And the Turks have no form for oppressing Kurds, or bombing Syrian and Iraqi Kurds?
In order to establish a legitimate asylum claim you need to do more than simply establish that some members of a particular group have suffered difficulties in a particular country in the past. Yes, the Turkish relations with their Kurdish minority have not been great, and continue not to be great, but we know that millions of Kurds manage to live quite safely in Turkey and hundreds of thousands of Syrian Kurds are living there right now without needing to fear for their lives. Absent any evidence to the contrary, which you have not provided, we have to assume that this family were in a safe country.
Well, his mother is dead too in the same incident, so she got what she deserves, right?
There was also a desire to reunite with family involved.
Grow up. Seriously Dan, it's not like you to bring such petty emotionalism into debates. I'll thank you to save the snark for the US politics threads that I know to avoid. My point, which I'm sure you understood full well, is that it's absurd to place the blame for the death of the child onto European politicians when it's quite obvious that the family chose to take an appalling risk.
And as for family reunion,I fail to see how getting to Kos was going to bring them very much closer to Canada.
sending aid is one thing, but really just a sticking plaster. I agree we should start with those in camps.
But Germany has to deal with the problem they have, which is thousands of people arriving now. Absent going back in time and dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis properly (and also the Afghan one which seems to be a factor too), what should they do? Germany probably has an aversion to creating camps and forcing people into them to be processed and sent somewhere else. And where? Turkey? Will Turkey take "back" people who technically entered their country illegally when they fled the Syrian war?
What the Germans have done is not to simply deal with the problem they have but to greatly magnify the scale of that problem by setting up an enormous pull factor which will encourage millions more to take the trip. Not just Syrians either. By all accounts there's already a thriving black market in fake Syrian passports. There's simply no way for them to efficiently process the torrent of asylum claims they're going to be subjected to. It's a fantasy to suggest that only genuine refugees will be allowed to stay. Everybody will be allowed to stay because the only way they can possibly even come close to processing those claims is to pretty much abandon any pretence at conducting a proper asylum screening process and simply grant everybody. Once word gets about that this is what's happening, and it IS going to happen that way, then next year's migrant crisis will make this one seem like a mere inconvenience.
I did not ask you to repeat the same assertion as if that adds anything, if I wanted that we could get DF in here. I asked you to tell me how they were safe. What evidence did you have that tells you that was the case?
See above. Absent evidence to the contrary, the logical conclusion is that they were safe. I'm afraid the ball is in your court here.
No, not every one. Let us not debate a false dichotomy here. I think we can and should stake more, and improve the way we handle people. That is not the same as "all".
Ok, so how many ? How many should we take, and what would you do once that number is reached ? I can assure you that it will be reached a lot more quickly than you expect.
We have a flow now even with restrictions, because the real problems are not here or on our borders, but in the countries they come from and those around them. There is a lot more we as the West can do to help, and not just use of military power.
Agreed, we can and should be doing a lot more at source, no objections there.
And frankly, the way we deal with refused immigrants like shoving them into places like Yarls Wood has been shameful too.
I'm not sure you really understand how Yarl's Wood works, or why it's there. The reality of the situation is that we detain a tiny proportion of illegal migrants, and usually for a very short period of time. Detention centres exist as a way of holding people for a short period while we go through the process of arranging for their removal. Usually these will be people who are already documented or who we've managed to obtain an agreement from their home country to issue an emergency travel document (a tortuous process which can take months and is easily frustrated by somebody refuses to cooperate). If they don't meet these requirements then we won't normally detain them, we simply set them up with requirements to report once a fortnight or so. Most detainees end up getting released back into the community again after a month or so as well, because they inevitably file for a judicial review or make an asylum claim, which makes them unremovable and as such a waste of limited bed space. It's simply not true that we just lock people up indiscriminately. It's done for a specific purpose and intended to be of very limited duration.
And what exactly is your alternative ? The reason people are detained is because they can't otherwise be removed. We always try every possible avenue of encouraging people to make a voluntary departure before detention is considered. There are even schemes for assisted voluntary return where they get given money to help them set back up in their home country (paying people to leave in effect). If somebody still refuses to go home then how else are we supposed to enforce removal ? Most of the inmates of Yarl's Wood would disappear into the black economy as soon as they get the chance and none of them would ever consent to going home voluntarily. By arguing for the closure of the detention centres you're effectively saying that the power to remove illegal migrants should be taken away.
It would be nice if the bleeding hearts would just come clean and admit that they don't actually want to control immigration. It's frankly laughable to on the one hand make out that you're in favour of a fair system which will refuse economic migrants and on the other hand to denounce any and all methods we attempt to use to control them.