UK will finally off shore illegal asylum seekers crossing the channel

Are you sure it's not Joanna Lumley?

Cute Hoorsm??? I remember back in the 60's there was the 10 pound assisted passage to Australia for anyone who met the criteria of their labour demand's. And it was a long list. Only condition was that you had to stay and work a minimum of 2 years.

DB post.

Sorry, I literally know 100s( worked with a lot of them) of folk that went to the UK in the 70s. I do not know 1 person who went there to go on the dole. I'm sure there were a very small percentage as is the case with everything but those doing do in the 70s would have been lacking brain cells as welfare in the UK was awful at the time.

Yes, the Tory Party, GB News and the Daily Mail probably couldn't give a flying fig about refugee numbers. It's all about waging 'culture wars' and attempting to keep the Conservatives in power in 2024.

Responding? How are they responding exactly and what affect is this responding having on the numbers arriving in small boats?

The new illegal migration bill has effectively banned asylum seeking in the UK. It requires the home secretary to detain and deport anyone who enters the UK illegally before their cases can be considered. Meaning most asylum seekers. It will be challenged in the courts and I expect it to be deemed illegal, just like their Rwanda policy.

But it's a total non issue - 50k asylum seekers a year crossing the Channel would have a negligible effect on the UK economy. It would be the equivalent of about 4k asylum seekers coming to Ireland (less than 0.1% of our population size). You could fit 4k people onto a football pitch.

Not usually from safe countries in the EU

Albania isn't in the EU, if it was they wouldn't need to claim asylum as they can just come and live here.

Also, asylum seekers can come from 'safe countries '

Safe countries ......

Would they happen to be bogus

It's never, ever illegal to seek asylum and there is no law in the UK, or any other country I know of, which makes it illegal. The people who lie about this are lying liars and the people who believe them are idiots. With views so wholly detached from reality they can have no useful contribution to make to discussions about how the issue of asylum seekers might best be addressed.

Not true....

Couple of points:

Anyone who seeks asylum is an asylum seeker. That's literally what the words mean.

People on the right love to make a distinction between asylum seekers and economic migrants, and to pretend that if you are an economic migrant you cannot be an asylum seeker. This is totally bogus. It's obvious that someone in genuine need of protection may also have an economic motivation for migrating; in many cases economic disadvantage is part of, or a consequence of, the oppression that they are seeking to escape. Thus characterising someone as an economic migrant tells you precisely nothing about whether they have a well-founded fear of persecution or another basis for seeking protection. An economic migrant can not only be an asylum seeker, but can be a successful asylum seeker.

As for whether Albania is a safe country — that's not really the question. What matters is not whether the applicant is a citizen of a "safe country", but whether the applicant has a well-founded fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group or, failing that, whether the applicant is at risk of suffering serious harm if they return to their own country. The process is not one of making a judgment about a country and then applying that judgment to all applicants from that country, regardless of their circumstances, but rather of making a judgment about the individual applicant. It's entirely possible — and indeed very common — for a country to be safe for one applicant but not safe for another, which just highlights the uselessness of generalised judgments about "safe countries".

The fact that applicants have passed through other countries is likewise not really relevant. There is no requirement that applicant seek protection in the first country they enter, and no rule that only the first country they enter is obliged to offer them protection. The reasons for not having such a rule are pretty obvious - the whole point of the international protection system is to ensure that protection is available. Minimising the number of countries offering that protection would run directly counter to this.

If what you say is true, you would expect most of the applications from Albania to be unsuccessful, and the obvious way for the UK to deal with this "crisis" would be to resource and operate its asylum application assessment process.

Yet we observe that the reverse is happening. The UK is spending hundreds of millions on improbable schemes to deport a small number of asylum seekers to Rwanda and billions on the hiring of unseaworthy hulks to detain asylum seekers in, and bloviating about leaving the European Convention on Human Rights with all the massive damage that would entail, but the obvious course of examining and rejecting ill-founded asylum applications seems not to have occurred to them — processing is getting slower and slower and backlogs of unexamined applications are getting larger and larger. They seem obsessed with pouring time and money into "solutions" that clearly can't work, while ignoring ones that can. Why do you think this is?

Well the UK home office has approved 48% of Albanian applications in 2021 and 2022 so they would probably say there is reason to approve these. They don't release information for the reasons for approval or denial. Figures for 2023 are not yet available.

You keep mentioning tens of thousands of Albanians too, There has been approx 20,000 applications over the last 3 years. They make up less than 10% of the boats crossing too. Apart from a jump in 3rd Quarter of 2022 the numbers have actually been pretty low, that quarter skews the figure. It has since gone back to pre that quarter level too.

I would guess that the ones who are being accused of lying are part of the 52% who's applications are being refused? Unless Suella Braverman knows the details of all the applications and knows that one's that are being approved, by her own Department, are lying in their application?

Also only 12% of those who arrived where referred to the National Referral Mechanism to identify if they were victims of modern slavery. So while some claim to be, it's far from the majority. And 55% of applications processed in 2022, where the application has been fully processed, where found to be victims of modern slavery. So the claim that it is lies doesn't really add up.