Calais: Migration and the UK Border
- Thread starter SpookyFrank
- Start date
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
I keep hearing this. How do you know this for certain? You don't. Many of those in Calais will be refugees. You have a right to your opinions but not the facts.
That fact is bullshit.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
That's a bit disingenuous. There have been many jungles that have come and gone since Sangatte was closed, and there were at least three in Calais that were cleared out earlier this year to force everyone into the new camp. That's the difference between the present jungle and all the previous ones, it's at a site chosen by the French authorities and people have been efectively forced to set up camp there. The last major migrants settlement outside of this new camp, a squatted warehouse near the town centre, was cleared out a few weeks ago in an operation where the police vastly outnumbered the migrants.
When there were several smaller jungles, different ethnic and language groups had some space to themselves and this helped to reduce tensions. I dread to think what the situation is like now with everyone crammed into one place and with nothing being done to reduce the hardships, fears and tensions that lead to outbreaks of violence between migrants.
I had never heard of migrants trying for the tunnel or the lorries in such numbers in broad daylight before recently. Not only are they more likely to get spotted by drivers or security, but the police are only too happy to arrive in numbers and beat them or gas them if they congregate near the roads. A young woman died recently after staggering into the road, blinded by police CS spray.
People who have been in Calais documenting the actions of the police have told me that the police tactics are designed to get migrants run over, often by chasing them with batons and leaving them with nowhere to run but across a busy road. They have been observed waiting for an ideal moment when vehicles are approaching at speed before doing this. At the very least the police in Calais have no concern for preventing deaths. Activists' cameras are so routinely destroyed that we've had to look into the possibility of acquiring a drone to keep watch on the police. Only if they know they're being filmed are they likely to rein in their behaviour.
The worse conditions become, the more obstacles the UK and French governments build to protect the border, the more risks people will take and the more people will die. This is already being borne out by the facts on the ground; the number of migrant fatalities in Calais this year has already surpassed last year's record-breaking total. And still large numbers of British people think they're the victims in all this, because they have to endure the possibility of their holidays being slightly delayed.
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SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
And your source for this fact is what, if you don't mind my asking?
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
Once again you have it backwards. Why would people risk their lives to make these journeys if their lives were not genuinely at risk back home? For many people of course, it is the risk to their families rather than the risk to themselves that forces their hand.
You don't get to tell people where they feel safe and where they don't. What is safe for you may not be safe for someone else.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
From the 'top'
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
The very idea that you can split off economic from anything else in the current conditions, in all that had resulted from the actions of the powerful over the last decades, is a monstrous lie.
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SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
Yes, I thought that was the kind of 'fact' that gets plucked directly from an arsehole.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
There are several thousand migrants in Calais, these are the recent injured/dead in Britain
In the main they are coming from north eastern Africa - Eritrea's military service (~3 years of unpaid hard labour) is a massive push factor as is the low-intesnity war in the Sudan between government allied forces and SPLM N, government allied forces employ forms of press ganging into service.
Baluchistan, NWFP and FATA in Pakistan are also a source.
- 30 July: A Sudanese woman is found dead in a lorry at Calais.
- 29 July: A 16-year-old Egyptian boy is in a critical condition after being electrocuted while trying to board a Eurostar train in Paris. (Le Parisien, 29 July 2015)
- 29 July: A man believed to be Sudanese, aged between 25-30, is knocked over and crushed to death by a lorry leaving a ferry in Calais. (Guardian, 29 July 2015; Independent, 29 July 2015)
- 29 July: A Pakistani man dies from his injuries after being run over near Calais a day earlier.
- 27 July: Two Sudanese men suffer serious injuries, but survive after being hit by a train near the Channel Tunnel. (Guardian, 29 July 2015)
- 24 July: According to campaigners in Calais a young Eritrean woman dies after being sprayed with CS spray by police officers and running into the path of a car on the A16. (Calais Migrant Solidarity press release, 27 July 2015)
- 23 July: The body of teenage boy is found in the loading bay of a Eurotunnel train at Folkestone. (Kent Online, 24 July 2015)
- 22 July: Two unidentified men suffer serious injuries after falling from underneath a lorry on the M20 in Kent where they are found on the hard shoulder of the motorway. (NewsShopper, 22 July 2015)
- 19 July: Houmed Moussa, a 17-year-old Eritrean teenager is found drowned after apparently falling into a 20-foot deep-water basin near the Eurotunnel. (Calais Migrant Solidarity press release, 27 July 2015)
- 17 July: Achrat Mohamad, a 23-year-old Pakistani man dies of burns sustained after being electrocuted by a pylon near the Channel Tunnel a few nights earlier. Two others also suffered serious injuries. (BBC News, 14 July; Calais Migrant Solidarity press release, 27 July 2015)
- 7 July: A man is found dead in the Channel Tunnel. (Independent, 7 July 2015)
- 4 July: A 20-year-old Eritrean woman falls from a truck triggering a premature delivery of a stillborn baby at twenty-two weeks. (Calais Migrant Solidarity press release, 27 July 2015)
- 29 June: The body of a 23-year-old Eritrean woman, Zebiba, is found on the A16 near Calais. (Calais Migrant Solidarity press release, 7 July 2015))
- 26 June: A 32-year-old Ethiopian man Getenet Legese Yacob is killed after trying to board a freight train near Coquelles. (Guardian, 26 June 2015, Calais Migrant Solidarity press release, 7 July 2015)
In the main they are coming from north eastern Africa - Eritrea's military service (~3 years of unpaid hard labour) is a massive push factor as is the low-intesnity war in the Sudan between government allied forces and SPLM N, government allied forces employ forms of press ganging into service.
Baluchistan, NWFP and FATA in Pakistan are also a source.
DownwardDog
Riding a Brompton with a power meter.
When they make it to the promised land/South London they're going to be cheek by jowl with many different cultures so they better start getting used to living with different ethnic and language groups.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
It's rather more difficult to get along with people when you're constantly tired, hungry and scared. And when people are packed so close together as they are in the jungle it only takes a small number of people to cause a lot of trouble for many others, however blameless they may be.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
I would be interested to know if the unborn child who died when his mother fell from a lorry was an economic migrant or a 'genuine' refugee according to the standards of people who believe in such categories.
Could you clear this up for us alfajobrob ? I want to know if I should be sad about this child's death or if it was his own fault for wanting better economic prospects.
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Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
Not to mention the Jungle is overseen by people traffickers, organised by ethnic group, who terrorise other ethnic groups causing a system analogous to the US prison setup - stick with your own for protection.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
Yes. It doesn't seem possible for migrants to remain neutral when there's trouble, their side is chosen for them by virtue of their ethnicity iyswim. Just because they don't want to be involved doesn't necessarily mean they won't be a target for some mad bastard's retribution.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Are you white?
If so you could walk into Canada, the US, Australia or Russia pretty easily, and live there as an illegal knowing your skin colour will protect you from a majority of harassment.
The people in the Jungles hardly came here on a whim, either. Most of them made rational choices based on being unable to stay in their homelands.
How do you define "economic migrant"? How do you define "asylum seeker"? Take a look at how the govt defines (and re-defines) them, and you should (unless you're dim) notice that a lot of room is left in order to treat asylum seekers as economic migrants. Strange, that.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
As an example, In parts of modern Sudan and Somalia (the parts that were formerly adornments of the Glorious Empire), English is the 2nd tongue, and the lingua franca for commerce. Add to that the fact of settled Sudanese and Somali communities in parts of the UK for over 100 years, and the reason you "risk your life further" is for your culture - to feel a little bit "at home" even when you're thousands of miles distant from where you were born.
The same points I've applied to Sudan and Somalia are applicable to dozens of other Anglophone states. We don't tend to get many asylum seekers from Cote d'Ivoire or Chad because they're Francophone, and prefer France over the UK even though their material conditions will be worse there.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
At this stage I'm half-expecting the eventual "solution" to be some kind of 'Great Wall' similar to efforts on the Us border.
Which will either fail on it's own terms or lead to more years of dithering while people die in the English Channel.
It wouldn't work anyway, because the next logical step regarding people-smuggling is to upscale the current use of boats from France, Belgium and Holland.
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
I was speaking to a lad a few months ago, privately educated and not particularly nice. He was in his second year of studying economics, and seriously told me that economics and politics are totally separate and that was why the FT was such a good paper - because there is no politics in it. I have heard similar from other students on the same course, it seems to be what is being taught which is ironic since a lot of the rest of what is being taught seems to be 'why capitalism is the bestest and much better still than any of the other ways of looking at the economy which we aren't going to teach you about'.
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
At this stage I'm half-expecting the eventual "solution" to be some kind of 'Great Wall' similar to efforts on the Us border.
Which will either fail on it's own terms or lead to more years of dithering while people die in the English Channel.
I agree with this, and when it is proposed by the Tories the liberals who would mock Farage for suggesting similar will all fall into line and agree that it is a necessary measure to strengthen Fortress Britain.
This is surely just the start of an immense diaspora as climate change and resource wars really start to bite. Even now, on a very mundane but nonetheless telling level, I have to wonder where more people are going to live. Housing is an issue which can only mean a class of exploitative landlords looking at influxes of desperate people and thinking how many they can squeeze in every room. I guess my recent brush with the buy to let scenario (a shocking, shoddy business) as well as housing issues on a more personal level, has left me increasingly anxious with no real appreciation of just how much building space is available in the UK (given the insane property bubble, any answers are going to be leveraged in some horrible way)...but I do struggle to find a generosity of spirit when squeezed (and then I obviously feel ashamed as my situation is in no way comparable)...but, being completely honest, I am conflicted on many levels about the whole question of borders. I also have no real idea about population pressures, amount of space per capita, and so on and so forth - would appreciate more info really.
8ball
Merr xmas...
Yeah, then the use of the Navy to patrol the entire coast would be on the cards.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
That would be both impossible and a colossal waste of money.
So I'm sure it will be government policy by this time next week.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
Even if there was a way to get Calais completely sealed off to anyone without a passport, there's plenty of other ports. And undocumented migrants go through those ports to get into the UK all the time. There's no hysteria about that though, because people don't really notice it. It's only because of the giant shanty town in Calais, itself a result of tightened border controls, that 'illegal' migration has entered the public consciousness. And all the solutions people come up with (David Cameron's latest plan: more fences, more sniffer dogs) are just new ways of making the situation worse.
As for the people who want to 'send the army in' to a refugee camp, they need to stop for a second and consider what they're actually suggesting. Because what they are suggesting would be a war crime, only without even the feeble justification that there's a war on.
As for the people who want to 'send the army in' to a refugee camp, they need to stop for a second and consider what they're actually suggesting. Because what they are suggesting would be a war crime, only without even the feeble justification that there's a war on.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
I just wonder if you were saying the same thing during the Cold War when thousands of asylum seekers crossed from east to west? I fact, asylum seekers/refugees were practically encouraged to risk their lives escaping the Warsaw Pact countries. Just ask Radio Free Europe for more details.
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
ManchesterBeth
Well-Known Member
Of course not. Rampant anticommunism is and was a different beast. Anything to enforce the mystified moral superiority of Western Europeans is to be encouraged. Just read my tagline for an ironic take on this.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Bit hard to mount a full rolling blockade of immigrants when you've only got half a dozen ships and a handful of converted bathtubs in service, and you've nixed your own S & R capacity.
8ball
Merr xmas...
Bit hard to mount a full rolling blockade of immigrants when you've only got half a dozen ships and a handful of converted bathtubs in service, and you've nixed your own S & R capacity.
Melt down your railings - your Government needs more bathtubs!
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