Nigel Farage

[mistermack]

What on earth could be wrong with sending illegal immigrants back home?
The clue is in the name. ( illegal ).

If you steal my car, and are caught using it a year later, it's no defence to argue that "well, I've been using it for a year, so I'd be stuck without it now".

Illegal is illegal, and you have no rights to anything gained illegally.

[Svartalf]

problem is the sheer cost of sending illegals back home, and the fact that many of them come from countries that are at war, or dictatures, or something that we, as enlightened people can't keep our moral high ground sending people to.

[rainbow]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... uards.html

This could fund a small army in Africa.

[Hermit]

What on earth could be wrong with sending illegal immigrants back home?
The clue is in the name. ( illegal ).

Nothing wrong with that, except asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants.

[pErvinalia]

Can the UK send Nigel back to wherever his ancestors came from?

[Svartalf]

Odds are neither the Danes nor the Germans will want him

[Pappa]

Farage was being interviewed on Radio 4 the other day and the interviewer referred to UKIP as, "A one man band carrying a bag of fighting ferrets."

[cronus]

He was here today. The reason he ain't looking the camera in the eye is because there's a Anne Summers shop directly behind.

[Rum]

What on earth could be wrong with sending illegal immigrants back home?
The clue is in the name. ( illegal ).

If you steal my car, and are caught using it a year later, it's no defence to argue that "well, I've been using it for a year, so I'd be stuck without it now".

Illegal is illegal, and you have no rights to anything gained illegally.

I lived in Hong Kong at the time of what was locally called The Influx in 66/7 - I was in my mid-teens. The Cultural revolution had just kicked off in Chine and many (many!) people wanted nothing to do with it. Hong Kong is, as people may know, an incredibly small territory and has at times been categorised as the most densely packed place on the planet (over 6000 per sq kilometre these days).

HK didn't have much choice. The government sent as many as they could back after giving them a meal but something like two million 'illegal immigrants' managed to stay one way and another.

The impact was to make the place hugely more vibrant and energised. HK in the late 60s was an amazing place.

[JimC]

What on earth could be wrong with sending illegal immigrants back home?
The clue is in the name. ( illegal ).

Nothing wrong with that, except asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants.

But not all the people moving via unconventional means to other countries are true asylum seekers...

[cronus]

The prisons here are half full of migrants these days. Says something about the sort of people coming over. I don't believe stopping all immigration. But the low grade types...we've enough of our own in that category. And we should be training our own Doctors, they wouldn't be on strike now if they were mostly British.

[Rum]

[cronus]

The 70s generation is mostly in retirement now Rum. The Tories have done a good job on producing a compliant work force willing to accept Zero Hours contracts and everything, keep with the times.

[Rum]

I don't know much about the contract that is on offer to them. I've tried to understand it but it is so spun by both sides it is impossible to get to the bottom of it.

I do know a couple of things though. The current government made a pledge to deliver a 7 day a week NHS. (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ ... en-day-nhs) Whatever colour your politics are, this is laudable.

My father died a year and a half ago from lung cancer. The week before he died someone would come into his room a couple of times a day to help clear his lungs. It was pretty horrible but it reduced his distress. On the Friday one of these people popped in and said they were off for the weekend and if the need was urgent someone would be available. Nobody was and he died on the Sunday, struggling for every breath.

The BMA is a political animal and has an agenda - as of course the government does. I am no Tory - the reverse - but I know where my priorities are with this issue.

[Brian Peacock]

The prisons here are half full of migrants these days. Says something about the sort of people coming over. I don't believe stopping all immigration. But the low grade types...we've enough of our own in that category. And we should be training our own Doctors, they wouldn't be on strike now if they were mostly British.

Those with poor or restricted access to the labour market, irregular work, and/or low wages are, by common consent, considered more likely to be involved in crime as the economic gains outweigh the risks - cost-benefit analysis model. Reported crime and convictions have been following a downward trend since the mid-1980 and since 2002 property crime (burglary, robbery, theft and handling, fraud and forgery and drug offenses) has fallen by 2% while the number of non-UK-born residents has risen by +3%. Even given the 2% fall there is a clear upward pressure in property crimes which is reflected in the proportion of asylum-seekers in a given population, where a 1% rise in asylum-seekers can be tied to a +1% rise in property crime. This is hardly surprising given the economic state of those who's status is in the balance during the asylum process. However, there is reliable evidence to show that the +3% rise in legal resident migrants as a share of the general population over that time is associated with a c.0.5% fall in property crime overall over the same period, and has been shown to have no impact on violent crime. This is because the economic benefits of legal economic activity clearly and significantly outweigh the benefits of crime.

Only the most economically desperate of UK immigrants, asylum-seekers, are more likely to be involved in property crime - predominantly theft and shop lifting. Asylum seekers account for less that 0.1% of the population. The group known as 'A8 migrants' arrive in the UK primarily for work whereas asylum-seekers predominantly arrive to escape danger. A conflation of the two is one of the major problems with this whole debate along with the assumption that both groups arrive in the UK with questionable motives and morals.

Also, both groups are far more likely to be the victims of crime and are also far less likely to report it than UK-born nationals. Whether this represents actual differences in victimisation rates or more general social tendencies among migrants is not clear, but anecdotally it is clear that that new arrivals, legal, illegal, and asylum-seekers, are often targeted by organised crime and opportunist extortionists and are perhaps more likely to be than UK-born nationals.

Though the Daily Mail and the right-leaning press were eager to report that the number of Polish nationals in prison where at 'unprecedented levels' in 2014, this was debunked at the time as they neglected to mention that the prison population at large was also at 'unprecedented levels', that the rate of conviction of Poles as a proportion of the UK Polish population was less than the UK-born population, that a significant proportion of inmates who identified as Polish were naturalised UK citizens, or that a greater proportion of Poles were processed to a conviction as a proportion of the UK Polish population than UK-born nationals. All of which suggests only that Polish nationals and ethnically Polish UK citizens are more likely to be caught and convicted rather than being more criminally-minded than the UK-born population. Recidivism rates are lower among the non-UK-born population than the UK-born population, and the proportion of non-UK nationals in the prison population is currently c.13% compared to c.15% in the general population.

Similar lines of 'argument', that the prisons were disproportionately crammed with a nominated group, used to be applied to the Jamaicans and the Irish - the Daily Hate Mail has just transferred that fear-inducing bigotry to those from Eastern Europe. One wonders which group will be next on list.

The problem here is not with the criminal intent of foreigners but with your intuitions Crumps, they simply do not reflect reality. But that's not going to stop your intuitions driving your opinions is it? Why is that do you think?