General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

kathpressey:

"I think a lot of people voted to leave to stop illegal immigrants and fake refugees and we all know how that has turned out!"

The mass asylum seekers coming to Britain, started in the 1990s due to conflicts in the Middle East, the first Gulf War, Iraq persecuting the Kurds etc, that caused a lot of refugees to flee the Middle East and head towards Europe, and then there were the Balkan Wars in Europe, which were also in the 1990s, and as these things were happening, in 1995 the Schengen Agreement came into being, abolishing border controls between EU countries, and that meant that refugees from the Middle East who made it into the EU through places like Greece, then to get to Britain, there was nothing stopping them only a long walk, and it was the young males who made the journey, Britain was said to be the land of milk and honey, so they all wanted to come to Britain, and so when these 'people' because they weren't refugees, and when they arrived at the channel ports, in the late 1990s and early 2000s it wasn't difficult for them to sneak aboard a lorry and smuggle themselves into Britain, and once here they applied for political asylum, and there were thousands of them, and they were spread out by the authorities across the country, into places like Wigan, and British folk did not like it, but Tony Blair was keen not to upset the EU, because he wanted the top job there, when he handed over his premiership to Gordon Brown, so he dragged his feet in doing something about it, because the EU wanted Britain to accept the asylum seekers, so it was like now, folk were going mad over the amount of asylum seekers who were coming here to milk the British asylum seeker system, and Tony Blair only did something about it, when he could see that politically it was becoming damaging for him and the Labour Party, and he did not want to lose the then next general election because of it.

But how all of this has panned out, I believe has confused people, because as Britain managed to bring the influx of asylum seekers under control in the early 00s, by basically paying the French to turn the channel ports into fortresses, and giving lorry drivers heavy fines, if they brought any asylum seekers into the UK, they did get on top of the problem, and the numbers coming here dropped.

But in 2004, and as I remember it was just as they had got the asylum seeker problem under control, the free movement of people across the EU thing started, and EU citizens could just jump on a plane, boat or car and come here, and they had the same right to benefits etc, as British people had, and millions came here, and the EU immigration to Britain was perfectly legal, and it was running at about a third of a million people a year, so the EU migrants took over from the asylum seekers, as the foreign people who were coming here, only they were in far greater numbers, than the then asylum seekers and that was basically what the Brexit thing was about, and someone on this topic said we should have done more as a member of the EU to stop it, well as I remember the UK tried, and the EU would not listen, free movement of people between EU countries is enshrined into the EU thing, and David Cameron tried very hard in 2015 to get the EU to make a special case for Britain, because Britain was having a particular problem, with a massive increase in population, from EU citizens coming here, and the EU told him to go and swivel on it, they told him that Britain was just one of 29 countries, and all EU countries had to follow the same EU rules, and allow free movement of EU people, and all they did over those years from 2004 until Brexit was to refuse the EU immigrants access to certain benefits, but they still had the 'right' to come here.

So with Brexit the EU immigration has stopped, so now we are back to asylum seekers, who are travelling here across the channel by small boats, but as I have said to Golden Bear, when he is having a meltdown, when he sees the UK coastguard giving those asylum seekers a lift into Britain, those hundreds and thousands, which having been coming here across the channel in a dinghy, and although it is blood boiling annoying, it is not in the millions which we had coming here when we were in the EU, and the Rwanda thing might stop them completely.

As regards the Ukrainian refugees, they are genuine refugees, so they should speed up the visa processing, and get them into this country in the thousands., because it is the right thing to do.