Migrants: Stop the Hatred.
Migrants. You mention the word and it conjures up the classic British media images of people in dinghy’s crossing the channel, people clinging onto the axles of trucks, or sneaking into the back trying to get into our country. They are the cannon fodder of the far right. Remember when David Cameron described them as a swarm? This is the normal narrative of our media these days, but to be honest, many of them have always been like that and should’ve been binned years ago.
Say you wanted to travel to France — would you choose to get into a rubber boat and sail across one of the busiest shipping lanes on the planet out of choice? No, of course you wouldn’t.
What is hardly ever asked is why are they attempting to get here by such desperate means and when it is, the usual narrative is negative, for example as coming after your jobs or undercutting your wages.
We do have people who come here for work, generally seasonal, generally poorly paid, but it works out as a decent whack for them by the time they get home under their national exchange rates. Jobs like flower picking, fruit picking, damned hard labour that pays a pittance that nobody here would work for.
Alternatively, we have huge skills shortages, notably in for example, the health service. We shaft our own citizens so that training to become a nurse is made twice as difficult by denying them the means to adequately support themselves whilst training. We don’t train enough doctors or paramedics or midwives either, the list goes on. We rely on people coming here to fill these gaps, to be welcomed to here, to build a life for themselves here, yet they remain met with hostility. Despite being needed here, the inherent racism within the Tories means to countenance granting them citizenship ahead of Brexit was utterly anathema to them, their ideology means they even demand payment from them to stay.
But all these people can come here through entirely legal means, the news of late has been fixated with dinghy’s crossing the Channel and no-one’s twitter feed has been more full of it than Nigel Farage, desperate to remain relevant by standing on the cliffs pointing out to sea and bemoaning of the people coming in. The question never gets asked why are they coming, it’s all ‘here they come’.
The media jumps on this theme as well, with Sky news punching out breaking news of 151 migrants in small boats being brought into the country, or the BBC headlining with why won’t France do more to stop migrants coming here? Well they aren’t obliged to stop them for a start and if 151 migrants coming here ‘to steal your job’ bothers you, 70,000 dead Brits due to Coronavirus incompetence by our own government should have you screaming with terror and running to jump in a dinghy of your own.
Perhaps you think Brexit will sort the illegal entry problem out? Sorry, it won’t. We can currently send migrants back to France for example, if they fail in their asylum applications. If a migrant applies for asylum in the first country they come to, then we can send them back there with no quibble and no fuss under the Dublin Regulation. No deal Brexit, means an end to this. We’ll have no agreement to return people to France, or anywhere else for that matter; we either take them in, with little to no chance of sending them anywhere else because there’s no agreement permitting us to do so with anyone, or risk violating international maritime law by leaving them at sea to drown. When Priti Patel is trying to deploy the Navy to patrol our waters and block migrants, when Paul Golding and his terrorist organisation Britain First are bragging about having their own Navy and will be patrolling as a bunch of vigilantes in whatever bathtub passes for Capt Paul Pugwash’s HMS Racist, you have to fear the latter is what they may end up facing.
So why are they coming here? To beat the clock. They’re on borrowed time for as long as the rules we still have mean we have to take them in so they can legally apply for asylum. Once they get here, they have that right. Quite why they think we’re still an attractive destination when we’re on the brink of economic suicide & the media and hard right hate them on sight is what flummoxes me though.
So we have some migrants coming here temporarily or permanently to fill job vacancies, that are becoming increasingly less attractive to them, whilst still blocking many of our own citizens from training up to fill them ourselves. They aren’t stealing your job, or undercutting your wages, they’re simply filling vacancies we can’t fill ourselves. We have people risking their lives to come here to apply for asylum and other countries are getting blamed for it. Helen Whately coming on the TV to saying we’ll have control of our borders back after Brexit is just drivel, since we’ve never not had control of our borders, it’s just that the Tories like they have with everything else, have cut border control budgets to the bone and are now desperately throwing millions at it in an effort to shore it up before we actually do exit EU regulations at the end of the year and she again, just as the BBC have, spinning that Tory government line, says the French need to help — they are under NO obligation to do so.
All the negativity, all the abuse from both government and media, feeding into those sections of society that feed off of it, the Farage’s the Golding’s, it’s little wonder all asylum seekers, all refugees are questioned as to whether they are genuine or not. The fact is we sell arms to some horrid places. Said places then bomb the ever-living daylights out of their neighbours. We engage in wars where we have no business being, instead of supporting the victims of said actions. Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, the list goes on and on. We help to cause the damage, but we don’t stay on to help clean up. After Iraq the Taliban sprung up, Al-Qaeda sprung up. We arm the Saudi’s making us complicit in what is still happening in Yemen. We tried to flush out Al-Qaeda in Libya, but instead of staying to help stabilise the country, it has become riven by civil war. The general populaces of these places naturally are not going to want to stay there if they can help it. Some come here. If our actions have helped contribute to the displacement of these people, then we owe them. Whilst Helen Whately bleated about getting control of our borders back during her interview with Niall Paterson, Paterson made note of the fact the Tories have invited 3m people from Hong Kong to come here, that if we can do that, surely we can accommodate some asylum seekers? The fact is once we have crashed out with no deal at the end of the year — any notion Johnson will get a deal by then is for the birds — we will no longer be able to send people arriving by dinghy back to other European countries they may have passed through, we will under international law have to pick them up since it is illegal to leave them adrift and if they come from an active warzone, we cannot send them back to their country of origin either. We are going to be accommodating a lot more migrants, a lot more asylum seekers, whether you like it or not, but these people are not evil, not sinister, not after something they don’t deserve. Many are just desperate and deserve our sympathy, not our condemnation. A government that has slashed border controls, failed to negotiate any kind of deal on this issue with the EU, contributed to the displacement of many of them and regards them as irritants, as a swarm, absolutely does, along with their supportive racist media. Question Everything.
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