Why do we have to make that assumptionSassenach wrote: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.
Primarily the blame lies with the people smugglers and the guy piloting the ship who abandoned it. The family are victims here and I really don't like victim-blaming.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.
But a lot of people, the Turkish government (which seems to have been contributing to the war in Syria and failing to deal with refugees); the Arab governments (again involved in Syria and not taking in many refugees outside of those forced to by location - Jordan and Lebanon); Western governments (not just European ones, but all who are sitting here in our rich and priviliged part of the world and only doing much at all after public pressure rather than because there's a crisis in the first place)..
All have some culpability in the situation of families like that of Alan Kurdi.
Our PM seems to have - until this week - spent more effort on resting taking more people with genuine asylum claims, and trying to lobby to bomb Syria than he did on helping those fleeing the conflict.
My guess is that they could not get direct flights or passage out of Turkey through legal means, due to lack of documentation. Which is what was hindering the application in Canada. Entering Europe I guess would give an opportunity to get properly registered there and then re-apply.And as for family reunion,I fail to see how getting to Kos was going to bring them very much closer to Canada.
Perhaps the Germans are better at administration than we are here.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 am sure that they will not simply accept all without question. They may (probably will) end up accepting some people who are not 100% legitimate. But would rather do that than turn away people in genuine need.
there clearly already are significant push and pull factors.
You could do more than blank assertion though. I have pointed out that Kurds, and Syrian Kurds, are not treated normally in Turkey.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.
Last I saw we had taken about 8,000. There are calls to take 24,000, which would be more proportional to other EU nations on average. I would double that, and go to the refugee camps in Turkey to do it. So 50K a yearNo, 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.
Which is less than our natural population growth.
And that is the vital issue, because it's always ignored as being "over there" and not our problem. When the problem comes to our doorstep we realise how small the world is and getting smaller.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.
I know that again recently it has been found being used in ways it should not be, such as to routinely hold pregnant women for more than a very short period.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.
Thanks for the straw man.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.
I do think we should retain immigration controls. But the way we are trying to do it now, by restricting legal routes (our fantastic government pledge to use cuts in visas to reduce net immigration to 100,000 or less has backfired), and our reluctance to accept a share of the burden and responsibility for what we can all see is a major humanitarian crisis is not helping us.