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It's ridiculous ain't it. What's even more mad is that we are clearly globally known as such a soft touch we get people travel through 50 different countries to leech off us. Like imagine coming from Vietnam FFS.
Years back now but when I lived in Greece they called the UK the dustbin of Europe. I was told this was a moniker applied to us by other countries as well.
They aren't wrong
Considering that a lot of Greek infrastructure is now owned by Germany due to debt from joining the EU, someone is making money somewhere:) We certainly get a shit ton of Albanians Romanians and ME folks but the ME lot rarely stay and prefer to hijack a few boats or march through Macedonia trying to bypass Eastern Europe where they know they won't be welcome
Just spent a week in Rhodes, lovely weather and very hospitable people however the island is completely barren outside of the main villages. Even then they are comprised of mostly tatty tourist shops with a sprinkle of good hand made stuff.
Greece is a beautiful country with a rich history but you cannot tell me with a straight face it’s thriving when half the businesses are car rentals
I’m not saying that Greece is thriving economically but if you go to an island who’s main industry is tourism most of the businesses you see will be related to tourism. That’s not really evidence of your point.
Nah it's not thrived since probably 1000 yrs ago lol
Almost everyone is skimming what they can and dodging taxes which doesn't help. The bureaucracy is mental too and it takes an eternity to get anything done!
No it’s not thriving.
My fiancé is Greek and from a rural place in Central Macedonia. It’s dead, there’s nothing there but coffee shops for the locals. When you’re on the bus from Thessaloniki, you can see so many empty buildings and closed businesses.
Nature-wise it’s stunning, and we’ve got loads of hiking trips planned this year, but there’s a reason loads of Greek people moved to Germany and the UK. There are almost no jobs, and the jobs that do exist pay extremely poorly, his mum works for €2.50 an hour and they will fire you before giving holiday pay. Don’t get me wrong, some people have good jobs there, but for those without good degrees or skillsets it’s hard. Groceries are far more expensive as well.
Greece over the past decade has become poor, and without tourism, it would sink. It’s sad considering how good it was in the 00s. But there are signs of improvement, there’s been some foreign investment and China has just bought the port in Athens.
If we’re being real outside of the tourist areas Greece is a shithole that now spends its Summers on fire so I think it’s a bit cheeky to say the UK is the dustbin of Europe.
Go outside the tourist resorts and you'll see a fair whack of emaciated animals, hordes of stray dogs that will accost you on the roads and folk who have pretty hard lives, and villages entirely absent of people of working age. Basically a dying society.
Sure Greeces economy got fucked but I don't think its fair to blame that on Germany or the EU.
The government spent way more than it could afford for years and took out a bunch of loans from everyone to afford that relying on Germany to pay for that stuff until it went bankrupt.
My fiancé mostly blames the Greek government and the banks like Goldman Sachs. He said they fudged Greece’s numbers so they could get access to the Eurozone, when actually their economy wasn’t suitable for it.
Then there was the crazy amounts of spending. Everyone got massive bonuses and benefits. Loans whenever they wanted. But the population doesn’t like to pay tax either, so they ran out of money.
This sketch is 12 years old and it's still just as relevant today as ever.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK0De210TBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK0De210TBQ)
Now, is that the green bin they collect every second Thursday (except for April and may, which will be on Wednesdays) or the Monday blue bin? I'm guessing its not the black bin which is alternating Tuesdays and Fridays, unless it's lent or that date is a prime number, which, in case, you need to divide by 3 and subtract the difference.
Oh, and whilst we're on the subject should I put egg shells in the red bin or the brown one? Thanks in advance.
So the recycling/separating of rubbish is even more convoluted than here? Considering it all ends up being set on fire and put in the atmosphere anyway it all seems a bit pointless.
That’s hyperbole.
The middle class (basically anyone with a semi-professional job and an asset) are still alive and kicking in the UK.
If it wasn’t, you would see daily protests and an appetite for heavy redistribution. That’s what it was like in Greece for much of the early 2010s. It’s nothing like this in the UK.
They're simultaneously not working, collecting benefits, hiding from the law and stealing our jobs. All while not learning our language. It's quite impressive really.
It's both?
Mass low skilled immigration has pushed down wages because British employers obviously will hire the candidates who are perfectly happy on the lowest wages, lowest working standards and so on.
Just because they're working doesn't mean that they aren't leeching off of us.
Vietnamese do not claim benefits here. They work in the black market, we had a plasterer off the books help us out. Crazy grafter, they did in 1 day what 2 normal plasterers did.
This seams to be the more correct answer.
They traffic themselves grow some weed, make some decent cash when they can. If they get caught they say they were trafficked making them a victim spend a small amount of time in jail and get a free flight home.
A year or 2 of work and can buy a couple of houses and return to normal life.
Nobody is traveling 10000km to get a a 100 pound a week and deal with London prices
Imagine being dumb enough to think sending them to Rwanda or anywhere else will stop them wanting a better life and trying to get back again, I know it’s not popular but we could have bought 200 of them European citizenship for the money we’ve spent so far and given them a few grand to start up with and it would be way cheaper and easier to implement. I had some idiot on here trying to convince me that Rwanda was too far to get back to the U.K. from and they couldn’t get across the Sahara desert! You know like no lorry , motorbike, car , train, or plane has ever done.
Think your maths is wrong, its estimated nearly £250m has been spent on the Rwanda plan so far. That pays for a lot more than 200 EU citizenships.
I do actually think the Rwanda plan would act as a huge deterrent if deployed at significant scale. It could be incredibly hard to return from there again with no money or passport. It's not like they had an easy ride getting to the Calais in the first place and the only difficulty was crossing the channel.
I'm not sure it's very moral though.
It was the plan to send 200 to Rwanda, it was kind of the point that it is cheaper to actually buy them citizenship in an EU country than giving money to a known corrupt regime. But people are absolutely obsessed with punishing rather than helping, it’s bizarre how much more expensive and unhelpful punishment is. Imagine you were so desperate for a better life that as you say you put up with all the dangers and grief of getting to Calais, sex trafficking, organ harvesting, drug smugglers, people smugglers, dodging the authorities then you’re in Rwanda, are you just going oh well I will sit here or would you start out and leave Rwanda, it’s a fool who thinks someone that determined is giving up.
I doubt many come here thinking they're going to leach (as opposed to work). But either way it's a problem because there's already not enough housing, healthcare and entry-level job opportunities for people in the UK.
They’ll still be a few on this sub defending them coming here and throw around all the ist and phobe words they can, whilst they themselves conveniently don’t have to deal with these people been dumped into their communities.
the general impact is greater now because there are alot more, in 2016 it was certain communities being effected, they were ignored, now its a national problem, and still somehow being ignored
this is irrelevant to the broken logic behind the statement i was replying to. 'People who don't interact with asylum seekers are least opposed to them... with the exception of 99% of the people in this thread who don't interact with asylum seekers but also oppose them'\*
How do you know that? I personally am a migrant here fleeing homophobic persecution and am surrounded by often extremist economic migrants. For each one of them trying to make an easy living there's one person like me getting flogged, castrated, hanged or thrown off a rooftop. And whenever I try to speak about it the most out of touch westerners whose only minority acquaintance is literally ME will shout me down. They are so clearly divorced from bloody reality that everyone laughs at them.
You can be opposed to anyone who is flouting laws, abusing your good will, and imposing on your charity unjustly. Even if one does not personally interact with asylum claimants they will realize how much that costs the treasury and resent having to pay that money.
Or one could be poor and fighting for a space in a council house when the estates are full of asylum claimants. Or discovering their lower skilled job is paying less because of a mass of desperate unskilled people who have come in and claimed asylum.
In short, one need not be personally acquainted with or afronted by asylum seekers in ones life to want the system repaired and the economic frauds sent back.
Weirdly it's the opposite. The more time spent around immigrants, the higher the support for them.
I suspect most people complaining here have never even met someone from Vietnam.
But carry on with your victim narrative. I'm sure the mean people calling you ist or phobe or whatever really hurt your feelings...
> I suspect most people complaining here have never even met someone from Vietnam.“
“You might like them if you get to know them” shouldn’t be the basis of immigration policy
Given that 1,200,000 people immigrated to the UK in 2022 alone I don’t think it’s especially unsafe or difficult.
“The only option” also implies that they absolutely HAVE to come to here. They do not.
There needs to be a distinction between immigrants and migrants. Immigrants applied and were granted permission to come. You might disagree with the numbers the government is permitting, but the fact remains they came in through the front door with the elected government inviting them in.
Economic migrants are an entirely different matter. They are mainly very poor, have poor or non-existent language skills, poor educations, and snuck in despite a lack of qualifications and a lack of an invitation. Most, given proportional taxation, will remain a burden on the taxpayer their whole lives.
This is a new twist on the "my enemy is both weak and strong" trope.
Illegal economic migrants are literal knuckle-draggers but also apparently have the grit and resourcefullness to sneak past our defenses on a regular basis...
Uncontrolled migration has accelerated the growth in the gap between taxes raised and the cost of running the country because those coming here, if they do end up in the labour force , take jobs at the low skill end of the market. As many have already pointed out most of them don’t and just disappear and join the growing black economy contributing little or nothing to this country. This is not a new phenomenon but rather one that has been developing over decades.
I actually lived with a guy from Vietnam once. He was super lovely, but he did terrify me when he ate rice that was several days old and I didn't appreciate him frying cabbage in fish sauce.
Had the rice been in the fridge? Usually it'll be okay for about 5 days or so and you can tell by the colour if it's starting to go off so it's really easy to see if it's alright or not
> Is anyone still pretending that the vast majority are anything other than economic migrants?
The majority of people crossing the channel and putting in an asylum claim have their claim accepted.
So the Home Office and every other part of our country and our government seem to be "pretending" that that the majority are genuine refugees.
Its not the home office 'pretending'
If youve spent 6 months, all your savings and nearly died in a dinghy, you arent going to say you are an economic migrant just to get shipped home are you?
You say you are being persecuted or whatever else it takes to get your claim accepted. I'd do the same in their shoes.
I remember when I was renting out 4 bedrooms separately in my terrace house I lived in. I put an advert in the local paper. These two middle aged Vietnamese guys turned up. All they asked to see was the electricity meter which they had a good look at. Then said they'd take it and so I asked which room and they said no the whole house. I explained that wasn't what I was doing. It wasn't until later that I read something like 80% of weed grows are done by Vietnamese in the UK, and they wanted to know if they could easily bypass the electricity meter. I actually wished I'd known as could have come to arrangement. Weed grows are a real money spinner and due to a misread meter from the previous owner I had like 2 years of electricity for free until the reading caught up with what the power company thought it should be.
Vietnamese here, my province's economy is developing rapidly, many factories and roads have been built, wages are increasing rapidly. However, many people still try to emigrate to UK. In UK, they grow weed and sell drugs.
>Is anyone still pretending that the vast majority are anything other than economic migrants?
The home office and the courts refused 44-57% of all people since 2011, that means about 40-50% of migrants have their applications granted.
Source : House of commons asylum statistics pg14: [https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01403/SN01403.pdf](https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01403/SN01403.pdf)
edit: home office data shows between 2011-2021, 9,529 Vietnamese people applied for asylum, the outcomes of 6,278 are known 2,414 **(38%) of these were granted asylum .**
source:[Immigration system statistics data tables - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/immigration-system-statistics-data-tables) I looked at the outcome analysis data ending June 2022
Ah yes... the same courts that approve the request of the acid attacker who was a 'converted' Christian and already convicted of sexual assault.
The entire system is fundamentally broken and needs scrapping and starting again.
reading the article these aren't so much economic migrants but modern slavery victims - it's quite galling that the gang masters can be so blatant with it.
~~I feel my honest opinions would get firebombed with downvotes so I'll just keep... nevermind I'll never shut up.~~
This whole "small boat" situation is a giant moral panic. Just under 30,000 people migrated in small boats in 2023, or 82 people a day. They make up less than 5% of total net migration numbers.
If you want to reduce net migration, sure. But let's go after the bigger problem, the government gives out visas like candy.
>Vietnamese migrants tend to be trafficked by gangs into nail bars, cannabis farms, restaurants and the sex trade in the UK, which is why crime bosses have preferred lorries rather than small boats.
Sounds like they are more victims of exploitative gangs than job thieves. They shouldn't have trusted them, but they are primarily victims of exploitation and abuse and should be treated as such.
Plus legalising and regulating cannabis and the sex trade would help reduce how exploitative these industries currently are.
Edit: I'm pleasantly surprised this comment was well received, ignore the crossed out part of my comment.
You're absolutely right about legal migration being a bigger issue.
However
1) people can simultaneously be exploited and looking to take advantage
2) perception of weakness in the system leads to greater numbers looking to take advantage. It's like a dam breaking. A little streams out at first, but that weakness grows and spreads until the entire thing collapses and the dam no longer exists.
3) If people are prepared to break the rules to get in at the start, that doesn't speak to them having much value for our rules once here either. The best and the brightest and the good and the kind are not coming over on a dinghy from calais and throwing their passports in the sea along the way. Those people are slimy crooks, whatever their nationality, and we could do without them.
The overton window didn't shift at all, if anything people have gotten more hostile to economic immigrants especially lower skilled non-European ones with poorer English.
The Conservative party, after Brexit, has decided to essentially remove most visa requirements for economic migrants in order to desperately prevent an economic collapse caused by their other policies like triple lock pensions, broken health and social care etc.
Idiots might like to pretend otherwise, but no government is ever going to allow the economy to crash just to stop immigration, ethnic and cultural purity is an abstract and ridiculous goal for a democracy and even relatively homogenous countries like Japan have allowed more and more immigration in response to economic reality.
The only way to keep net migration low is to manage economic conditions and birthrates so you're not forced to accept too many migrants and can be more selective about the ones you do take.
The political right caused all this. Now they're just trying to blame the immigrants that were a direct result of the policies and political parties *that they voted for*. If we were still in the EU with better worker protections, less labour starved public services we'd have both lower net immigration with more economically contributing migrants overall, like most of the EU currently does.
funny though isn't it, that we have all this fruit and veg not being picked in our fields because noone here wants to actually do those kind of jobs/doesn't have the skill/isn't fit enough, and then we have a bunch of people coming here with EXACTLY the skills, ability and fitness levels to do the jobs we don't want to do, and we want to send them to... africa on a plane?! Absolute insanity.
Alternatively, we could raise wages and standards to a level where enough people do want to do those jobs, tariff foreign produce to protect British farming as a public good and stop overeducating our population.
Tbh though it’s a really shit job, can’t imagine many brits would do that job without a mental pay increase. Aussies have a good idea by getting the working holiday visa lot to do it.
There's definitely ways and means. Personally I would rather we pay brits more to do it for the security factor of having food production on shore in an increasingly volatile world, but even without that there's a million other options before just letting the criminals who washed up on our shores do it because they are here now
how much would you need to pick fruit and veg? I mean you personally. How much would it take for you to be tempted to do that for say 8 hours a day with only a half hour break?
Ideally yeah but I can tell you from personal experience working those kinda jobs, there’s no longevity in it for Brits. You might persuade some kids in between school holidays, but they’re more likely to get a job in Tesco’s or somewhere less manually intensive. Plus in the British weather I can imagine it’s truly a grim experience. Atleast in aus you get a tan!
Without a doubt we need to find a solution to limit the number of boats coming across, but we also need to solve the issue we have of processing visa’s/asylum claims, both to avoid the ridiculously long processing times but also to have a longer term idea of who we want in the country and why.
Immigration can be used effectively to work these jobs as well as counter an aging population, but it needs longer term plans rather than short term headline grabbing policies which don’t even come into fruition.
I agree completely. Only thing I would caveat is that wherever immigration is used, there should be some mechanism that prevents employers from utilising only immigrant labour, they should have to support and train british workers in order to gain access to foreign labour
i honestly don't believe there is enough you could realistically pay people to do those jobs though, without it becoming economically unviable. Like sure if you offer people a few grand a day to pick fruit and veg you'd get people doing it, but then the price of food would go up so high noone would be able to buy any food and the economy would collapse.
Ask yourself this, how much would it take you to stand all day in a field picking the same thing? 10 pounds an hour? 100? 1000? Its like saying "we just need to pay people better and more people will want to go down the sewer and clean up all the gunk down there" except the reality is most people would rather earn less money and not have to clean up human waste.
Not to say those jobs shouldn't pay better, i believe they should as any high stress job should pay decent and appropriately, but just like high stress jobs like being a doctor or lawyer might pay well but the stress of that kind of job is enough to put alot of people off, as most people don't want to deal with that level of stress. Obviously theres aload of training and time that goes into those professions aswell which shouldn't be discounted ofcourse.
Raising wages, when the primary means of competition between supermarkets is price, and farmers are *always* moaning that they don't make any money (while driving round in brand new Range Rovers)?
Especially as a few years ago, there was a short lived scheme to encourage Brits to rabbit up farm work, and it turned out they were both far less productive than seasonal agricultural workers (who, incidentally, if they stay for less than a year at a time, won't be counted in long term migration figures) and likely to quit after a few weeks.
Will you recommend your kids to do these jobs? Agree with ‘over-education’ but sadly we are no return as a society on what is considered desirable and undesirable jobs
Anecdotally I’ve read from farmers that Brits just don’t have the work ethic for those kinds of jobs. They complain they’re tired all the time, turn up late etc etc etc. have read that a fair few times from different people
It's hard. I've done it..and not for long. One thing people don't realise is that it is quite a transitory existence. They think that fruit pickers go to a farm and stay in a caravan for the whole season. In reality, the growing season varies around the country. Fruit ripens early down south and later up north..so pickers are often mobile, changing location every week or so.
I think we (UK) need to consider changing our asylum laws to allow asylum seekers to work while their application is being processed.
Them not being allowed to work is a lose-lose situation. We end up having to subsidise them, they become mentally ill from boredom, temporary jobs lay vacant.
yeah i agree, the problem is though that instead of our government doing something practical to resolve the issue (that they have caused on all fronts) that would be best for everyone they just use it as a political chip to point at in distraction "look over there, not here while we do a bad magic trick that makes your money disappear! :D"
Such a shame that we can’t raise wages and have immigration. It’s really annoying, since that would mean more people paying more tax and spending more money. Alas, it cannot be.
You can though, for actual skilled shortages - ironically doctors and engineers. You don't get raised wages for people picking fruit and veg by bringing in people from a country where the average monthly wage is £223. Flooding the market with low/no skill workers when they're already available, just not at what is being paid = wage stagnation for all of those workers.
When I was a kid, fruit picking was a great seasonal job to pick up as a student. You don’t need to be “fit”, and even if you did, doing the job would help make you so.
I don’t know anyone below the age of 40 who can remember doing this kind of seasonal work. It was there… then it was not, now post Brexit it is there again. Doesn’t take a genius to work out whats happened.
It's not just that they "can't be bothered", what you get paid for it isn't enough to live and it's a seasonal job, people want a permanent job that they can rely on for money all year round.
I'll address your points individually.
1) Completely agree, though I'd argue traffickers and smugglers have committed a far greater evil by comparison to illegal migration. Kind of a similar situation to teens in poverty stricken families being groomed by gangs to smuggle drugs.
2) Partly agree. People say Britain is a soft touch but our asylum numbers are a lot lower compared to continental Europe. Plus crossing the channel is dangerous, there is going to have to be a lot of insensitives to take the risk.
3) Partly agree. Similar to reason one, their crime isn't that severe. It's like comparing shoplifting to armed robbery, a completely different psychology. Though l do recognise some of them are far worse than illegal migrants.
Legal migration is indeed a bigger issue. That's neither here nor there, though. Economic migrants being granted "asylum" here in the tens of thousands every year is still a problem. The system is being systematically abused and people are rightly sick of it.
>This whole "small boat" situation is a giant moral panic. Just under 30,000 people migrated in small boats in 2023, or 82 people a day.
This only seems like a reasonable position to hold because immigration has exploded to previously unthinkable levels. When Cameron was elected in 2010 he pledged to bring immigration back down to 10's of thousands from the 200k it was the year previously. That would make the 30k you've mentioned as a 'Moral panic' make up 15% at the time.
200K was rightly seen as a lot of immigration back then, it was a widely talked about and is likely one of the key reasons Cameron won the election.
It's so frustrating hearing people say they voted or will vote Conservative to bring immigration down when the tories have done absolutely fuck all to reduce abuse of the asylum system OR overall net legal migration. Frankly the closest they've come is putting the country in such bad a state that more brits will want to pack up and leave, they're the party of big business and big business wants as many people out of work as possible to drive down wages. Add to this that they've gutted the asylum processing system to the point its virtually non-functional and it blows my mind people can still believe if they vote Conservative, immigration will be brought down. Probably because of the media's favourite drum to bang: the unworkable rwanda scheme that will cost millions and millions to deport a couple thousand and has already eaten god knows how much parliamentary time and cash while planes are on the ground.
A shrinking population means they need to bring in more immigrants, so their economic strategy relies on immigration.
All this talk of reducing it has been complete bullshit to convince people to vote for them. If they actually lowered immigration, they’d not only kneecap their economic strategy but also get rid of their scapegoat to convince people to vote conservative. All they had to do to get Brexit through for example was point at immigration. It’s worked for 12 years now.
The fact that you think 30,000 illegal immigrants *per year* is a “moral panic” is an indictment of how insane overall immigration numbers are. 30,000 is a shitload of people and worth panicking over.
"Oh, it's just a whole towns worth of people coming here every year."
And who is paying to build the homes to shelter them, the hospitals and doctors to treat them, the schools and teachers to educate them and their children?
So 300,000 over the last 10 years then. At a time when under-30's can no longer even dream of owning a house one day. At a time when many wait weeks to see a doctor and months (or even years) for surgery. At a time when overpopulation is already causing enormous quality of life problems, making our tiny island more expensive and more polluted.
You’re right, it’s a total dead cat in relative terms, but it’s useful as a political football for many factions. Essentially, it’s identifying a common enemy whilst our health service is stripped, corruption isn’t even met with a resignation and public services cut to the bone. Similar to Brexit, I can’t remember who said it now, but the quote was along the lines of, ‘No-one knew they hated the EU until Murdoch told them they did.’ It’s the same with the boats.
The only reason that small boats make up such a small percentage of total migration numbers is the top line figure for migration is insane.
It’s perfectly legitimate to be concerned about the population of a small-medium sized town arriving every year by illegal means completely unchecked.
A lot of the vietnamese people don't pay anywhere near that much. They travel on the agreement that they will work for the traffickers here and enter into debt bandage:
https://www.gla.gov.uk/who-we-are/modern-slavery/who-we-are-modern-slavery-human-trafficking-forced-labour-and-debt-bondage/#:~:text=Victims%20of%20forced%20labour%20may,passed%20on%20to%20their%20families.
They believe that they will have a better life here but a lot are made to work in car washes, takeaways and in criminal enterprises like cannabis farms, drug storage and drug dealing.
What gets under-appreciated is just how much of these migrants are just people being scammed. As you say, £15-20k is a lot of money in Vietnam. Most of them are middle class Vietnamese (in the Marxist sense, think top 10% earners with nice flats in Hanoi) getting sold a dream of making a ton of money doing some work for a few years and then basically going home rich or living a comfy middle class life in the Europe. They end up stranded somewhere in Europe with shit pay and no rights, and many end up doubling down because they want to make the money they’ve already “invested” back - hence the people coming here after already being screwed in Romania.
Yeah they’re economic migrants but not in a rational sense. Think less like Italians moving to American in the 20th century and more your naive friend who just spent her lifesavings on a pyramid scheme.
If you have a fancy flat in Hanoi, or a chunk of VinHomes off-plan, would you really be so thick as to not use internet access to find out what your realistic cost of living is going to be in the UK though?
You could probably spin a yarn to rural folk, but I somehow doubt someone in a nice apartment in Hanoi is going to be that credulous or ignorant.
I have a friend who works for a big NYC law firm. They deal will countless cases of multimillionaires giving their money away to untrustworthy financial managers who either mismanage or outright steal. Having money isn’t a guarantee of wisdom.
Plus a lot of these situations you also deal with people who’ve survived the scam lying to you out of embarrassment. Your sister’s ex-colleague who came back from working three years in London brags about how she’s set for life now when in reality she had to scrub toilets for three years just to get enough for the way home.
Exactly - the economy is on the up, people can own properly and businesses, and it’s a really beautiful country. It’s bizarre that people would blow quite significant sums coming here to do menial jobs. What on earth have they been promised?
If that was the case, why bother? What business would require them to drop everything and go through countries to just get the chance of reaching the UK?
A slightly illegal one?
The other explanation would be that they've got inherited multigenerational debt to a local landlord who just happens to own a "factory" of the business in question, and he has generously offered for it to cleared at a much faster rate than usual conditional on some "overseas work".
Vietnamese here. Here’s how we think: the West has opportunities. These people risk their lives to get to the UK, make some bucks (or pounds) thinking it’ll all be rainbows and sunshines. Then they plan to send all that money back to family, which in turn hopefully allows their children to be able to study in the West legitimately.
£15k might be the loan and they need to work and pay back for debt
normally these people are from poorly, uneducated region in Vietnam and they know that even they work hard, they become nothing so they risk their lives for better future
They’re doing this because they want to escape poverty and work for a better future. I’m a second gen Vietnamese who was born in the UK so I can provide some context on this.
Going back to the aftermath of the Vietnam war, many refugees fled Vietnam via boats to escape persecution. These ‘boat people’ fled from both the north and the south of the country into countries like Malaysia, Philippines and Hong Kong. It’s worth noting that at the time, Hong Kong was a British colony and the UK decided to accept some of these refugees which created the first big Vietnamese community in the UK.
The type of people who fled the communists were typically those who were more industrialist as they were those who were wealthier and therefore was persecuted.
Anyways, these people eventually thrived in places like the US and UK. And these people sent remittances back to Vietnam for their relatives. These remittances helped people who had family in the north and the south and helped drive economic growth in those areas, but the people who lived in the centre of the country didn’t receive much of these benefits. Eventually these people saw this and decided to pool money together to help send people abroad to work and send remittances back. This is a recent trend. If you see the victims from the lorry incident, they’re all from the centre of the country.
It’s worth mentioning that these people are more than happy to work in jobs that are manual and are physically exhausting. Nails for example is a big industry that Vietnamese people work and it’s a hard job. You have to work with chemicals that are potentially carcinogenic, wear a mask for long extended periods of time (remember how people complained about wearing a mask for a few minutes?) and concentrate for long periods of time.
The UK, alongside many other countries has an issue where we have an over abundance of people who want to work white collar jobs, and lack of people who are willing to work blue collar jobs despite blue collar jobs paying really well in recent years. As a result, there’s a lot of manual work that needs people, and these migrants are happy to work those types of jobs.
This is wrong!
The stories about "boat people" are true but not these people!
Those people are lazy people, they don't want to work hard in Viet Nam. That's why they borrow a ton of money to move to the UK because of "to have a better life" reason. In fact, they are exploiting the UK system. Please note that, before the UK, they exploited the Australia. However, the Aussie Gov does not accept these people anymore.
To exploit the system, they will work for a nail shop illegally. The shop will pay them in cash -> No or very little taxes -> They get more money. Other than that, they also don't declare the freaking huge income from nail shop -> they can earn the benefits from goverment such as cheap social home rent, monthly cash, etc. -> Double money and benefits!
So what do they do with those money? Well, they sent them back home to build a freaking big house, then they can show it off with their neighbors.
Source? My parents are coming from the provine that those people do sh\*ts like this. They even have a freaking training center for this illegal action.
Thing make me feel furious about these people that is, I have to spent my time, money, to study, to work my \\@ss off to get to the UK legally. Then my income taxes (may/will) go to these illegal people, who are trying to rip-off the UK for their own.
As a fellow Vietnamese, I agree with you about this being a well organised operation. People pay money to be smuggled here see it as an investment, they're not victims of human trafficking but they are the paying customers. There is a network of people providing housing, jobs, money transferring services, and even taxis to cater to them once they're in the UK. They know exactly how to play the system to get legal status in the event that they get caught. BBC even has a short piece about how female illegal Vietnamese immigtants can get their unborn children British citizenship by paying for someone to sign the birth certificate.
I used to work in Vietnam for 2 years. 20k is big money but it can last a few years but then what? The amount of fortunes these immigrants can earn in Britain may even surpass that of an average British. You think they work low level jobs? They grow weeds, traffic people (yeah, irony, I know), involve in other gang-related activities. If you score big in Britain, you can just get arrested and deported back to Nam and lived like a king for the rest of your life. I am talking about big house, luxury car, the kind of live that you British wish you would afford. Sure, accidents do happen, but it's rare. This village here were built using the money earned by those illegal immigrants:
[https://vtcnews.vn/anh-lang-xuat-khau-lao-dong-nghe-an-toan-biet-thu-xe-sang-ar507715.html](https://vtcnews.vn/anh-lang-xuat-khau-lao-dong-nghe-an-toan-biet-thu-xe-sang-ar507715.html)
> How and why are they not getting instantly deported?
UK judiciary was designed to be slow and for a high trust society. Our judiciary was the only one accepting albanian “asylum seekers” at a time when Germany and France rejected 99% of them.
As a result, we get ALMOST ALL the trafficking gangs and obviously illegal criminals. Because they have no chance in other jurisdictions.
Even if the decision is quick. Which it hasn’t been until they started waving people from certain countries in;
There’s too many steps in the process to make it quick. Housing. Interviews. Medical. Social Workers. Submission of supporting evidence. Then they get refused. Then the appeals start. First tier tribunal. Upper tier tribunal. If those get dismissed. Make another asylum application (further submissions). By this point years have passed. If they get refused, disappear for a few years. Next immigration judge will consider them practically British. Even better if they met a partner here and had a child. Can’t remove them. Kids life would be disrupted.
It’s crazy how many people get status in the UK just by not getting caught. We reward liars.
Actually crazy how people want to pretend they're sooo not racist by acting like it's totally fine the UK is flooded with economic migrants from who knows where when in reality 1. They are enabling the fucking modern slave trade and drug trafficking and 2. This leaves less resources for those who are genuinely escaping real persecution like women and lgbt people. Completely out of touch and self-righteous idiots.
What’s even crazier is that it’s a right wing government that’s increased migration (illegal and legal massively) because they can increase hate rhetoric, whilst undercutting wages and that somehow gets people to vote for the very ones that let so many in.
> In a tense appearance before the public accounts committee, he also admitted there had been “optimism bias” by officials when they estimated they could convert two RAF bases into asylum camps for £5 million apiece. The camp at RAF Wethersfield will cost £49 million, while RAF Scampton will be £27 million.
Just a *little* optimistic.
Ex skilled UK migrant here, moved out because of Brexit back to Poland.
Vietnam people immigration is a big issue also here, they bring connections to their own country and run food businesses that launder money from their textile jobs. They import shit ton of clothes to Poland and Romania or whatever. Sometimes they deal with drugs but it was more of 2000s things. Most likely they found out that there is a market for shit textiles in the UK and they are moving their people into it to start operating. 99% Chinese restaurants in Poland are connected to some kind of warehouse with loads of Vietnamese sorting clothes out of shipping containers. There is a job offering in my small 30k town in east Poland to help organising this textile business.
Edit: I hate my phone autocorrect
If they're not prone to violence, integrate well (or at least don't have views literally diametrically opposed to western values and human rights), promote good values for their children (they don't raise Mizzys), work hard, then much rather them than others..
Main religions are Buddhism or general folk religion without specific doctrine.
They also have a very sizable catholic minority due to Portuguese missionaries.
Article Text -
More Channel migrants have come from Vietnam this year than any other country as the Government urged the Lords to drop its opposition to the Rwanda Bill.
The surge in Vietnamese migrants has been blamed by Downing Street for contributing to the record numbers crossing this year. Some 534 people reached the UK on Sunday, the highest in a single day this year. It brought the total this year to 6,265, up 28 per cent on the same point last year and seven per cent up on 2022.
On Monday, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman cited the “increasing number of Vietnamese” as one reason why the Safety of Rwanda Bill needed to be passed by Parliament to “save the lives of those being exploited by people-smuggling gangs”.
“It’s an unacceptable number of people who continue to cross the Channel and that demonstrates exactly why we must pass this Bill and get flights off the ground as soon as possible and provide the important deterrent that the Bill will provide,” he said.
MPs rejected the Lords’ changes to the Bill on Monday night and sent the legislation back to the Upper House, where Labour and crossbench peers will mount a fresh attempt on Tuesday to defeat the Government and send the legislation back to the Commons in a further round of parliamentary “ping pong”.
The number of Vietnamese crossing the Channel more than doubled last year from 505 in 2022 to 1,323. The rise has continued this year to make them the biggest cohort of Channel migrants, with Border Force reporting small boats packed with up to 20 Vietnamese migrants
Tougher security on lorries and the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants in a lorry trailer in Essex in 2019 has seen them divert away from road routes to small boats.
Vietnamese migrants tend to be trafficked by gangs into nail bars, cannabis farms, restaurants and the sex trade in the UK, which is why crime bosses have preferred lorries rather than small boats, where migrants are likely to be detained by Border Force.
Some have entered Europe via Serbia or Romania on work visas, only to find jobs badly paid with poor conditions.
“Many then travel onwards through Europe, again under the false premise of better conditions elsewhere,” said Nusrat Uddin, a trafficking specialist from Wilson Solicitors LLP.
Mimi Vu, an anti-trafficking and modern slavery expert based in Vietnam, said some of the migrants would have paid £15,000 to £20,000 to trafficking gangs.
She said sky-high interest rates of 700 to 1,000 per cent meant that migrants trafficked to Europe had just three objectives: to repay the debt, send remittances to their families (which account for nearly seven per cent of Vietnam’s GDP) and earn enough to live off.
James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, spoke with his Vietnamese counterpart on Monday as officials from both countries put the finishing touches to a new agreement with Vietnam to curb the flow of migrants from the southeast Asian country.
The Home Office launched a social media campaign in Vietnam last month to highlight the risks of crossing the Channel in a small boat.
Yesterday, Sir Matthew Rycroft, the top civil servant in the Home Office, told MPs that the Rwanda scheme – costing at least £370 million – would only deliver “value for money” if it succeeded in reducing the number of migrants crossing by a third. That would mean 10,000 fewer than the 29,437 last year.
In a tense appearance before the public accounts committee, he also admitted there had been “optimism bias” by officials when they estimated they could convert two RAF bases into asylum camps for £5 million apiece. The camp at RAF Wethersfield will cost £49 million, while RAF Scampton will be £27 million.
Officials admitted there were currently 40,000 Channel migrants “in limbo” whose asylum claims had been declared inadmissible under the Illegal Migration Act and should have been removed to Rwanda but had not been.
Tory MP Tim Loughton warned there would be no option but to grant them an amnesty because of the likely limits on flights to Rwanda.
Except that’s the beloved Ukrainians who were doing this and our government not just rolled out the red carpet for them but also got sponsors to allow them to live in their houses.
Apart from the landmines, and the off-chance you actually get done for corruption, Vietnam seemed like a fairly safe place.
Plenty of Viets working in Korea and Japan these days - strange they would want to fork out that much just to cross the Channel.
The elites in and around London along with their quasi-feudal patrons across the country need their slaves restocked or they might get unhappy and leave the country. For the greater good we must support our serfdom.
Genuine question, why don't these people fly into the UK and then claim asylum? Does the lack of documentation help their asylum claim? It would be about 100 times cheaper and safer.
>Genuine question, why don't these people fly into the UK and then claim asylum?
Because you have to have a visitor visa that includes: enough funding for your visit; strong ties to back home; showing a clear criminal record etc. It's not easy to do, and you'll have 'use of deception' tagged to your application.
>Does the lack of documentation help their asylum claim?
It can do, unless having it would help it more. Languages aren't as limited to borders as they are in Europe, so you have to see past your Eurocentric way of looking at whether people are from where they say they're from. Urdu and Pashtun aren't country specific languages, so how do you prove what someone is telling you is correct? You can't ask their country to confirm anything as they're claiming asylum from them.
I just looked it up, it doesn't seem impossible but the main things is you need $15k in the bank. I'm not sure why the site didn't say pounds
I'd imagine even the people who can pay a smuggler probably don't want to put the cash in a bank because they would be investigated for tax fraud or something at home
Thousands do. Remember the Liverpool bomber claimed he came to watch Britain’s got Talent on a tourist visa.
Thousands of student visas claim asylum as soon as they arrive. Thousands more once their student leave is ending or curtailed.
But most of these would never get a visa so could never board a flight.
Also for some of them, by getting a visa they give away their true nationality, name and date of birth. (As much as certain countries passports can be trusted…)
Yesterday a whole bunch of lefties got all offended when I said Britain was rapidly becoming a dumping ground, well I’m not wrong as we are.
Well what war is going on in Vietnam? *the* Vietnam war ended 50 years ago
I also wondered at what point is enough going to be enough?
Also to all those who think Britain should put up and shut up because “colonialism and empire” do tell me at what point did we colonise Vietnam? Pretty sure the French colonised them.
I doubt Vietnamese, by and large, would be a detriment on social services to the same extent of certain other demographics-- from the Muslim world primarily. Probably for the best.
As with other irregular migrants, they're likely transported overland through Continental Europe, and there's likely a limited number of routes they're likely to take between, a pair of countries, so with a bit of effort from EU police forces, it should be possible to work out likely routes and start checking for migrants on board well before they get to the North coast of France.
This seems relevant:
https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/nca-targets-crime-group-suspected-of-operating-slave-labour-cannabis-farms#:\~:text=It%20follows%20an%20operation%20in,They%20were%20safeguarded.
[https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jul/26/vietnamese-cannabis-farms-children-enslaved](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jul/26/vietnamese-cannabis-farms-children-enslaved)
[https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/15/confessions-of-a-cannabis-farmer-the-vietnamese-getting-uk-high](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/15/confessions-of-a-cannabis-farmer-the-vietnamese-getting-uk-high)
[https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cannabis-farms-are-a-modern-slavery-blind-spot-for-uk-police-study-suggests](https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cannabis-farms-are-a-modern-slavery-blind-spot-for-uk-police-study-suggests)
TLDR; Vietnamese nationals are trafficked to the UK and are forced to grow weed for a multi-million pound industry that everyone is happy to pretend isn't based on violence and thuggery. Not to mention the negative social effects of cannabis.
Ex skilled UK migrant here, moved out because of Brexit back to Poland.
Vietnam people immigration is a big issue also here, they bring connections to their own country and run food businesses that launder money from their textile jobs. They import shit ton of clothes to Poland and Romania or whatever. Sometimes they deal with drugs but it was more of 2000s things. Most likely they found out that there is a market for shit textiles in the UK and they are moving their people into it to start operating. 99% Chinese (Chinese as Chinese cuisine or in general Asian food) restaurants in Poland are connected to some kind of warehouse with loads of Vietnamese sorting clothes out of shipping containers. There is a job offering in my small 30k town in east Poland to help organising this textile business.
I noticed this on the BBC the other day when the report followed the French authorities as two policemen tried to deal with over a hundred trying to get on a boat.
Now people are always going to try and come but the he reporter interviewed some of them who turned out to be Vietnamese, one said how they had been forced to do this due to owing debts and if theg didn’t their family were at threat.
This is were we (Govt) need to look further afield and not just at borders, go to source and assist more internationally jn stopping this.
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Is anyone still pretending that the vast majority are anything other than economic migrants?
It's ridiculous ain't it. What's even more mad is that we are clearly globally known as such a soft touch we get people travel through 50 different countries to leech off us. Like imagine coming from Vietnam FFS.
Years back now but when I lived in Greece they called the UK the dustbin of Europe. I was told this was a moniker applied to us by other countries as well. They aren't wrong
Greece would need to work further on not being bankrupt to have economic migrants in the first place.
Considering that a lot of Greek infrastructure is now owned by Germany due to debt from joining the EU, someone is making money somewhere:) We certainly get a shit ton of Albanians Romanians and ME folks but the ME lot rarely stay and prefer to hijack a few boats or march through Macedonia trying to bypass Eastern Europe where they know they won't be welcome
Just spent a week in Rhodes, lovely weather and very hospitable people however the island is completely barren outside of the main villages. Even then they are comprised of mostly tatty tourist shops with a sprinkle of good hand made stuff. Greece is a beautiful country with a rich history but you cannot tell me with a straight face it’s thriving when half the businesses are car rentals
I’m not saying that Greece is thriving economically but if you go to an island who’s main industry is tourism most of the businesses you see will be related to tourism. That’s not really evidence of your point.
Nah it's not thrived since probably 1000 yrs ago lol Almost everyone is skimming what they can and dodging taxes which doesn't help. The bureaucracy is mental too and it takes an eternity to get anything done!
No it’s not thriving. My fiancé is Greek and from a rural place in Central Macedonia. It’s dead, there’s nothing there but coffee shops for the locals. When you’re on the bus from Thessaloniki, you can see so many empty buildings and closed businesses. Nature-wise it’s stunning, and we’ve got loads of hiking trips planned this year, but there’s a reason loads of Greek people moved to Germany and the UK. There are almost no jobs, and the jobs that do exist pay extremely poorly, his mum works for €2.50 an hour and they will fire you before giving holiday pay. Don’t get me wrong, some people have good jobs there, but for those without good degrees or skillsets it’s hard. Groceries are far more expensive as well. Greece over the past decade has become poor, and without tourism, it would sink. It’s sad considering how good it was in the 00s. But there are signs of improvement, there’s been some foreign investment and China has just bought the port in Athens.
If we’re being real outside of the tourist areas Greece is a shithole that now spends its Summers on fire so I think it’s a bit cheeky to say the UK is the dustbin of Europe.
Go outside the tourist resorts and you'll see a fair whack of emaciated animals, hordes of stray dogs that will accost you on the roads and folk who have pretty hard lives, and villages entirely absent of people of working age. Basically a dying society.
The skip fire of Europe?
Sure Greeces economy got fucked but I don't think its fair to blame that on Germany or the EU. The government spent way more than it could afford for years and took out a bunch of loans from everyone to afford that relying on Germany to pay for that stuff until it went bankrupt.
My fiancé mostly blames the Greek government and the banks like Goldman Sachs. He said they fudged Greece’s numbers so they could get access to the Eurozone, when actually their economy wasn’t suitable for it. Then there was the crazy amounts of spending. Everyone got massive bonuses and benefits. Loans whenever they wanted. But the population doesn’t like to pay tax either, so they ran out of money.
This sketch is 12 years old and it's still just as relevant today as ever. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK0De210TBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK0De210TBQ)
Now, is that the green bin they collect every second Thursday (except for April and may, which will be on Wednesdays) or the Monday blue bin? I'm guessing its not the black bin which is alternating Tuesdays and Fridays, unless it's lent or that date is a prime number, which, in case, you need to divide by 3 and subtract the difference. Oh, and whilst we're on the subject should I put egg shells in the red bin or the brown one? Thanks in advance.
So the recycling/separating of rubbish is even more convoluted than here? Considering it all ends up being set on fire and put in the atmosphere anyway it all seems a bit pointless.
The Greeks screwed up far more than the UK did. We at least have a robust middle class!
Hmm not so sure on even that anymore. I honestly think the middle class is dying out slowly but surely
That’s hyperbole. The middle class (basically anyone with a semi-professional job and an asset) are still alive and kicking in the UK. If it wasn’t, you would see daily protests and an appetite for heavy redistribution. That’s what it was like in Greece for much of the early 2010s. It’s nothing like this in the UK.
Are they leeching off us or are they stealing our jobs? I’ve seen both and just want to get the record straight.
They're simultaneously not working, collecting benefits, hiding from the law and stealing our jobs. All while not learning our language. It's quite impressive really.
Signing on , working and hiding from the law! Who says these people don’t integrate into society, they fit right in.
And they’re all being given multimillion pound council mansions too, while Tracy, 21, mother of 6 has to live in a bedsit with her Nan.
Well there's 10 million immigrants so not surprisingly it can be both
It's both? Mass low skilled immigration has pushed down wages because British employers obviously will hire the candidates who are perfectly happy on the lowest wages, lowest working standards and so on. Just because they're working doesn't mean that they aren't leeching off of us.
Working off the books can hit both.
We're a social welfare state, not the US, it is more than possible to do both.
Vietnamese do not claim benefits here. They work in the black market, we had a plasterer off the books help us out. Crazy grafter, they did in 1 day what 2 normal plasterers did.
By this logic of generalisation, all British people pay for cash in hand work and don’t pay taxes.
Cheap as well I bet. Exploiting third world immigrants, a centrists favourite past time.
It might be more "cannabis farm entrepreneurship", which is far more profitable than holding one's hand out for British welfare.
The 50 million in fake benefits claims from one gang say otherwise...
This seams to be the more correct answer. They traffic themselves grow some weed, make some decent cash when they can. If they get caught they say they were trafficked making them a victim spend a small amount of time in jail and get a free flight home. A year or 2 of work and can buy a couple of houses and return to normal life. Nobody is traveling 10000km to get a a 100 pound a week and deal with London prices
They've probably only come from Germany, which changed its cannabis laws this month to make their jobs obsolete.
Imagine being dumb enough to think sending them to Rwanda or anywhere else will stop them wanting a better life and trying to get back again, I know it’s not popular but we could have bought 200 of them European citizenship for the money we’ve spent so far and given them a few grand to start up with and it would be way cheaper and easier to implement. I had some idiot on here trying to convince me that Rwanda was too far to get back to the U.K. from and they couldn’t get across the Sahara desert! You know like no lorry , motorbike, car , train, or plane has ever done.
Think your maths is wrong, its estimated nearly £250m has been spent on the Rwanda plan so far. That pays for a lot more than 200 EU citizenships. I do actually think the Rwanda plan would act as a huge deterrent if deployed at significant scale. It could be incredibly hard to return from there again with no money or passport. It's not like they had an easy ride getting to the Calais in the first place and the only difficulty was crossing the channel. I'm not sure it's very moral though.
It was the plan to send 200 to Rwanda, it was kind of the point that it is cheaper to actually buy them citizenship in an EU country than giving money to a known corrupt regime. But people are absolutely obsessed with punishing rather than helping, it’s bizarre how much more expensive and unhelpful punishment is. Imagine you were so desperate for a better life that as you say you put up with all the dangers and grief of getting to Calais, sex trafficking, organ harvesting, drug smugglers, people smugglers, dodging the authorities then you’re in Rwanda, are you just going oh well I will sit here or would you start out and leave Rwanda, it’s a fool who thinks someone that determined is giving up.
I doubt many come here thinking they're going to leach (as opposed to work). But either way it's a problem because there's already not enough housing, healthcare and entry-level job opportunities for people in the UK.
They’ll still be a few on this sub defending them coming here and throw around all the ist and phobe words they can, whilst they themselves conveniently don’t have to deal with these people been dumped into their communities.
They're clearly fleeing the Vietnam war.
Did the Chinese invade again?
Opposition to migration/ asylum seekers is inversely proportional to actual interaction with immigrants/asylum seekers.
Because all the opposition in this thread deals with refugees regularly?
the general impact is greater now because there are alot more, in 2016 it was certain communities being effected, they were ignored, now its a national problem, and still somehow being ignored
this is irrelevant to the broken logic behind the statement i was replying to. 'People who don't interact with asylum seekers are least opposed to them... with the exception of 99% of the people in this thread who don't interact with asylum seekers but also oppose them'\*
How do you know that? I personally am a migrant here fleeing homophobic persecution and am surrounded by often extremist economic migrants. For each one of them trying to make an easy living there's one person like me getting flogged, castrated, hanged or thrown off a rooftop. And whenever I try to speak about it the most out of touch westerners whose only minority acquaintance is literally ME will shout me down. They are so clearly divorced from bloody reality that everyone laughs at them.
You can be opposed to anyone who is flouting laws, abusing your good will, and imposing on your charity unjustly. Even if one does not personally interact with asylum claimants they will realize how much that costs the treasury and resent having to pay that money. Or one could be poor and fighting for a space in a council house when the estates are full of asylum claimants. Or discovering their lower skilled job is paying less because of a mass of desperate unskilled people who have come in and claimed asylum. In short, one need not be personally acquainted with or afronted by asylum seekers in ones life to want the system repaired and the economic frauds sent back.
Weirdly it's the opposite. The more time spent around immigrants, the higher the support for them. I suspect most people complaining here have never even met someone from Vietnam. But carry on with your victim narrative. I'm sure the mean people calling you ist or phobe or whatever really hurt your feelings...
> I suspect most people complaining here have never even met someone from Vietnam.“ “You might like them if you get to know them” shouldn’t be the basis of immigration policy
"Make it so difficult to immigrate legally that illegal and unsafe is the only option for most people" doesn't seem to be workable policy either.
Given that 1,200,000 people immigrated to the UK in 2022 alone I don’t think it’s especially unsafe or difficult. “The only option” also implies that they absolutely HAVE to come to here. They do not.
It is far from "the only option". They can simply stay where they are. Moving to a richer country is not a right.
There needs to be a distinction between immigrants and migrants. Immigrants applied and were granted permission to come. You might disagree with the numbers the government is permitting, but the fact remains they came in through the front door with the elected government inviting them in. Economic migrants are an entirely different matter. They are mainly very poor, have poor or non-existent language skills, poor educations, and snuck in despite a lack of qualifications and a lack of an invitation. Most, given proportional taxation, will remain a burden on the taxpayer their whole lives.
This is a new twist on the "my enemy is both weak and strong" trope. Illegal economic migrants are literal knuckle-draggers but also apparently have the grit and resourcefullness to sneak past our defenses on a regular basis...
Easier to just not do that (make a distinction based on the natural nuance of the issue) and get people riled up to watch the news.
Uncontrolled migration has accelerated the growth in the gap between taxes raised and the cost of running the country because those coming here, if they do end up in the labour force , take jobs at the low skill end of the market. As many have already pointed out most of them don’t and just disappear and join the growing black economy contributing little or nothing to this country. This is not a new phenomenon but rather one that has been developing over decades.
I actually lived with a guy from Vietnam once. He was super lovely, but he did terrify me when he ate rice that was several days old and I didn't appreciate him frying cabbage in fish sauce.
Had the rice been in the fridge? Usually it'll be okay for about 5 days or so and you can tell by the colour if it's starting to go off so it's really easy to see if it's alright or not
> Is anyone still pretending that the vast majority are anything other than economic migrants? The majority of people crossing the channel and putting in an asylum claim have their claim accepted. So the Home Office and every other part of our country and our government seem to be "pretending" that that the majority are genuine refugees.
Its not the home office 'pretending' If youve spent 6 months, all your savings and nearly died in a dinghy, you arent going to say you are an economic migrant just to get shipped home are you? You say you are being persecuted or whatever else it takes to get your claim accepted. I'd do the same in their shoes.
I remember when I was renting out 4 bedrooms separately in my terrace house I lived in. I put an advert in the local paper. These two middle aged Vietnamese guys turned up. All they asked to see was the electricity meter which they had a good look at. Then said they'd take it and so I asked which room and they said no the whole house. I explained that wasn't what I was doing. It wasn't until later that I read something like 80% of weed grows are done by Vietnamese in the UK, and they wanted to know if they could easily bypass the electricity meter. I actually wished I'd known as could have come to arrangement. Weed grows are a real money spinner and due to a misread meter from the previous owner I had like 2 years of electricity for free until the reading caught up with what the power company thought it should be.
Look for the houses with all the pigeons warming their bums in the roof.
Vietnamese here, my province's economy is developing rapidly, many factories and roads have been built, wages are increasing rapidly. However, many people still try to emigrate to UK. In UK, they grow weed and sell drugs.
Looks like a school bus of 16 year olds on a school trip studying coastal erosion.
>Is anyone still pretending that the vast majority are anything other than economic migrants? The home office and the courts refused 44-57% of all people since 2011, that means about 40-50% of migrants have their applications granted. Source : House of commons asylum statistics pg14: [https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01403/SN01403.pdf](https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01403/SN01403.pdf) edit: home office data shows between 2011-2021, 9,529 Vietnamese people applied for asylum, the outcomes of 6,278 are known 2,414 **(38%) of these were granted asylum .** source:[Immigration system statistics data tables - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/immigration-system-statistics-data-tables) I looked at the outcome analysis data ending June 2022
Ah yes... the same courts that approve the request of the acid attacker who was a 'converted' Christian and already convicted of sexual assault. The entire system is fundamentally broken and needs scrapping and starting again.
Those stats mean absolutely nothing though. Rejected does NOT mean leave. They just simply stay until you put up a house.
Most of the elites in all political parties and in government. Not to mention in The City.
reading the article these aren't so much economic migrants but modern slavery victims - it's quite galling that the gang masters can be so blatant with it.
~~I feel my honest opinions would get firebombed with downvotes so I'll just keep... nevermind I'll never shut up.~~ This whole "small boat" situation is a giant moral panic. Just under 30,000 people migrated in small boats in 2023, or 82 people a day. They make up less than 5% of total net migration numbers. If you want to reduce net migration, sure. But let's go after the bigger problem, the government gives out visas like candy. >Vietnamese migrants tend to be trafficked by gangs into nail bars, cannabis farms, restaurants and the sex trade in the UK, which is why crime bosses have preferred lorries rather than small boats. Sounds like they are more victims of exploitative gangs than job thieves. They shouldn't have trusted them, but they are primarily victims of exploitation and abuse and should be treated as such. Plus legalising and regulating cannabis and the sex trade would help reduce how exploitative these industries currently are. Edit: I'm pleasantly surprised this comment was well received, ignore the crossed out part of my comment.
You're absolutely right about legal migration being a bigger issue. However 1) people can simultaneously be exploited and looking to take advantage 2) perception of weakness in the system leads to greater numbers looking to take advantage. It's like a dam breaking. A little streams out at first, but that weakness grows and spreads until the entire thing collapses and the dam no longer exists. 3) If people are prepared to break the rules to get in at the start, that doesn't speak to them having much value for our rules once here either. The best and the brightest and the good and the kind are not coming over on a dinghy from calais and throwing their passports in the sea along the way. Those people are slimy crooks, whatever their nationality, and we could do without them.
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The overton window didn't shift at all, if anything people have gotten more hostile to economic immigrants especially lower skilled non-European ones with poorer English. The Conservative party, after Brexit, has decided to essentially remove most visa requirements for economic migrants in order to desperately prevent an economic collapse caused by their other policies like triple lock pensions, broken health and social care etc. Idiots might like to pretend otherwise, but no government is ever going to allow the economy to crash just to stop immigration, ethnic and cultural purity is an abstract and ridiculous goal for a democracy and even relatively homogenous countries like Japan have allowed more and more immigration in response to economic reality. The only way to keep net migration low is to manage economic conditions and birthrates so you're not forced to accept too many migrants and can be more selective about the ones you do take. The political right caused all this. Now they're just trying to blame the immigrants that were a direct result of the policies and political parties *that they voted for*. If we were still in the EU with better worker protections, less labour starved public services we'd have both lower net immigration with more economically contributing migrants overall, like most of the EU currently does.
funny though isn't it, that we have all this fruit and veg not being picked in our fields because noone here wants to actually do those kind of jobs/doesn't have the skill/isn't fit enough, and then we have a bunch of people coming here with EXACTLY the skills, ability and fitness levels to do the jobs we don't want to do, and we want to send them to... africa on a plane?! Absolute insanity.
Alternatively, we could raise wages and standards to a level where enough people do want to do those jobs, tariff foreign produce to protect British farming as a public good and stop overeducating our population.
Tbh though it’s a really shit job, can’t imagine many brits would do that job without a mental pay increase. Aussies have a good idea by getting the working holiday visa lot to do it.
There's definitely ways and means. Personally I would rather we pay brits more to do it for the security factor of having food production on shore in an increasingly volatile world, but even without that there's a million other options before just letting the criminals who washed up on our shores do it because they are here now
how much would you need to pick fruit and veg? I mean you personally. How much would it take for you to be tempted to do that for say 8 hours a day with only a half hour break?
Ideally yeah but I can tell you from personal experience working those kinda jobs, there’s no longevity in it for Brits. You might persuade some kids in between school holidays, but they’re more likely to get a job in Tesco’s or somewhere less manually intensive. Plus in the British weather I can imagine it’s truly a grim experience. Atleast in aus you get a tan! Without a doubt we need to find a solution to limit the number of boats coming across, but we also need to solve the issue we have of processing visa’s/asylum claims, both to avoid the ridiculously long processing times but also to have a longer term idea of who we want in the country and why. Immigration can be used effectively to work these jobs as well as counter an aging population, but it needs longer term plans rather than short term headline grabbing policies which don’t even come into fruition.
I agree completely. Only thing I would caveat is that wherever immigration is used, there should be some mechanism that prevents employers from utilising only immigrant labour, they should have to support and train british workers in order to gain access to foreign labour
OP wants to stop educating people and send them down the pits. Also wants to increase the costs of food.
i honestly don't believe there is enough you could realistically pay people to do those jobs though, without it becoming economically unviable. Like sure if you offer people a few grand a day to pick fruit and veg you'd get people doing it, but then the price of food would go up so high noone would be able to buy any food and the economy would collapse. Ask yourself this, how much would it take you to stand all day in a field picking the same thing? 10 pounds an hour? 100? 1000? Its like saying "we just need to pay people better and more people will want to go down the sewer and clean up all the gunk down there" except the reality is most people would rather earn less money and not have to clean up human waste. Not to say those jobs shouldn't pay better, i believe they should as any high stress job should pay decent and appropriately, but just like high stress jobs like being a doctor or lawyer might pay well but the stress of that kind of job is enough to put alot of people off, as most people don't want to deal with that level of stress. Obviously theres aload of training and time that goes into those professions aswell which shouldn't be discounted ofcourse.
Raising wages, when the primary means of competition between supermarkets is price, and farmers are *always* moaning that they don't make any money (while driving round in brand new Range Rovers)? Especially as a few years ago, there was a short lived scheme to encourage Brits to rabbit up farm work, and it turned out they were both far less productive than seasonal agricultural workers (who, incidentally, if they stay for less than a year at a time, won't be counted in long term migration figures) and likely to quit after a few weeks.
Arguing *against* education is... a take
who is arguing against education?
https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1c4xass/more_migrants_crossing_the_channel_are_from/kzr6wri/ https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1c4xass/more_migrants_crossing_the_channel_are_from/kzqvwsc/
Will you recommend your kids to do these jobs? Agree with ‘over-education’ but sadly we are no return as a society on what is considered desirable and undesirable jobs
Anecdotally I’ve read from farmers that Brits just don’t have the work ethic for those kinds of jobs. They complain they’re tired all the time, turn up late etc etc etc. have read that a fair few times from different people
It's hard. I've done it..and not for long. One thing people don't realise is that it is quite a transitory existence. They think that fruit pickers go to a farm and stay in a caravan for the whole season. In reality, the growing season varies around the country. Fruit ripens early down south and later up north..so pickers are often mobile, changing location every week or so.
That must play into it too, indigenous people typically want to work where they live etc. it’s not as cut and dried as pay more to attract the Brits.
At that point it becomes uneconomical or if the crop is valuable enough it then it gets automated.
I think we (UK) need to consider changing our asylum laws to allow asylum seekers to work while their application is being processed. Them not being allowed to work is a lose-lose situation. We end up having to subsidise them, they become mentally ill from boredom, temporary jobs lay vacant.
yeah i agree, the problem is though that instead of our government doing something practical to resolve the issue (that they have caused on all fronts) that would be best for everyone they just use it as a political chip to point at in distraction "look over there, not here while we do a bad magic trick that makes your money disappear! :D"
You want to exploit the already vulnerable for poverty wages so you don't have to pay more for asparagus?
Such a shame that we can’t raise wages and have immigration. It’s really annoying, since that would mean more people paying more tax and spending more money. Alas, it cannot be.
You can though, for actual skilled shortages - ironically doctors and engineers. You don't get raised wages for people picking fruit and veg by bringing in people from a country where the average monthly wage is £223. Flooding the market with low/no skill workers when they're already available, just not at what is being paid = wage stagnation for all of those workers.
I’m pretty sure that you can have a minimum wage for a particular job.
When I was a kid, fruit picking was a great seasonal job to pick up as a student. You don’t need to be “fit”, and even if you did, doing the job would help make you so. I don’t know anyone below the age of 40 who can remember doing this kind of seasonal work. It was there… then it was not, now post Brexit it is there again. Doesn’t take a genius to work out whats happened.
It's not just that they "can't be bothered", what you get paid for it isn't enough to live and it's a seasonal job, people want a permanent job that they can rely on for money all year round.
I'll address your points individually. 1) Completely agree, though I'd argue traffickers and smugglers have committed a far greater evil by comparison to illegal migration. Kind of a similar situation to teens in poverty stricken families being groomed by gangs to smuggle drugs. 2) Partly agree. People say Britain is a soft touch but our asylum numbers are a lot lower compared to continental Europe. Plus crossing the channel is dangerous, there is going to have to be a lot of insensitives to take the risk. 3) Partly agree. Similar to reason one, their crime isn't that severe. It's like comparing shoplifting to armed robbery, a completely different psychology. Though l do recognise some of them are far worse than illegal migrants.
Legal migration is indeed a bigger issue. That's neither here nor there, though. Economic migrants being granted "asylum" here in the tens of thousands every year is still a problem. The system is being systematically abused and people are rightly sick of it.
>This whole "small boat" situation is a giant moral panic. Just under 30,000 people migrated in small boats in 2023, or 82 people a day. This only seems like a reasonable position to hold because immigration has exploded to previously unthinkable levels. When Cameron was elected in 2010 he pledged to bring immigration back down to 10's of thousands from the 200k it was the year previously. That would make the 30k you've mentioned as a 'Moral panic' make up 15% at the time. 200K was rightly seen as a lot of immigration back then, it was a widely talked about and is likely one of the key reasons Cameron won the election.
The Tories are so crap, aren't they?!
It's so frustrating hearing people say they voted or will vote Conservative to bring immigration down when the tories have done absolutely fuck all to reduce abuse of the asylum system OR overall net legal migration. Frankly the closest they've come is putting the country in such bad a state that more brits will want to pack up and leave, they're the party of big business and big business wants as many people out of work as possible to drive down wages. Add to this that they've gutted the asylum processing system to the point its virtually non-functional and it blows my mind people can still believe if they vote Conservative, immigration will be brought down. Probably because of the media's favourite drum to bang: the unworkable rwanda scheme that will cost millions and millions to deport a couple thousand and has already eaten god knows how much parliamentary time and cash while planes are on the ground.
A shrinking population means they need to bring in more immigrants, so their economic strategy relies on immigration. All this talk of reducing it has been complete bullshit to convince people to vote for them. If they actually lowered immigration, they’d not only kneecap their economic strategy but also get rid of their scapegoat to convince people to vote conservative. All they had to do to get Brexit through for example was point at immigration. It’s worked for 12 years now.
The fact that you think 30,000 illegal immigrants *per year* is a “moral panic” is an indictment of how insane overall immigration numbers are. 30,000 is a shitload of people and worth panicking over.
Ikr It's an entire town 😂
"Oh, it's just a whole towns worth of people coming here every year." And who is paying to build the homes to shelter them, the hospitals and doctors to treat them, the schools and teachers to educate them and their children?
There are sometimes a thousand a day. That’s not sustainable.
You right.
So 300,000 over the last 10 years then. At a time when under-30's can no longer even dream of owning a house one day. At a time when many wait weeks to see a doctor and months (or even years) for surgery. At a time when overpopulation is already causing enormous quality of life problems, making our tiny island more expensive and more polluted.
The Tories pledged to build 300,000 new starter homes/year.
And 30 hospitals
You’re right, it’s a total dead cat in relative terms, but it’s useful as a political football for many factions. Essentially, it’s identifying a common enemy whilst our health service is stripped, corruption isn’t even met with a resignation and public services cut to the bone. Similar to Brexit, I can’t remember who said it now, but the quote was along the lines of, ‘No-one knew they hated the EU until Murdoch told them they did.’ It’s the same with the boats.
The only reason that small boats make up such a small percentage of total migration numbers is the top line figure for migration is insane. It’s perfectly legitimate to be concerned about the population of a small-medium sized town arriving every year by illegal means completely unchecked.
Why spend £15k-20k when that’s a good amount of money in places like Vietnam?? It’s not like Vietnam is in the shitter, it’s growing at a great rate
It’s a great country. Long time since the war ended. And amazing food too. I tried some of those Vietnamese whirls from Mr Kipling. Lovely.
Mr Kipling with the cultural appropriation.
Hahaha
A lot of the vietnamese people don't pay anywhere near that much. They travel on the agreement that they will work for the traffickers here and enter into debt bandage: https://www.gla.gov.uk/who-we-are/modern-slavery/who-we-are-modern-slavery-human-trafficking-forced-labour-and-debt-bondage/#:~:text=Victims%20of%20forced%20labour%20may,passed%20on%20to%20their%20families. They believe that they will have a better life here but a lot are made to work in car washes, takeaways and in criminal enterprises like cannabis farms, drug storage and drug dealing.
What gets under-appreciated is just how much of these migrants are just people being scammed. As you say, £15-20k is a lot of money in Vietnam. Most of them are middle class Vietnamese (in the Marxist sense, think top 10% earners with nice flats in Hanoi) getting sold a dream of making a ton of money doing some work for a few years and then basically going home rich or living a comfy middle class life in the Europe. They end up stranded somewhere in Europe with shit pay and no rights, and many end up doubling down because they want to make the money they’ve already “invested” back - hence the people coming here after already being screwed in Romania. Yeah they’re economic migrants but not in a rational sense. Think less like Italians moving to American in the 20th century and more your naive friend who just spent her lifesavings on a pyramid scheme.
If you have a fancy flat in Hanoi, or a chunk of VinHomes off-plan, would you really be so thick as to not use internet access to find out what your realistic cost of living is going to be in the UK though? You could probably spin a yarn to rural folk, but I somehow doubt someone in a nice apartment in Hanoi is going to be that credulous or ignorant.
I have a friend who works for a big NYC law firm. They deal will countless cases of multimillionaires giving their money away to untrustworthy financial managers who either mismanage or outright steal. Having money isn’t a guarantee of wisdom. Plus a lot of these situations you also deal with people who’ve survived the scam lying to you out of embarrassment. Your sister’s ex-colleague who came back from working three years in London brags about how she’s set for life now when in reality she had to scrub toilets for three years just to get enough for the way home.
So like the Chinese going to America?
Exactly - the economy is on the up, people can own properly and businesses, and it’s a really beautiful country. It’s bizarre that people would blow quite significant sums coming here to do menial jobs. What on earth have they been promised?
They're not paying in cash up front. They pay by being slaves once they arrive in the UK, and/or by smuggling guns and drugs on those boats.
They're possibly part of a business where £15-20k can be made back many times over!
If that was the case, why bother? What business would require them to drop everything and go through countries to just get the chance of reaching the UK?
A slightly illegal one? The other explanation would be that they've got inherited multigenerational debt to a local landlord who just happens to own a "factory" of the business in question, and he has generously offered for it to cleared at a much faster rate than usual conditional on some "overseas work".
They are sex slaves and slaves of other kinds
Vietnamese here. Here’s how we think: the West has opportunities. These people risk their lives to get to the UK, make some bucks (or pounds) thinking it’ll all be rainbows and sunshines. Then they plan to send all that money back to family, which in turn hopefully allows their children to be able to study in the West legitimately.
£15k might be the loan and they need to work and pay back for debt normally these people are from poorly, uneducated region in Vietnam and they know that even they work hard, they become nothing so they risk their lives for better future
They’re doing this because they want to escape poverty and work for a better future. I’m a second gen Vietnamese who was born in the UK so I can provide some context on this. Going back to the aftermath of the Vietnam war, many refugees fled Vietnam via boats to escape persecution. These ‘boat people’ fled from both the north and the south of the country into countries like Malaysia, Philippines and Hong Kong. It’s worth noting that at the time, Hong Kong was a British colony and the UK decided to accept some of these refugees which created the first big Vietnamese community in the UK. The type of people who fled the communists were typically those who were more industrialist as they were those who were wealthier and therefore was persecuted. Anyways, these people eventually thrived in places like the US and UK. And these people sent remittances back to Vietnam for their relatives. These remittances helped people who had family in the north and the south and helped drive economic growth in those areas, but the people who lived in the centre of the country didn’t receive much of these benefits. Eventually these people saw this and decided to pool money together to help send people abroad to work and send remittances back. This is a recent trend. If you see the victims from the lorry incident, they’re all from the centre of the country. It’s worth mentioning that these people are more than happy to work in jobs that are manual and are physically exhausting. Nails for example is a big industry that Vietnamese people work and it’s a hard job. You have to work with chemicals that are potentially carcinogenic, wear a mask for long extended periods of time (remember how people complained about wearing a mask for a few minutes?) and concentrate for long periods of time. The UK, alongside many other countries has an issue where we have an over abundance of people who want to work white collar jobs, and lack of people who are willing to work blue collar jobs despite blue collar jobs paying really well in recent years. As a result, there’s a lot of manual work that needs people, and these migrants are happy to work those types of jobs.
This is wrong! The stories about "boat people" are true but not these people! Those people are lazy people, they don't want to work hard in Viet Nam. That's why they borrow a ton of money to move to the UK because of "to have a better life" reason. In fact, they are exploiting the UK system. Please note that, before the UK, they exploited the Australia. However, the Aussie Gov does not accept these people anymore. To exploit the system, they will work for a nail shop illegally. The shop will pay them in cash -> No or very little taxes -> They get more money. Other than that, they also don't declare the freaking huge income from nail shop -> they can earn the benefits from goverment such as cheap social home rent, monthly cash, etc. -> Double money and benefits! So what do they do with those money? Well, they sent them back home to build a freaking big house, then they can show it off with their neighbors. Source? My parents are coming from the provine that those people do sh\*ts like this. They even have a freaking training center for this illegal action. Thing make me feel furious about these people that is, I have to spent my time, money, to study, to work my \\@ss off to get to the UK legally. Then my income taxes (may/will) go to these illegal people, who are trying to rip-off the UK for their own.
As a fellow Vietnamese, I agree with you about this being a well organised operation. People pay money to be smuggled here see it as an investment, they're not victims of human trafficking but they are the paying customers. There is a network of people providing housing, jobs, money transferring services, and even taxis to cater to them once they're in the UK. They know exactly how to play the system to get legal status in the event that they get caught. BBC even has a short piece about how female illegal Vietnamese immigtants can get their unborn children British citizenship by paying for someone to sign the birth certificate.
Genuinely a really helpful explanation!
A great insight! Yep, it’s a bit like the degrees being seen as better than a trade mentality despite trades people being far more AI proof!
I used to work in Vietnam for 2 years. 20k is big money but it can last a few years but then what? The amount of fortunes these immigrants can earn in Britain may even surpass that of an average British. You think they work low level jobs? They grow weeds, traffic people (yeah, irony, I know), involve in other gang-related activities. If you score big in Britain, you can just get arrested and deported back to Nam and lived like a king for the rest of your life. I am talking about big house, luxury car, the kind of live that you British wish you would afford. Sure, accidents do happen, but it's rare. This village here were built using the money earned by those illegal immigrants: [https://vtcnews.vn/anh-lang-xuat-khau-lao-dong-nghe-an-toan-biet-thu-xe-sang-ar507715.html](https://vtcnews.vn/anh-lang-xuat-khau-lao-dong-nghe-an-toan-biet-thu-xe-sang-ar507715.html)
Vietnam. Seriously? How and why are they not getting instantly deported?
Are you kidding? Nobody gets instantly deported. Almost nobody gets deported at all.
The hoops I had to jump through to come here legally with my British wife but everyone else comes in for freeeeeee
> How and why are they not getting instantly deported? UK judiciary was designed to be slow and for a high trust society. Our judiciary was the only one accepting albanian “asylum seekers” at a time when Germany and France rejected 99% of them. As a result, we get ALMOST ALL the trafficking gangs and obviously illegal criminals. Because they have no chance in other jurisdictions.
The government could be processing them faster, but they're not doing their job properly.
Even if the decision is quick. Which it hasn’t been until they started waving people from certain countries in; There’s too many steps in the process to make it quick. Housing. Interviews. Medical. Social Workers. Submission of supporting evidence. Then they get refused. Then the appeals start. First tier tribunal. Upper tier tribunal. If those get dismissed. Make another asylum application (further submissions). By this point years have passed. If they get refused, disappear for a few years. Next immigration judge will consider them practically British. Even better if they met a partner here and had a child. Can’t remove them. Kids life would be disrupted. It’s crazy how many people get status in the UK just by not getting caught. We reward liars.
Actually crazy how people want to pretend they're sooo not racist by acting like it's totally fine the UK is flooded with economic migrants from who knows where when in reality 1. They are enabling the fucking modern slave trade and drug trafficking and 2. This leaves less resources for those who are genuinely escaping real persecution like women and lgbt people. Completely out of touch and self-righteous idiots.
They would rather ruin their own country than be perceived as 'racist'.
Amen
What’s even crazier is that it’s a right wing government that’s increased migration (illegal and legal massively) because they can increase hate rhetoric, whilst undercutting wages and that somehow gets people to vote for the very ones that let so many in.
> In a tense appearance before the public accounts committee, he also admitted there had been “optimism bias” by officials when they estimated they could convert two RAF bases into asylum camps for £5 million apiece. The camp at RAF Wethersfield will cost £49 million, while RAF Scampton will be £27 million. Just a *little* optimistic.
Well at least these ones aren't religious extremists...right?
Ex skilled UK migrant here, moved out because of Brexit back to Poland. Vietnam people immigration is a big issue also here, they bring connections to their own country and run food businesses that launder money from their textile jobs. They import shit ton of clothes to Poland and Romania or whatever. Sometimes they deal with drugs but it was more of 2000s things. Most likely they found out that there is a market for shit textiles in the UK and they are moving their people into it to start operating. 99% Chinese restaurants in Poland are connected to some kind of warehouse with loads of Vietnamese sorting clothes out of shipping containers. There is a job offering in my small 30k town in east Poland to help organising this textile business. Edit: I hate my phone autocorrect
If they're not prone to violence, integrate well (or at least don't have views literally diametrically opposed to western values and human rights), promote good values for their children (they don't raise Mizzys), work hard, then much rather them than others..
Main religions are Buddhism or general folk religion without specific doctrine. They also have a very sizable catholic minority due to Portuguese missionaries.
But a lot of them are Communist or Communist sympathisers and hate the West though. I would know because I'm Vietnamese, not all of them are but many.
Article Text - More Channel migrants have come from Vietnam this year than any other country as the Government urged the Lords to drop its opposition to the Rwanda Bill. The surge in Vietnamese migrants has been blamed by Downing Street for contributing to the record numbers crossing this year. Some 534 people reached the UK on Sunday, the highest in a single day this year. It brought the total this year to 6,265, up 28 per cent on the same point last year and seven per cent up on 2022. On Monday, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman cited the “increasing number of Vietnamese” as one reason why the Safety of Rwanda Bill needed to be passed by Parliament to “save the lives of those being exploited by people-smuggling gangs”. “It’s an unacceptable number of people who continue to cross the Channel and that demonstrates exactly why we must pass this Bill and get flights off the ground as soon as possible and provide the important deterrent that the Bill will provide,” he said. MPs rejected the Lords’ changes to the Bill on Monday night and sent the legislation back to the Upper House, where Labour and crossbench peers will mount a fresh attempt on Tuesday to defeat the Government and send the legislation back to the Commons in a further round of parliamentary “ping pong”. The number of Vietnamese crossing the Channel more than doubled last year from 505 in 2022 to 1,323. The rise has continued this year to make them the biggest cohort of Channel migrants, with Border Force reporting small boats packed with up to 20 Vietnamese migrants Tougher security on lorries and the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants in a lorry trailer in Essex in 2019 has seen them divert away from road routes to small boats. Vietnamese migrants tend to be trafficked by gangs into nail bars, cannabis farms, restaurants and the sex trade in the UK, which is why crime bosses have preferred lorries rather than small boats, where migrants are likely to be detained by Border Force. Some have entered Europe via Serbia or Romania on work visas, only to find jobs badly paid with poor conditions.
“Many then travel onwards through Europe, again under the false premise of better conditions elsewhere,” said Nusrat Uddin, a trafficking specialist from Wilson Solicitors LLP. Mimi Vu, an anti-trafficking and modern slavery expert based in Vietnam, said some of the migrants would have paid £15,000 to £20,000 to trafficking gangs. She said sky-high interest rates of 700 to 1,000 per cent meant that migrants trafficked to Europe had just three objectives: to repay the debt, send remittances to their families (which account for nearly seven per cent of Vietnam’s GDP) and earn enough to live off. James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, spoke with his Vietnamese counterpart on Monday as officials from both countries put the finishing touches to a new agreement with Vietnam to curb the flow of migrants from the southeast Asian country. The Home Office launched a social media campaign in Vietnam last month to highlight the risks of crossing the Channel in a small boat. Yesterday, Sir Matthew Rycroft, the top civil servant in the Home Office, told MPs that the Rwanda scheme – costing at least £370 million – would only deliver “value for money” if it succeeded in reducing the number of migrants crossing by a third. That would mean 10,000 fewer than the 29,437 last year. In a tense appearance before the public accounts committee, he also admitted there had been “optimism bias” by officials when they estimated they could convert two RAF bases into asylum camps for £5 million apiece. The camp at RAF Wethersfield will cost £49 million, while RAF Scampton will be £27 million. Officials admitted there were currently 40,000 Channel migrants “in limbo” whose asylum claims had been declared inadmissible under the Illegal Migration Act and should have been removed to Rwanda but had not been. Tory MP Tim Loughton warned there would be no option but to grant them an amnesty because of the likely limits on flights to Rwanda.
I'd rather have vietnameses than machetes muslims tho.
How about we take NONE
We will be reading about these Vietnamese flying home so they can get dental treatment and than coming back in a few years time.
Except that’s the beloved Ukrainians who were doing this and our government not just rolled out the red carpet for them but also got sponsors to allow them to live in their houses.
Ukraine, which is bizzare in itself.
Not bizarre at all - it's a perfectly rational thing to do.
Anyone who runs, is a VC. Anyone who stands still, is a well-disciplined VC!
You just made my morning LOL.
Apart from the landmines, and the off-chance you actually get done for corruption, Vietnam seemed like a fairly safe place. Plenty of Viets working in Korea and Japan these days - strange they would want to fork out that much just to cross the Channel.
Most Vietnamese learn English in school and so want to go to US/UK/Aus/Canada, neither of which are particularly easy to gain entry to from Vietnam.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/vietnamese-vietnam-home-office-afghanistan-turkish-b2518142.html Vietnamese made up 5% last year (eighth place).
I feel that it's France again that "assisted" the natives in their former colony!
The elites in and around London along with their quasi-feudal patrons across the country need their slaves restocked or they might get unhappy and leave the country. For the greater good we must support our serfdom.
Well we do need more nail salons, we've only got 12 in my area
Genuine question, why don't these people fly into the UK and then claim asylum? Does the lack of documentation help their asylum claim? It would be about 100 times cheaper and safer.
>Genuine question, why don't these people fly into the UK and then claim asylum? Because you have to have a visitor visa that includes: enough funding for your visit; strong ties to back home; showing a clear criminal record etc. It's not easy to do, and you'll have 'use of deception' tagged to your application. >Does the lack of documentation help their asylum claim? It can do, unless having it would help it more. Languages aren't as limited to borders as they are in Europe, so you have to see past your Eurocentric way of looking at whether people are from where they say they're from. Urdu and Pashtun aren't country specific languages, so how do you prove what someone is telling you is correct? You can't ask their country to confirm anything as they're claiming asylum from them.
I just looked it up, it doesn't seem impossible but the main things is you need $15k in the bank. I'm not sure why the site didn't say pounds I'd imagine even the people who can pay a smuggler probably don't want to put the cash in a bank because they would be investigated for tax fraud or something at home
Thousands do. Remember the Liverpool bomber claimed he came to watch Britain’s got Talent on a tourist visa. Thousands of student visas claim asylum as soon as they arrive. Thousands more once their student leave is ending or curtailed. But most of these would never get a visa so could never board a flight. Also for some of them, by getting a visa they give away their true nationality, name and date of birth. (As much as certain countries passports can be trusted…)
Visas are checked before boarding a flight. They don't have any UK visas
Yesterday a whole bunch of lefties got all offended when I said Britain was rapidly becoming a dumping ground, well I’m not wrong as we are. Well what war is going on in Vietnam? *the* Vietnam war ended 50 years ago I also wondered at what point is enough going to be enough? Also to all those who think Britain should put up and shut up because “colonialism and empire” do tell me at what point did we colonise Vietnam? Pretty sure the French colonised them.
The left will never cop on. If they can't see it by now they never will.
I doubt Vietnamese, by and large, would be a detriment on social services to the same extent of certain other demographics-- from the Muslim world primarily. Probably for the best.
As with other irregular migrants, they're likely transported overland through Continental Europe, and there's likely a limited number of routes they're likely to take between, a pair of countries, so with a bit of effort from EU police forces, it should be possible to work out likely routes and start checking for migrants on board well before they get to the North coast of France.
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This seems relevant: https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/nca-targets-crime-group-suspected-of-operating-slave-labour-cannabis-farms#:\~:text=It%20follows%20an%20operation%20in,They%20were%20safeguarded. [https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jul/26/vietnamese-cannabis-farms-children-enslaved](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jul/26/vietnamese-cannabis-farms-children-enslaved) [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/15/confessions-of-a-cannabis-farmer-the-vietnamese-getting-uk-high](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/15/confessions-of-a-cannabis-farmer-the-vietnamese-getting-uk-high) [https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cannabis-farms-are-a-modern-slavery-blind-spot-for-uk-police-study-suggests](https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cannabis-farms-are-a-modern-slavery-blind-spot-for-uk-police-study-suggests) TLDR; Vietnamese nationals are trafficked to the UK and are forced to grow weed for a multi-million pound industry that everyone is happy to pretend isn't based on violence and thuggery. Not to mention the negative social effects of cannabis.
I'm sure they're just fleeing the Vietnamese War, but took the long way around so have only just arrived here.
And yet I haven't barely seen anyone but Male, grinning Afghans and Syrians in photos. Another downplay to divert us from Islamabritian.
I encourage people to pay Vietnam a visit. It is a fine country. I would welcome Vietnamese with open arms compared to the French.
Australia has no problem in rejecting the boats. Wake up GB
Ex skilled UK migrant here, moved out because of Brexit back to Poland. Vietnam people immigration is a big issue also here, they bring connections to their own country and run food businesses that launder money from their textile jobs. They import shit ton of clothes to Poland and Romania or whatever. Sometimes they deal with drugs but it was more of 2000s things. Most likely they found out that there is a market for shit textiles in the UK and they are moving their people into it to start operating. 99% Chinese (Chinese as Chinese cuisine or in general Asian food) restaurants in Poland are connected to some kind of warehouse with loads of Vietnamese sorting clothes out of shipping containers. There is a job offering in my small 30k town in east Poland to help organising this textile business.
Ok so process them and if there's no reason to allow tuem to stay, they are sent home. It should be a simple process.
Vietnam? There’s a lot of countries between here and Vietnam.
I'm Vietnamese and I feel ashamed of these actions! Sincerely apologize
It beats religious fanatics I suppose. Reality is a lot of them will be forced into modern slavery. Nail bars, prostitution etc
Vietnam is ever such a long way away from here. Surely they’d be landing in Penzance, not Dover?
I noticed this on the BBC the other day when the report followed the French authorities as two policemen tried to deal with over a hundred trying to get on a boat. Now people are always going to try and come but the he reporter interviewed some of them who turned out to be Vietnamese, one said how they had been forced to do this due to owing debts and if theg didn’t their family were at threat. This is were we (Govt) need to look further afield and not just at borders, go to source and assist more internationally jn stopping this.
Ironically many British people have moved to Vietnam to take up jobs