you would need an expert and about 100 pages to fully explain it, even then I doubt any of us would understand it. This is why the 'seal the boarders' BNP / Daily Fail types are so laughably ridiculous and uninformed. Its like a brain surgeon hitting a patient up side the head with half a house brick.
The practical difficulties in putting decisions into effect are sometimes very great. Take an example: X has arrived from China, burns his passport and flushes it. X has no right to remain in UK, so it is decided he should be removed. How is removal to be done? * Can X be dragged kicking and screaming onto a plane for China, with no passport? No, since no airline will allow passengers onto a plane on this basis. * Can X be put on a British Government plane and flown to China? No, since the Chinese government refuses to allow such a plane into their airspace, or to land. * Can X get a new passport? Possibly, but that takes time, requires fees, form-filling, signatures, photos - and as soon as the new passport arrives, X may burn it and flush it as before. * Can X be sent to some other country? No, because no other country is prepared to admit him either. In short, deciding X should be removed is easy, but actually removing X legally is difficult, complicated and expensive to administer.
This is the reality. People arrive at British entry points with many different sorts of documents, and for many different reasons. Millions of Brits come back home after foreign trips, millions of tourists arrive for holidays every year, and mixed in with them are thousands of people who have false documents, or tell lies about their circumstances. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is extremely complicated, and simply wishing it were simple does not help the process. Out of such numbers it will always be possible to find cases of people who have been granted (or refused) a visa or a work permit, of whom it is alleged they have been treated unfairly or inconsistently one way or the other. Some of them may be right, but from hearing only one side of their story you cannot tell.
If someone who is actually in UK has a serious infectious disease which represents a threat to others, what are UK health authorities to do? Treat the disease only if the person is present legitimately, and ignore it if the person entered illegally? Pathogenic organisms really don't care if we are British or not, or legal or not. They just infect all of us indiscriminately. As a matter of public health policy, serious infectious diseases must be suppressed as far as possible, regardless of their source. Is this not obvious?
Not quite sure what your point is, here. You seem to be saying that there are UK and EU passport holders who are not of white European ancestry. And that you were surprised to discover this fact two years ago. Well well.
Asylum seekers fleeing from persecution, imprisonment, torture and death threats are rarely able to fly into Heathrow with legitimate documents. More often they have contrived some difficult, dangerous, chancy route and those who survive the journey often arrive exhausted, starving, frozen, or sick. Also confused and terrified. These are the people immigration officials have to deal with, which is not at all easy. Some of them are genuinely fleeing persecution, others tell lies about it. The saddest cases IMHO are those whose genuine story would have got them asylum, but who have been advised to tell some fictional story instead which leads to refusal. Or where a child has made it to UK, but their parents died along the way.
So what makes them travel across land all the way to the UK, why not stop in Spain, Italy or Turkey ?
the oh so caring benefits system, immigration stupidness and and the army of feckwit legal professionals we have here making a living out of importing foriegn nationals. It is believed it is easier to gain a recognised status within the Uk so the blighters all head here, waiting in droves in France (who feed them but keep the non-status) to cross the channel and populate this country.
Australia have now introduced a method of removal.......well a removasl to a non autralian national country. How many people can be homed on Devon Island (cold lonely unihabited place - Canadian territory)? Maybe 150000?
You make it sound very noble Pete, and for those genuinely in distress it is, but do we know the scale of the problem and how many of are bogus / economic migrants. Do the stats exist ?
I suppose that was implied in my 'Who benefits' comment. I believe Cherrie Blair has done very well out of it. It is a bit like children in care cost about £100k per year, but it doesn't end up in their pockets.
Some are indeed noble, some aren't - as I believe I tried to make clear. Even for those genuinely in distress, the trouble is there are millions of people in many different countries who are genuinely in distress, but they certainly can't all come to the UK. Even if it were possible infallibly to sort the genuine from the frauds, that would come nowhere near solving the problems. As for stats, of course there are stats. Whichever party is in government generally tries to represent the various figures in the most favourable light, while the opposition represents them in the most unfavourable light - naturally enough. If there are backlogs in the system (as there often are, because insufficient staff are overwhelmed by the workloads), figures are very unreliable because the staff trying to collate them are overwhelmed. Yet another confusing factor is that people departing from the UK are not monitored with any accuracy (or at all, often). Large numbers of visa overstayers, refused asylum seekers etc. depart from UK of their own accord with no record kept. Since we do not have a National Identity system in the UK, the nascent system having been suddenly scrapped in 2010, there simply is no mechanism available for keeping track accurately.
So what is your point? That professional people handling difficult and complex cases expect to be paid salaries and fees for the work they do? So what? Do you think they ought to work for nothing? Why?
