Comments by "TJ Marx" (@tjmarx) on "Immigration battle: government small boats policy is ‘immoral’ says Archbishop of Canterbury" video.
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I really dislike this interviewer. He is unprofessional as a journalist, allowing his personal bias, beliefs and political ideology taint everything he is involved in.
Interviewer: "what is the answer to my question! If you are someone in Sudan right now, terrified, you may have links to this country. How do you apply for asylum?"
Minister: "We have a reunion scheme to reunite families"
Interviewer: "But you might not have family"
The premise of the question being answered is someone with links to the UK. That is, family. If you don't have family in the UK, you don't have links to it either. If you have limks, you have a safe pathway to immigration through the families reunion scheme. If you don't have links to the UK, you don't get special treatment.
These emotional arguments about level of fear, aren't actual arguments. Please stop making them.
Minister: " The refugee convention also says that people should seek sanctuary, should seek asylum, in the first safe country..."
This is the only thing the interviewer got right. It's either a bald faced lie or the minister for immigration has never actually read the refugees convention and the UDHR and is thus completely incompetent. It is entirely untrue that the convention says that. Under international law an asylum seeker can seek asylum in whichever country they choose without regard to the nature of any transitory nation they pass through.
For the record though, the asylum system as it stands today is the new colonialism.
Interviewer: "Minister, when did you become a higher moral authority than the arch bishop of Canterbury?"
These leading, loaded questions have to stop. This isn't journalism. There is no substance to the question let alone any potential answer thereto.
To answer the question, when he was voted in by his constituents to represent all of them secularly as opposed to being appointed to represent the interests of a corupt organisation and the values of those whom believe in the butchered words of a storybook as truth. More people in the UK aren't Anglican than are, so his moral authority is exceptionally limited.
Interviewer: "Just on that, the majority of people who come here, that are applying for asylum on small boats, are given leave to remain. They're found to be legitimate."
FALSE. The idea that being given leave to remain means they are found to be legitimate asylum seekers is a non-sequitur. Review the law.
If you enter a host country and claim asylum, and that asylum claim takes time to process whereby you have opportunity to make connections to the community by way of friends (even if just other asylum seekers), have a place of residence, have an income (even if just the dole), etc then by law even if you do not meet the requirements of your asylum claim you will still be granted leave to remain on the grounds you should not remove people from a community with which they have links.
This is where the majority of leave to remain statistics come from and is a massive loop hole economic migrants exploit. Not just in the UK but across the whole of the signatory OECD nations. Leave to remain and legitimate asylum claim are not the same thing. It's a point of massive contention around the global asylum system in the UNGA and UNHDR. Much work is being done to try to fix this problem, they've been trying to fix it since 2013.
There is a lot of interest across the OECD in the Australian model, which is the same model the Tories are trying to push through. The Australian model works, period.
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