The Mayor of Calais

I see on the news the Mayor of Calais is putting pressure on the UK to solve the illegal immigrant problem.
And its about time.

Would we like to have that lot hanging around our ports, I dont think so.

How the residents of Calais have put up with it so long I dont know

I also noticed on the news that Keith Vass actually asked her if the UK was "perceived" as a soft touch?

God what planet are our politician on.
It certainly aint this one.

 

But surely the French let them in in the first place = there problem!

 

Yep, I suppose you could say that, and they should actually settle in the first safe country they enter.
Trouble is we seem to be attracting them like flies.

If the channel wasn't there, Calais problem would not exist.

 

We would all be

 

I don't remember there being an illegal immigration problem when I was a kid. But then I guess we also hadn't scrapped border controls and then drew attention to ourselves by starting wars with anyone America chose to dislike either.

I don't like the whole 'illegal immigrant' thing myself. There was a time when they were called refugees. I liked that term better even though it doesn't seem to be politically correct any more. The benefits system in the UK is not that amazing. I can't imagine many people wake up one morning and say "I think I'll bundle my wife and kids and self onto a defective boat and risk us all, just to get us all to cling onto the bottom of a lorry for a few thousands miles if we don't sink first, and risk getting seven bells knocked out of us by the coppers, and locked up in jail, so that we can go to Britain to live on their dole".

I'm not saying I would welcome all and sundry. I think there has to be controls and restrictions, but I don't like the way we seem to think its acceptable to have these sweeping blanket terms for all. We might as well start calling them lepers, or a myriad of terms 100 times more derogatory and discriminatory. If I didn't think it was safe for my wife and kids to stay at my house, I would move them. I would do whatever I could to put them somewhere safe and hospitable, and it would break my heart to know they'd been forced from their home and made to go somewhere unfamiliar and where they are likely to face hostility. I'd try to make the best of a bad situation by moving them to somewhere where I thought they'd get the fairest treatment. If foreign folk that are forced to make this horrendous decision decide that it is best to get their wife and kids past france and into Britain, then that doesn't say to me that Britain is an attractive place to move to having been forced to give up your home, it tells me that france is perceived to unwelcoming, hostile, and generally rubbish.

 

I dont think many have actually been forced to give up their homes, they just have heard on the grapevine that the English give them money for nothing, no one else has ever done that for them.
And we are all nice welcoming people.

Just cross that channel and they are home free.

Whether that be the case or not, that is what they think, or have been told.
Sadly in most cases its true.

 

Would you give up your home, risk your life to get to somewhere thousands of miles away and unfamiliar, risk getting seven bells beaten out of you by the coppers, and risk getting locked up in jail, for about £35 per week?

How do you know? How many of them have you asked?

Is it? Again, how many have you asked? Have you ever had to claim benefits? Its like getting blood out of a stone even if you were born here, paid into the system, and have some basic understanding of it.

Again I'm not saying that we should have completely open doors. There should be some sensible controls. But the idea that people just wake up one morning and think "I might just throw all this away and go to Britain for the hell of it, just cos I'm a bit bored like", I mean, come on, you don't need me to tell you how crazy that idea is.

 

How many have you asked?

 

I know that if coming from abroad (in the vast majority of cases) it's a while before you can have access to any benefits.
Many of the immigrant families I work with live below what we would class as the breadline- i.e. Squeezed into a grimy 1 bed flat with no money for a decent meal or quality of life. Some of their home lives, it's a miracle they can work so hard at school.

 

Sorry but I ran out of time last night @clueless1 .

To try to answer your questions, personally I've not asked any of them, but over the years I've seen quite a few of them asked by reporters why they are camping out in Calais, and the reply by the ones that can speak English is mostly the same, they are just wanting to live in Britain because we treat them better than most other countries.

They have heard this, back home where they come from.
Possibly from others who have already made it to the UK and vanished in the system, or being fed and watered for nothing.

The problem is quite serious in Calais, and I for one would not want that to be happening here, I could understand the French giving them all a free ticket on Eurostar just to get shot of them.

And it might just come to that as they want the camp moved to Dover, where they would have a free run into the UK.

 

It is a French problem, I would not let them get as far as the port, let alone build make shift shelters.

 

This is true. Many are kept waiting for six months or more without benefits and are not allowed to work. They exist by getting food from food banks and clothes from clothes banks. If they are caught working they will be deported. These are not people living off the cream supplied by our country.

 

Put yourself in the French position just for a moment.

You have hoards of these people entering your country from southern Europe, you know their intended destination, do you spend time and money capturing them and looking after them, or just let them get to the channel and hope most find a way across?

 

If that is the case, why do they come here?