Everyday more people are fleeing violence
and poverty and seeking asylum in Europe. The EU member states are at
loggerheads over refugee quotas, the authorities are often overburdened. Parts
of the population are opposed to taking in asylum seekers altogether while a
greater majority fear the impact on welfare state and governments inability to
control borders. Politicians in service to their electorates demonstrate their
tough stand on illegal migration by using inflammatory language, refuse to cooperate
or address emergencies.
Government neglect of the crisis is
justified by the policy of removing pull factors for more migrants. Apart from
the morally questionable stand on the spectrum of neglecting vulnerable asylum
seekers to deliberately endanger human lives the current policy is not adequate
to deal with the issue of migration. This tired policy was first tried in 2013 and
continued to 2014 where migrants on unseaworthy vessels in international waters
were not rescued in order to deter migrants from the journey. This policy
resulted in thousands of life losses and finally compelled politician to launch
naval rescue missions in 2015.
The difficulty of the journey nor the
fences and barbwires will deter migrants from attempting to gamble the
treacherous journey as long as the chance of having a dream life exist in
Europe. Most asylum seekers are escaping poverty and violence and have a valid
claim to asylum. For instance most
Afghans who sought asylum in 2014 were granted leave but the current policy
will only grant them humanitarian protection and refugee status if they are on
European soil thus encouraging the treacherous journey. Since they are granted
asylum anyway it would save many lives and remove rings of human traffickers if
developed countries assessed and granted visa in migrant home country.
There need to be legal ways for people to
travel to Europe and live here while not being a burden on the public purse under
work and business visa schemes. Refugees are very expensive and a study in
Denmark showed three in four refugees are unemployed ten years after their
arrival. Work schemes will empower people by granting them the status of a
productive member of the society and boost their confidence. Such schemes currently
exist for instance I myself arrived in the UK on an entrepreneur visa but the
visa imposes too many unjust restrictions on the applicant from the kind of
work they should be doing to descriptive guidelines on conduct of business and
a hefty £30,000 visa related fees on a small family.
Britain is ahead of other European
countries in terms of attracting foreign talent yet the system is dysfunctional
and one can only imagine what it is like for other European countries. It only takes a brief review of immigration law website
to see that there is a constant relentless stream of judicial decisions showing
the vast numbers of errors which occur by decision makers. Transitional
provisions regarding immigration rules ignored, policies not taken into account,
ambiguous rules inconsistently applied, children or dependants not considered
properly, judicial precedents ignored.
Against this
background the Home Office, the state department in charge of immigration,
continue to tighten the rules without due attention to how that relate to other
policies. For instance the Home Office has removed the right of appeal for all
business and work visa and applicants are faced with the Home Office reviewing
its own decisions rather than have a tribunal undertake this task. This is
intended to provide a fast track to remove individuals from the country if
their visa extension application fails. Ironically it is likely that an
individual could probably make a human rights claim, which will then provide an
appeal anyway. Out of all that could be said about these changes the least
sustainable position is that they will make it simpler to remove individuals
from the UK. Even worse there is a flow of decisions about certain core
concepts, such as article 8 of the ECHR and the rights of children, which
suggest even the senior judiciary cannot quite decide what the rules mean and
how they should be applied. If you have a life here of some substance and then
a series of unfair Home Office decisions, its not hard to see how you could
argue that eventual removal will breach your fundamental rights.
Some people like
myself come from active war zones and will be unwilling to avail them for
removal and will have a valid claim of stay argued on the human rights grounds.
The legal route to
migration is a sham and the authorities are unable to reconcile the nationalist
fervor they cultivate to rally support among the population for the political
class with the realities of the world and their foreign policy. As a result
they keep producing these farcical rules and immigration laws that is choking
legal immigration and fuelling the refugee crisis and human trafficking.
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