Why are the French not doing more for kids stuck in the camps at Dunkirk and Calais?

mellowsun

I appreciate that we have a moral duty to take in our share of people fleeing desperate situations and we should be doing a lot more.

However, people are currently suffering on French soil. Does France not have a duty to help these people? It sounds like a war zone and it seems to be being ignored by the French authorities.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/12/dunkirk-child-refugees-risk-sexual-violence

57Deluxe

Katie Popcorns is talking about this right now on LBC...

mgaw

that is a very good question? no idea why they arent ..but they should

Richardj

How many are political refugees and how many are economic migrants who have been told that the UK is a land of milk and honey, where it turns out the majority of the voting public don't want them.

France is broke and has fairly high unemployment as it is. They aren't interested in them as they will only add further to the burden. There is already a lot of unrest in France with the migrant population. The migrants clearly don't want to be in France so why should the French care?

What do you do with people that no-one wants?  They are unfortunately in a limbo of their own making.

It's a social problem without a current solution.

EricTheWeary

Presumably something about stretched resources, resentment that the UK isn't doing more ( they are at Dunkirk trying to get to the UK which is currently part of the EU)and the growing French resentment towards refugees. 

earwighoney

The French aren't doing more for refugees in Dunkirk and Calais due to Brexit, UKIP and because the UK are a bunch of a cunts. 

Cirrus

Sunday rant/ essay time 

I have a friend who's done a lot of work at the camp - for months she was living out of an old caravan that was a first point of call for new arrivals to pick up essentials like a tent, sleeping bag, a blanket etc.

From what I've learned from her, the French authorities actually do quite a lot. Every now and then they raze the camp to the ground to dissuade people from settling there. When they did that a few times and it didn't work, they switched tactics and moved blue shipping containers in to provide some safer and more permanent structures, while periodically continuing to clear out the temporary camps that form around those. They built accommodation for unaccompanied children. They've also, in conjunction with UK authorities, massively increased the perimeter fences etc around the port area.

A few months ago, they closed the camp again and this time put on busses to take them all to camps spread around France. The problem they had, of course, is that when you're a 12 year old kid who's travelled a thousand miles and experienced hell, you might be reluctant to get on a random government bus. So they had some trouble rounding everyone up.

So France has definitely done stuff, though the way they conduct their operations usually leaves a little to be desired from the planning/ forewarning angle - often it's like "today is Monday, on Wedensday we're going to come along and burn all your tents. You have been warned."

I worry a little when people talk cynically about the motives of these migrants - like, who are they, trying to get to the UK? Why don't they stay in France, or better yet the first country they got to (Italy, Greece, Turkey, wherever) or even better why didn't they just stay put in Africa?

I worry because making a blanket judgement on these thousands of people involves making generalisations about them all "oh, they're just economic migrants" (someone explain why this is a bad thing? Does it make them opportunists? does it mean they have ideas above their place in the world, dictated by the geographical location of the vagina that spat them out?).

I worry because the overwhelming attitude seems to be "yeah, it's bad that they're stuck there. But it's not our problem. Someone else should look after them." Thing is, I'd wager the vast majority don't want to be basket cases forever, or mollycoddled by whichever state happens to wrap a blanket round them. These people, all of them from the old men to the women to the children of 10, had the gumption to look around at the world they lived in, see the war/poverty/lack of opportunity/absence of rule of law (delete as appropriate), say "wait, this is fucking awful, I'm out of here." Then put their lives in the hands of fate and people smugglers because that was better than staying put. They're not having a jolly jaunt over Europe with the end game of sponging off the "land of milk and honey". They're smuggling themselves across Africa, across the med in rickety, overcrowded boats where they know they might die, then travelling across the continent in the hope of a better life.

I worry because of how rare it is that people think of the practical reasons someone might prefer to live in England than France - I usually see it explained away by some notion about our benefits system. Rarely do people concede that it might be a more practical reason - that these migrants speak better English than French, that as a hangover from our colonial past they might feel a family tie to the UK that they don't feel in France, that they might have friends or relatives living here (and not necessarily a brother who snuck over the year before, I'm talking about aunts, uncles, grandparents who moved to the UK in the '50s, 60s etc...)

I worry because when a desperate migrant robs an old lady in Calais, or a mentally sick refuge sexually assaults a German schoolgirl, it is reported to the whole of Europe and on some very real level it informs our views about all migrants and all refugees - in the simplistic mind of the "general public" (we are smart as individuals, stupid as a group) we start thinking "better not help any of them if this is how they repay us". It's basically tribalism at its most simplistic, or nationalism at its most worrying, and it's being used to stoke the fires of radical right wing sentiment in Europe. My view is that in any group of humans there will be "bad" people - criminals, rapists, liars, cheats. I'd even go so far as to say that when that group of people has experienced hell, there might be more behavioural problems than otherwise. In my mind, that's a reason to help them more and show them more compassion - not shut them out from western society. Basically, the problems aren't problems intrinsic to migrants, they're problems of humans who have lost hope.

I don't have the answers, I think no matter what societies/ nations/ individuals do, there will always be people who fall off the bottom of the ladder. It's part and parcel of the human condition. If we built a utopia there would still be beggars on the streets. The question is just, do we help them, or do we leave them be? Do we take responsibility or point the finger at someone else to?

SteveRobinson

If the French were clever, they'd give all the refugees French passports which would mean they'd be able to come to live in Britain legally.

For a couple of years at least... 

Fretwired

earwighoney said:

The French aren't doing more for refugees in Dunkirk and Calais due to Brexit, UKIP and because the UK are a bunch of a cunts. 

Is that so - the French did bugger all for years so it doesn't have anything to do with Brexit. How many people have died in rubber boats trying to cross the Med? Thousands who were exploited by people traffickers. The UK can take 3,000 from the French camps then what? It gives the traffickers some great PR and before you know it there are thousands more .. the EU should set up a camp and process these people. Many are just economic migrants who should be sent home. Refugees from Syria should be processed as such and people traffickers should be hunted down by the likes of the SAS.

The UK has pledged to take 20,000 refugees from the camps in Lebanon and Turkey by 2020 - these camps are being funded by the UK which has pledged £1.2 billion in aid. Ask the French how much they are contributing . Could the UK do more? I don't know. It takes time to vet and process people. It's interesting that countries like Sweden and Germany are planning to deport thousands.

scrumhalf

This is something that affects Europe as a whole and would therefore be something that could be could be co-ordinated by, ooh, some sort of Europe-wide body.

If only there was such a body....

...that wasn't so full of bloated self-interested beaurocarts who cannot be bothered to get off their fat taxpayer-funded backside.

I'd expect the UN to do buggerall, but the failure of the EU in this speaks volumes.

Cirrus

scrumhalf said:

I'd expect the UN to do buggerall, but the failure of the EU in this speaks volumes.

You know, I agree. This was one of the things in my personal "reasons to leave the EU" column when I was trying to work out how to vote.

I see this as an issue that's pretty timeless. I'm getting towards the end of William Shirer's Berlin Diary, and I'm seeing many similar themes in terms of national failures of diplomacy and failure to act while groups of people are put through hell.

mellowsun

@Cirrus great post.

I'm conflicted on this because I've been active in human rights and refugee groups in my younger days, but I see no end or solution to this problem.

We should of course prioritise refugees over economic migrants but in practice how do we make that judgement with numbers on this scale?

Sambostar

More to the point, if I stumbled into your house at 3am in the morning with my nephews and extended family, made a camp fire in your living room and refused to listen to you, what would you do?

BigBearKris

SteveRobinson said:

If the French were clever, they'd give all the refugees French passports which would mean they'd be able to come to live in Britain legally.

For a couple of years at least... 

So your understanding is that after Brexit people with French passport won't be able to stay in UK legally? 

Sambostar

That is exactly what happens at present though, it's much harder to find decent paying work that requires no qualifications in France and Germany because of educational standards and cultural reasons, which is exactly why they all come here. 

I doubt you could even call yourself a gardener in France without some sort of specialist higher education. 

Here you can go buy a van and do as you please, hell you can even call yourself a professional builder if you want to.

And if you want to be an Indian rather than a cowboy, there's always a shit load of unskilled service industry work, our whole economy is based on it.

Sambostar

I might take a trip ti the refugee migrant camp and see if there are any qualified dentists though.  Just a hunch, but I'm guessing I won't be able to find a single one.

earwighoney

Fretwired said:

earwighoney said:

The French aren't doing more for refugees in Dunkirk and Calais due to Brexit, UKIP and because the UK are a bunch of a cunts. 

Is that so - the French did bugger all for years so it doesn't have anything to do with Brexit. How many people have died in rubber boats trying to cross the Med? Thousands who were exploited by people traffickers. The UK can take 3,000 from the French camps then what? It gives the traffickers some great PR and before you know it there are thousands more .. the EU should set up a camp and process these people. Many are just economic migrants who should be sent home. Refugees from Syria should be processed as such and people traffickers should be hunted down by the likes of the SAS.

The UK has pledged to take 20,000 refugees from the camps in Lebanon and Turkey by 2020 - these camps are being funded by the UK which has pledged £1.2 billion in aid. Ask the French how much they are contributing . Could the UK do more? I don't know. It takes time to vet and process people. It's interesting that countries like Sweden and Germany are planning to deport thousands.

Sorry, my post was supposed to be sarcastic.  A failed attempt on my behalf to suggest blaming/scapegoating for problems were actually the making of the UK's or down to Brexit. 

Brize

@Cirrus ;

Excellent post, sir.

vale

BigBearKris said:

SteveRobinson said:

If the French were clever, they'd give all the refugees French passports which would mean they'd be able to come to live in Britain legally.

For a couple of years at least... 

So your understanding is that after Brexit people with French passport won't be able to stay in UK legally? 

it's all part of the cunning plan to make britain great again.

export/return hundreds of thousands of young, healthy, qualified eu/non-eu medical staff, teachers, designers & engineers, trades people, etc. the kind of people that keep the country going at all.
& replace them with imported/returned (& bitter at having dreams of retirement destroyed) sickly costa-del-fray-bentos pensioners, to burden our health, welfare & housing systems.

taking back control, one shot in the foot at a time.

Fretwired

Sambostar said:

I might take a trip ti the refugee migrant camp and see if there are any qualified dentists though.  Just a hunch, but I'm guessing I won't be able to find a single one.

You won't; nor doctors. They're all in the USA although Trump is trying to stop them .. ;-)

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-syrian-doctor-with-a-visa-is-suing-the-trump-administration

Sambostar

How come they get the talent and what do we get...people like me witchdoctors and worse?  Hardly fair is it?