V8Granite wrote: Sun May 10, 2026 1:58 pm
I would be amazed if it is a small percentage actually wishing to cause trouble. They have shown themselves to be happy doing illegal things by coming here in the way they do anyway.
Dave!
I'm going to take issue with calling them illegals too. They are not even illegal immigrants at this stage, they are asylum seekers. They have made applications for asylum and are in the process of having their claims assessed. They do not become "illegal migrants" until their claims have been rejected and they stay regardless, at which point they are most definitely *not* staying in a government funded hotel.
And neither is their means of arrival "illegal". It is described as "irregular" and irregular travel in order to seek asylum is not a crime. And nobody would have to use irregular travel if the UK government had not closed every single "regular" avenue. Even when they opened an official channel to grant Ukrainian civilians asylum at the start of the war the bureaucratic barriers were virtually impossible to overcome - e.g. requiring people who had literally run in the clothes they stand up in to present multiple official documents and requiring applications to be made online.
And aside from the official definitions, I'd perhaps ask for a wee bit of sympathy. If someone was bombing the shit out of your town, or systematically rounding up and detailing people of your family's religion, you'd do the sensible thing and run away too. And having run away and realised that there's little realistic possibility of it all being OK in the next couple of weeks, you would look to make a new life for your family elsewhere.
The social problems you describe are not anything to do with the colour/creed/legal status of people themselves, they are an inevitable consequence of concentrating a bunch of very poor, very desperate people in one place. Where I grew up there was a residential psychiatric hospital nearby, and unfortunately there were incidents, including assaults, caused by patients on day release. But the correct response to these incidents by people already evaluated to need residential psychiatric care was not to call them names, de-humanise them into one amorphous group of nefarious actors, or call for them to be shipped off to some deeper, darker hole somewhere. It was to look to the hospital to change its day-release policies and to better risk assess those allowed out unsupervised. The problem was clearly administrative, rather than personal.