Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "Desperate families arrive in Greece in search of people missing after boat capsize" video.

@BaybieK how ironic. Who started the war in Iraq? Who started the war in Afghanistan? Who started the war in Libya? Who caused the climate change that is turning much of Africa and the Middle East into an uninhabitable wasteland? These people are fleeing from crises that we started.
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@brianarnone933 it is not illegal to seek refuge in any country that has signed the UN convention on Refugees. Like all the EU and U.K. What is illegal is denying people the right to do so.
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@tombartram7384 the UN convention on refugees provides the right for refugees to apply for refuge in any country they choose for the obvious reason that if they couldn't then the only countries taking refugees would be those bordering conflict zones. You obviously don't want Britain to take any people seeking refuge. Even though it's a system that Churchill helped setup after WW2 to avoid another holocaust. Just say so.
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@queenofluna there is nothing cushy about living on benefits in the U.K. We have one of the least generous systems in Europe. Refugees are banned from working while claiming asylum, which takes years because the Tories broke the system. Instead we could just let them work and pay their way, and process their application in weeks rather than years. The people who have screwed the working class aren't a few tens of thousands of refugees. It's the super rich who have sucked up most of the new wealth over the last 20 years. The data doesn't lie on this. All this stuff about refugees is about making a scapegoat for the deep failures of our current system. It's a distraction.
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@thebritishbookworm2649 go look up the law. The UN convention on refugees absolutely does NOT say you have to settle in the first country.
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@whatsinaname11 we were instrumental in starting the war in Iraq and the war in Libya. And even if we didn't. These are desperate people needing help. When you see people in trouble, is your first instinct to kick them?
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@mikemanner9811 actually I own and run a company of 35 people. I am just saying what is actually true about the way the economy works.
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@johnwintergreen3180 immigrants work at higher rates than native British people.
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@susanwestern6434 any excuse for a war eh? Iraq had already been kicked out of Kuwait 12 years before we invaded in 2003. There was no threat from Iraq to its neighbours as the intelligence services knew. Certainly no threat to us. It was invaded for its oil. Libya was buying weapons from the U.K. and the EU for years AFTER lockerby. Because it started allowing western oil companies in to exploit its oil and gas. Afghanistan offered Al Qaeda and bin Laden to the Americans before the invasion. The US said no. The real perpetrators of 911 were the Saudis. 15 of them were from Saudi Arabia. None of them were from Afghanistan of Iraq. What happened to Saudi Arabia? That's right. They are a US and U.K. ally. And climate change is caused by carbon pollution. And the vast majority of the pollution to date was from the US, Europe the U.K. and Japan. The carbon footprint of the 1.4 billion people in Africa is less than that of the U.K. So not only do we deny people in desperate need help, like a bunch of sociopaths, we are a big reason why they need help. It's like if you burned down your neighbour's house then shot at him as he came to your foot asking for help.
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@chathamdogend4461 we take fewer refugees per capita than most other rich European countries. The vast majority of immigration is not from refugees. A growing population isn't a zero sum game. Our population is much bigger than it was 100 years and average incomes are also much higher. A growing population means more people to work and spend money in the economy. That means more demand for goods and services. That means a bigger economy. The problem that workers have right now is not that there are no jobs. It's that employers are being able to get away with paying shtty wages because the unions are not big enough. The unions are force employers to share the proceeds of their work more fairly. Right now, company profits are sky high. There's money. It's the distribution that's the problem. If you want workers to be able to negotiate better pay, then workers collectively need more power. The people being given refuge are screened and vetted. They don't let anyone in. As for the word holocaust, I was referring to the holocaust of Jews, Roma and other people under the third Reich. As that was going on, many countries refused to take refugees fleeing Germany and Austria, leaving them to die in their millions. The convention on refugees was set up by the British and others to prevent that from ever happening again.
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@chathamdogend4461 re India, I don't know if you follow Indian news much. The Modi government is one run by Hindu nationalist fascists. I know because I have colleagues that I talk to daily in India. The Muslims are literally scared to walk the streets. Modi himself oversaw a pogrom that killed 2000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat. The Indian government has banned the BBC because it made a documentary about that and related events. Their offices were ransacked by the police. The country is going down a very dark path. Pakistan experienced floods that lasted a month and made 30 million people homeless. They killed thousands and destroyed the farms and homes of many many more. Literally half the inhabited area of the country was underwater. A few weeks ago the temperature in Pakistan reached 50C. Last year it reached 52C. Maybe that's why some people are now leaving.
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@queenofluna you are talking about regular migrants, of which there are 100s of 1000s each year. Not desperate refugees who make up a few 10s of 1000s each year.
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@thebritishbookworm2649 and you've met refugees right? Do you work for the home office processing applications for asylum. You just aren't a compassionate person. Own it.
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@thebritishbookworm2649 "Assertion: Under the Geneva Convention refugees should seek refuge in the first safe country they come to. Incorrect. The UN Refugee Convention does not make this requirement of refugees, and UK case law supports this interpretation. Refugees can legitimately make a claim for asylum in the UK after passing through other “safe” countries."
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@josevilas4927 I think you underestimate the gigantic disparity in carbon emissions between rich and poor countries. "Many countries in the world still have very low per capita CO2 emissions. In many of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa – such as Chad, Niger and the Central African Republic – the average footprint is around 0.1 tonnes per year. That’s more than 160 times lower than the USA, Australia and Canada. In just 2.3 days the average American or Australian emits as much as the average Malian or Nigerien in a year. " This is a crisis made by the rich and inflicted on the poor. But it will be coming for us as well soon enough.
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@secular7396 why would they go to countries with some of the worst human rights records on the planet?
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@MandyAustin-nl4cn the choice to give asylum almost exclusively to people from Hong Kong and Ukraine is a political choice driven by obvious racism. The programme for Afghanistan is deliberately broken and a year after launch in Jan 23, had resettled literally no Afghans. The UK granted asylum to 23,841 people in 2022. That compares to over 600,000 of regular immigrants. So refugees are a tiny 4% of net immigration. Meanwhile France received over 130,000 applications for asylum in 2022 and nearly a million in the EU as a whole. The UK is being mean, irresponsible and inhumane. It is abandoning people to death as they run from problems that it itself contributed to. The UK is not "full". The UK's population density is lower than several European countries and comparable with that of Germany - a country which has taken about 25x as many refugees as the UK in the last 10 years. Re the proportion of women vs men, the figure is 26% women, not 10%. The reason there are no good public services is because the Tories have underfunded them. The reason there is no housing is because the Tories and New Labour didn't build any, they sold off all the social housing and banned councils from building more. The reason that workers are underpaid is because of 40 years of class war that has reduced bargaining power of workers, imposed changes on workers that they didnt ask for and the wholesale gutting and offshoring of British industry to enrich businesses. Desperate people seeking refuge and a better life as productive members of a better country are not the villains here. They are just a distraction to the real problem which is decades of neoliberal class war by elites in politics and business.
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@marianiarxouofe9083 in fact over 75% of refugees seeking asylum in the U.K. are granted refugee status by the home office, according to home office figures.
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@whatsinaname11 People can seek refuge for many reasons not just war. It's anyone seeking refuge from persecution for a whole bunch of reasons. So for example Muslims could be fleeing India because the government there is becoming very hostile to Muslims and so such people might have a legitimate claim of asylum in another country. You can read the definition of a refugee online. It's quite short. Pakistan is also undergoing a lot of political repression with supporters of Imran Khan being attacked by government supporters and the Police. That is just one reason they might be fleeing. When it comes to seeking asylum, you cannot be an "illegal immigrant" upon arrival. You can only be told to leave after you have been assessed and had your application turned down. In fact, in criminalising the people coming to the U.K. seeking refuge, the U.K. government itself is breaking international law because the right to travel to the U.K. and claim asylum is a core right of the Geneva convention on Refugees which the U.K. is a founding signatory to.
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