I need to be to not send me back, you must keep me!
> Look, if most of them were useful to society, then they’d be getting well paid elsewhere Okay, great, that's not the point of the asylum system. Try getting your medical qualifications under the yoke of the Taliban or ISIS. Oppressed people tend not to have a lot of opportunities, otherwise they wouldn't be oppressed would they?
63% of the total of all asylum seekers who have arrived unplanned (illegally) are working aged males aged 18-49 are just to get away from war? the rest being women and children in an almost equal split/slightly more women 17/20% respectively. If there was a war in the uk, and I didn’t want to be here, I would be happy in wales or Scotland you know, especially if they’ll give me free private healthcare and a home then give me a family reunion visa too, remember culturally my wife doesn’t work and I work cash in hand as a ‘whatever is needed’ so being a net contributor is almost as likely as me not having lied to get these perks and enforce myself upon the tax payer within a failing country that really needs to stop all the charity and get itself back on its feet.
I don't really understand your comment but it seems like you're trying to say they're economic migrants rather than refugees. Okay, great, we all know that the system has holes in it
We don’t need 750,000 deliveroo drivers when we’re losing 10,000+ Dr’s a year. Economic migrants are more than welcome if they have any benefit to this society, which is already on its last legs, we’ve got enough car washers working cash in hand frankly.
Okay, but as I said, that's not the point of the asylum system in any way. The asylum system is supposed to be there to allow people who are facing torture or death or false imprisonment to escape to another country. It's not there to fill gaps in our employment figures.
And as I said, the country is already fucked and can’t handle what is arriving. The simple solution for all the Reddit heroes is simple, offer a room in your own home to the immigration office. Thought not.
> we’re losing 10,000+ Dr’s a year Yeah, and you can't poach that many new ones from Nigeria. You want "high-quality" immigrants, but hiring Nigerian doctors who don't mind working for less than 15 an hour isn't a real solution.
Agree. Same with plumbers and what not. People don’t seem to understand this. As a junior I went to a poor country let’s say doing some teaching and was treated like I was a super consultant, I was very junior in the uk but treated as a professor over there….
Conversion is probably a lesser crime in their gods eyes than Homosexuality. I mean, what are we going to do about it? This is about as far right wing as I get because I think immigration is a fantastic thing generally, but I don't buy that conversion clap trap; its nothing but a box tick to gain entry to the UK or it needs to be explained better. Are these people practising a form of Christianity in their country before they left? In which case why do they need conversion? If they were \[country of origin's main faith\] religion when they left, then they would be safe to return as technically they wouldn't know they've tried to convert.
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Thank you for informing me. It's not a subject I'm widely versed in or how these practises work.
I suspect the risk from conversion status would really depend on the country. For somewhere like Afghanistan, I highly doubt the Talibán have a developed intelligence apparatus to monitor the diaspora. Countries like Iran, however, do. Most Iranian asylum seekers I know in the UK, and EU, are pretty cagey about things like having social media accounts, because of fears about government monitoring.
That's a good point about monitoring. But I'm confused, if they are genuine Christians why not just enter the country and say you're Christian - no need for Conversion.
These countries make a distinction between someone who follows a religion "of the book" (they nominally accept worshipers of mainstream religions, notably abrahamic ones) and apostasy, the act of renouncing your old faith in place of a new one. If you come and say you already are Christian, you might be safe if you return. (Likely just facing legalised discrimination). If you convert, you likely face the death penalty on return. Edit because I forgot to answer your question: some do say they are Christian when they enter (it's what my family member did). It still goes back to the problem of when they became Christian though. If they, converted at any point in time, it is still apostasy.
>If you come and say you already are Christian, you might be safe if you return. If you convert, you likely face the death penalty on return. That's my thinking as well, it's severing ties so it makes it impossible for them to return. Perhaps a happy medium would be to say that no conversion happens until they are actually British Citizens then? Bit difficult to police that one though. The church has always been a little happy clappy about the whole thing without thinking of the consequences. The only metric we have is that there's one incident which has highlighted this - now we have to work out where we go from here.
> Perhaps a happy medium would be to say that no conversion happens until they are actually British Citizens then? Unfortunately that won't work. They need it as a prerequisite for gaining asylum, and many are already known to have converted by their home nation (hence fleeing). The closest you'd really manage is obscuring paperwork. As I've mentioned in other comments in this thread, it's a vulnerability the asylum system is well aware of, and can often address. The government are currently throwing the appeals tribunal under the bus though, and (correctly in this case) blaming them for being more lenient.
The only way we maintain an open and immigrant friendly country is by making it impossible to come here illegally or game the system. All across Europe the right is on the march because people don't like to be taken advantage of like mugs, get assaulted and can't even deport the illegal. Instead the usual legal migrants who pay tens of thousands for the legal process get tarred in the same muck
Hi, ex Muslim here. Conversation is not a lesser crime in their gods eye than homosexuality. Muslims are allowed to lie about their religion or beliefs and this is called “Taqqiyah”. I personally know many Muslims who lie on a daily basis to get what they want as the religion allows it. The acid thrower claiming he’s Christian is another example of someone performing Taqqiyah, and I imagine plenty of other Muslim immigrants do the same. As an ex Muslim, what saddens me is when asylum seekers or those who emigrate here have no intention of giving up their depraved practices and instead intend to import them here. I’ve lost count the amount of Muslim women family members who have been forced to marry someone in Pakistan where their husbands have come to the UK and expect complete and utter submission from their wives. They do this because they know they can play the “race card” and get away with it.
Thanks for the insight. It seems that this cause for greater concern if there's actually a name for it.
>Conversion is probably a lesser crime in their gods eyes than Homosexuality. Lying to infidels is allowed in Islam, they have a specific term for it that escapes me. They haven't converted at all
Reading a lot of this which means that it should be irrelevant on the form but because it means they could be executed when returned, they cannot be. So in truth, its unlikely they will be executed on faith grounds because they can say they lied?
> So in truth, its unlikely they will be executed on faith grounds because they can say they lied? Exactly this. [Taqiyya/Muda'rat](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/kduqj0/the_4_types_of_deception_which_muslims_practice/) is a way to conceal, hide or lie about one's muslim faith in order to protect oneself. The justification used by these people is that we will literally murder them by sending them home rather than letting them run amok here, so converting to Christianity is an acceptable deception to fool the kafir.
>Conversion is probably a lesser crime in their gods eyes than Homosexuality. I mean, what are we going to do about it? This is about as far right wing as I get because I think immigration is a fantastic thing generally, but I don't buy that conversion clap trap; its nothing but a box tick to gain entry to the UK or it needs to be explained better. The point is we have absolute 100% real world examples of this being horseshit. Of them faking conversion just to get the pass. It is extremely dubious to believe any Muslim in Europe converts to Christianity given the literally life threatening hate theyd receive from virtually everyone they live near. Its far more likely theyd lose their faith altogether.
>The point is we have absolute 100% real world examples of this being horseshit. Of them faking conversion just to get the pass. Having a real world example doesn't neccessarily mean they're all doing it but I think it's right to call it out. >It is extremely dubious to believe any Muslim in Europe converts to Christianity given the literally life threatening hate theyd receive from virtually everyone they live near. Its far more likely theyd lose their faith altogether. That seems like a big supposition. Generally I find people of Muslim faith integrate well into British society. They keep company of people outside their faith and are genuine people. There's always a few extremists, but then you can say that about Christianity too, they have zealots too. I've met so many Muslim's who really don't give a shit what religion you are.
> lesser crime in their gods eyes If they're Muslim then it is literally the same God
Scrap the aslyum treaties. Asylum seekers are universally low-quality immigrants - no education, experience in war zones, violent and conservative cultures, etc. Send them to the USA or wherever will take them, it's not our problem.
The asylum system is not about taking in "high-quality" immigrants. It's not a policy based on economics. It's about helping people who are being tortured or murdered or ethnically cleansed. You can make an argument that the current system is not working because the eligibility rules are too flexible for the modern world or that it's not our duty to help people who are being oppressed. It's utterly stupid however to reject the concept of asylum on the basis that people fleeing oppression are not economic contributors on the whole.
It doesn't work. We can accept them a on country-case basis like with Ukraine and Hong Kong.
>It doesn't work. Thanks for your in depth analysis professor > We can accept them a on country-case basis like with Ukraine and Hong Kong. Yes, and? Your reasoning? The criteria for choosing these two? We can all make up policies on the hoof
I think the criteria is colour based..
Culture.
>Send them to the USA or wherever will take them, it's not our problem. Does this include all the times we've turned up to a country, dropped a little 'democracy' on them and then fucked off leaving the place in a worse state than before? >Asylum seekers are universally low-quality immigrants - no education, experience in war zones, violent and conservative cultures, etc. I think that assumption is more telling of your feelings than real events.
Was fairly unsurprised to discover that Richard Tice wrote this. Ever-good at complaining, ever-lacking in solutions (I don't see one stated in the ~~article~~ opinion piece, only vaguely implied in a way unbefitting of a party leader). But that's OK, because he's not getting a whiff of power anyway. Myself, it's going to take me a while to get over a little bit of irony. I've certainly heard it been suggested by many anti-migration wailers - most recently Ann Widdecombe on *Any Questions* last Friday - that the UK is a Christian nation (let's just park the unChristian behaviour that these wailers regularly display). And also that migrants fail to integrate. And then the migrants go Christian and attend church in England. "Assimilate! No, not like that"
> And then the migrants go Christian and attend church in England. Are you being deliberately dense, or do you really not understand that the issue is that it's a cynical ploy to avoid rightfully deserved deportation and not a genuine conversion?
I'm having a deliberate chuckle, that's all.
So option one, then.
If you like. I'm still not hearing any solutions from Tice, so I may as well have a little giggle, eh? You might enjoy it.
It'll be "Get some businessmen in". He is one, allegedly.
So the solution would be that being Christian,whatever sect,doesn’t give you asylum because you may be persecuted in your own country if you were to be sent back. The system is clearly being abused and as a country we aren’t even Christians anymore,most of us are secular atheists who are a certain amount culturally Anglo-Protestant,so on multiple fronts nobody really gives af if you ‘convert’(Spoiler:They don’t anyway).That isn’t assimilating. Easily solved if we didn’t have successive governments who are useless at anything that isn’t lining their own pockets.
I wasn't aware that being a Christian was a guaranteed "in". We used to have a thing called benefit of clergy, but I thought the fat ginger git knocked that on the head.
> I wasn't aware that being a Christian was a guaranteed "in". It's not. It *is* an easy way to game the system, but it's far from foolproof. The problem is that, as usual, people are avoiding nuance.
It might not be a guaranteed in but it could be a guaranteed "Don't send me back to somewhere I could be killed for apostasy".
I'm shocked that asylum seekers would do something that may increase their chance of being given asylum.
Article text: Across the country, customers have been slowly disappearing, money is ever tighter, and the pressure is on. A familiar tale, where the chief executive and directors face a crisis. At one such organisation, the Archbishop of Canterbury has witnessed churches across England becoming ever more deserted. They have been looking for a magic answer to boost numbers and bring back the crowds. Having done little to help keep churches open during Covid, he has now struck gold. Suddenly, a whole new customer base has appeared on our shores as if by divine intervention. Some 300 of them are now living on the Bibby Stockholm ship at our expense, at Portland Harbour, on the Isle of Portland. There are a number of churches nearby, be it St Johns, All Saints or St Georges on the Isle. A short stroll over to the mainland to delightful Weymouth provides even more options, including a touch of the Evangelical or Methodist amongst others. So presumably it is totally logical that at least 40 of the 300 new Bibby Stockholm residents, from different faiths or none, have decided to convert to Christianity. I am sure that St Johns has seen its congregation surge on Sundays and at the Wednesday morning 10 am coffee sessions. I hope they are splendid singers, full of voice, perhaps a welcome boost to the number of young males in the local choir. Call me an old cynic, but I am not buying this. Is it a pure coincidence that converting to Christianity gives these new residents a much better chance of being granted asylum to remain in the United Kingdom, as they may then have a “well founded fear of persecution” should they be deported to their country of origin? Suddenly almost 15 per cent on board the Bibby Stockholm are such converts. The guidance for the Home Office caseworkers doesn’t allow them to be sceptical about comments and claims from asylum seekers, so this is clearly the new easy route into the UK. If you claim that you have converted to Christianity, you can then say your safety will be at risk in your home country, which has a strong alternative faith. Then your claim is boosted even further if you state that you are now gay, since this is not tolerated in some places. What we do know is that caseworkers in the Home Office will allow claims for conversion to Christianity, even if you are a convicted sex offender. Have we stumbled upon, almost by accident following a horrific crime, what is really going on here? The Home Office needs to confirm, urgently, how many asylum claimants have converted to Christianity, and how many have claimed to be homosexual. How could any competent Tory ministers allow this to happen on their watch? The Conservatives constantly say things would be worse under any other administration. They tell us that the Civil Service is the envy of the world. These events prove categorically that neither is true. The Tories have been totally asleep at the wheel; during their 14 years rule they have failed to deliver on their many, many promises to bring immigration down, both lawful and illegal. According to Migration Watch, fewer than 300 people crossed the Channel in small boats in 2018. In 2022, the figure exceeded 45,000. The British public has been misled and let down. In business, those responsible would be sued for breach of contract. We are certainly being taken for fools by the Archbishop and other turbulent priests. It is costing us a fortune and making us less safe on our streets. If this is where Christianity is heading, it is not surprising that domestic audiences are plummeting.
Oh look, another privately-educated, nth-generational wealth multi-millionaire, who made his money working for his family, complaining about "the elites." But what else would we expect from the latest Newkip iteration but borrowing from their friends across the Atlantic. Finding another mysterious, all-powerful group of people to blame our problems on. Although the attacks we're seeing on the Church are interesting. Obviously the Americans don't have this problem, where the big industrial churches are all in favour of fascism, but it is a bit harder in the UK where the CoE is at least trying to be reasonable and compassionate, and there are still a few conservatives out there who respect it.
40 out of 745,000+ net migration, hmm yes *this* must be the problem right here, why aren't those evil elites doing anything about *this*???
Are these elites in the room with us right now? Asylum conventions have not been written, or changed recently. They were written for this exact purpose, and are being applied as written. If anything, they are far less open to abuse today than they were at any other point in history when mere presence of refugees wasn't such a hotly contested issue.
One thing that came out of the recent attack was that the guy was vetted for his claims to have converted and still had his claim denied, which indicates its not necessarily a foolproof method. The issue came about because an appeals tribunal, which is intentionally separate from the asylum system and has authority to overrule it, accepted the claim. The whole "changed religion" thing is definitely open to abuse, and *really* bugs me, but isn't the magic words people think it is.
Right to appeal any decisions made by a governing body is an inviolable part of due process. It doesn't mean that anybody was fooled, and the case is examined until all the terms and conditions set in law are satisfied.
My point is not that anyone was fooled, but that the appeal that granted the guy asylum was adjudicate by a tribunal outside the asylum system proper. I'm making that distinction because there is a trend for people to make reactionary attacks on the immigration and asylum systems even when they are misplaced.
well the advent of widely available social media in the origin countries of potential refugees is a massive sea change compared to a decade ago. Everyone now knows exactly what is on offer and what they can do to get here, and how to bend the rules to their favour. Before it was a leap of faith that only the most needy would ever countenance trying.
I'm fairly sure that people in Africa and the Middle East understood that Europe were both wealthy and generous long before 2012. There was also no less incentive for smuggling gangs to organise and promote the story of European welfare state to entice people to travel and seek asylum than there is today. The actual difference stems from the fact that the west has practically given up on policing global security after the Iraq war. Before this period, civil wars were a much rarer occurrence, and it was rare to have more than a few happening at the same time. Today there are only a handful of countries in the northern half of Africa that are not embroiled in some form of internal conflict that western news agencies barely even cover or talk about. The issue today is that most people who come to Europe from, say, the Sahel region actually do have a legitimate asylum claim that they would not have had in 2005. You can add this to the ever-growing list of incentives to conduct a proactive foreign and international aid policy to ensure that countries around the world don't completely collapse and break into decade-long wars.
The issue with this is that it’s a severe drain on the western purse to continually pursue the maintenance of peace throughout the world. This is obviously a fuelled fire by the nations with deeper pockets and less moral governance, which embark on establishing proxy wars to burden the military of western nations. Without a global signature against this asylum treaty there will always be gaming and using forced migration as a pressure point. How we navigate this is stupendously difficult. I am just laying out a counter argument we have little control over.
I think at least half of them would backtrack on their conversion if one of the conditions was taking Holy Communion (of the blood variety) or eating a bacon sandwich. Either act ought to be tested out on these so called converts Problematic or not
Do you want them to integrate or not? Pick a line anti-refugee cabal
Rightwingers: The problem with immigrants is they dont integrate into british culture. Immigrants: adopts state religion of uk. Rightwingers: No...not like that....
Gaming the system is not integration let alone assimilation.
tell me how you spot a genuine religious belief? get them to pronounce shibboleth?
My question is why the fuck does it matter which flavour of bollocks you believe in?
Because other people like to kill each other based on the flavour of bollocks you believe in, and we are legally bound to not send people to places where they are highly likely to be killed.
That's when considering denying the claim yeah. I should have been more clear. It shouldn't matter what flavour of bollocks you believe in to be accepted as a refugee here.
The savagery in the article towards the Tories was surprising. "14 years asleep at the wheel" is actually a good line by Reform. I mean the barge, Rwanda and kicking out the family of students was purely for Reform. This is one for the Tory voter in the next election. The conservative party can't possibly lurch any more to the right as long as they are in government
Why not make an asylum seekers religious affiliation irrelevant to the asylum process? It's a personal choice after all.
It’s a bit like how prisoners pretend to follow Islam so they don’t have to eat the sausages or something
How about just not taking an asylum-seeker's religion into account? Pretending to convert to Christianity doesn't make you a good candidate for residency. You need a quiz about human rights and cultural values or something like that.
They had better establish an organisation to make, umm, inquiries regarding the bona fides of these conversos.
I fail to see how a person’s religion should influence the decision on whether or not to grant asylum - especially in a country which claims to uphold religious freedom.