Can anyone explain the Rwanda deal for asylum seekers to me please?
Do they need to go through the legal process for each individual case or are they taken straight off the boats to a plane?
I keep seeing all the crap about so many being placed in hotels and the cost of doing this so wouldn't it make more financial sense to spend it on processing their cases quicker and getting them settled properly than just sending them to hotels and virtually forgetting about them?
Does anyone know on average how long it takes for the applications to be dealt with and their cases heard?
Or do they not even go through a court process?
We never seem to hear the other side of these things.
Like everything with this shitcake of a government, the entire asylum/migrant processing system is underfunded and short-staffed. So there's huge backlogs.
The problem is exacerbated by a substantial proportion of people entering the country and claiming asylum are not meeting the criteria for genuine refugees. And
they know it. Anecdotally, many of these 'lose' their passports/identity papers before getting to the UK, and claim to be from a different country.
I stress that this isn't me blaming anybody for seeking a decent standard of living, given the rank inequality of wealth and opportunity across different countries/regions.
But 'economic migrants' claiming asylum do mean that the whole asylum system is discredited in the eyes of a lot of people, and that has led to a reducing level of sympathy with asylum seekers generally.
As experts have repeatedly said, there needs to be system of having a route whereby people can enter the UK and claim either asylum or apply to stay for other reasons. This would end almost all of the deadly boat crossings.
People using this hypothetical 'legitimate' method of entry then need to be rewarded with a greater opportunity to stay - especially those with their ID papers to help more quickly process their application - over those that seek a clandestine entry.
In theory, I'd want people who enter the country in this way to be housed in immigration centres. Not the half-derelict, pest-ridden shitholes that the outsource companies like Serco, G4S, Mitie, etc, who just want to maximise profit. But decent facilities where people can learn/improve their English and prepare for entry exams and British 'culture', whilst in safe, warm accomodation with food. If you were a family genuinely fleeing persecution, you'd surely welcome such a facility.
In reality, there are a number of major problems with this.
1) If you create an open route for migrants to enter the UK before having their applications to stay assessed, the system would soon be flooded, as a serious barrier to people entering the UK is removed (ie, the peril of a dinghy voyage across 20-odd miles of cold sea around some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world)
2) As we've seen, it's difficult to keep people safe in migrant processing centres. The majority of migrants into the UK are men aged between 15 and 30. They also know they're unlikely to secure asylum status, so have no will to remain and be compliant.
I don't know what the answer is. But it's a certainty that the government don't want to make anything easy, so that it acts as a discouragement to prospective migrants.
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