A prolific Vietnamese people smuggler, who entered the UK illegally this year in a small boat, has told the BBC he forges visa documents for other Vietnamese who plan to make the same crossing.
The man, whom we are calling Thanh, is now claiming UK asylum and told us he has spent almost 20 years - his entire adult life - in the smuggling industry.
He has been in prison, led a gang working on the northern coast of France, and claims to have helped more than 1,000 people to risk their lives to cross the Channel.
The self-confessed criminal met the BBC at a secret location to share detailed information about the mechanics of the international smuggling industry.
I don’t think a country can hate immigration enough to make migrating to that country worse than being horribly fucking poor. Hope can be so strong it is blind to the strong possibility of bigoted violence.
Also, a country cannot hate immigration enough to destroy the reality that migrants actually bring positive effects. You want people working in your economy, yes? Living in the UK, there are plenty of essential jobs that people who consider themselves non-migrants (a matter of perspective about who ‘belongs here’ which is often tedious and self-serving) simply do not fill. And, spoiler alert,
Spoiler Alert
rich people aren’t going to pay you more and reduce their profits because you chased migrants away with violence. They will demand that the bigots now do the jobs for those low wages themselves, because they created an absence of employees.
I agree with the first part.
The second has some truth but peoples frustration isn’t that there is some immigration. More so, despite their claims, there isn’t a skill shortage of unskilled workers which should’ve always been self refuting. However, there is a shortage of companies who will pay people enough to do the work they want people to do.
When its framed like the above, it frames it as the choices are a) exactly as it is no or b) no migrant workers, even if that’s not what you meant to say.
I hope you agree, the problem isnt the tiny number of people coming here illegally. Its not great but it was largely a deliberately manufactured problem.
The real problem we have no is that every company, post brexit, can now claim that their refusal to pay market rate wages or the provide meaningful training to anyone is the same as a skill shortage. This, of course, means their only possible option these hard done by entrepreneurs can do is import someone in for far less than what they should be paying for that work to be done in the UK.
Before brexit, they had pay enough for someone to want to move from, say, Italy leaving their family and friends behind to start a new life. Now, they only have to offer more than the going rate of the global south.
The problems were seeing are directly a result of letting corporations run riot over our immigration policy for years which has lead to some serious problems.
Just to be clear, I don’t blame anyone for wanting to come here for a better life. I didn’t choose to be born here.
I teach in the UK. I can promise you that there is a skill shortage, in the sense that many young people do not respect learning skills. This is, itself, possibly an outcome of capitalism.
I don’t remember saying that skill shortages don’t exist.
Especially when they’re already coming from places where there’s classism based bigotry and violence.
I think everywhere has that. It’s just that people migrate from places where there is enough of it to be less tolerable than being hated for being foreign in a land full of seething bigots.