Genuine question, not intended to be inferential or anything else about immigration/assylum...

Who on here has personal experience of being affected by immigration/assylum issues. How has it affected you and how has your life altered as a result? Do the views you hold come from personal experience or are they formed from public opinion and what you read or hear on the news and in the papers? Also, do you define the movement of people within the EU as immigration and are you classing these people (e.g Polish workers) as theimmigrants who are affecting your life/opinions? Thanks</p>

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school project?

or you going on question time wi nick griffin?

 

I work in inner-city Southampton. The poverty stricken old part of the City that has been left behind by massive investment elsewhere. Boarded up shops, drugs, prostitution (so it's not all bad), immigration, refugees, high levels of benefit claimants. It's truly multi-cultural, with people Somalia, Africa, India, China, Former Soviet Russia, Pakistan and of various generations etc. I've worked with all of the above and more.

Every culture, every country of origin has lazy slackers and those willing to work hard to raise their footing in society, in my experience.

But there are poverty traps, and many have been created by policy. An asylum seeker for example, can be housed, paid benefits, be fed and clothed and live off the state. In fact they HAVE to, I had a client whose whole family came over from Russia and were told they couldn't work for 2 years? After that 2 years passed, they set up in business, but only because they had that aspiration to do it, they had lost their own business in Russia and knew they could do it. Others have asked to work on arrival and couldn't but ended up claiming up to £18k in benefits per year and it's not worth them getting a job now.

That's ****** up. My view, is if people want to set up a life in this Country, we should let them, but not make them fall into setting up life on benefits, because if you (the Government) were the obstacle to them working in the first place, then you are responsible for perpetuating the poverty trap.

 

Nope, just wondering where that attitude has come from (especially in Barnsley folk) that makes people feel that immigration and assylum seeking is such a problem in this country. My perception is that there are more scroungers who live off the state who are white, 'indigenous' members of the population who can't be arsed to work and find it easier to get benefits, steal from others and hang around doing nothing all day complaining about immigration and assylum seekers to deflect attention from their scrounging existence. People like this seem to think the world owes them a living and this though has been perpetuated since the days of Thatcher, when it was every man for themselfs and F**k anyone else. My question simply was one to inform myself of why genuine people feel as I perceive them to do.

 

through some community work I'm involved with I have met several people who are asylum seekers and am fairly close now to 3 of them. Their stories are dreadful (one is a mum here with her 4 kids, they are a lovely family, her husband is in jail in her country basically because he is from the wrong tribe and her middle child was taken from school and hasn't been seen since). Then on top of that they are treated very badly by the agencies they are involved with over here. The home office is as bad in some respects.

They aren't, as popular opinion would have it, preventing someone from having a council house, they are in accommodation belonging to or sub contracted by the agency that manage them, they aren't rolling in money, they want to work but are prevented from doing so. They can be moved at virtually a moments notice anywhere, think how you would feel if you were given a week and you'd be off to a different town, that means kids out of school and uprooted - how would they cope with that? They are not supposed to have landlines, cars etc anything that ties them to an address - though it seems some do.

The problems, as I see it aren't the fault of legitimate asylum seekers but by a system that can't cope, and by illegal immigrants.

The asylum process itself seems unfathomable

I do get infuriated by the asylum trail across Europe and the camps in calais. If someone needs to seek asylum then surely it should be in the country they enter first.

 

I once got the shits after visiting that Indian Restraunt on Wombwell High Street - I can tell you it altered my life for several hours. Does that count?

 

Think you must be using my glasses with that perception

I wholeheartedly agree.