[logifail]

> The reason people are trying to get to the UK from France (and other countries) is they are trying to apply for asylum in the UK

Why is applying for asylum in the UK more appealing to them than applying for asylum in France?

> But all of this is to say it does not matter whether France is or is not a safe country

If we accept that France is a safe country then doesn't it follow that there is no need for anyone to cross the English channel in a small boat in order to claim asylum?

Unless of course you are someone who is being persecuted by the French and are therefore seeking safety with the English, but since it's been over 200 years since those two countries were at war with each other so that sounds somewhat unlikely.

Gerald Knaus[0] observed last year that although there is a right to asylum, there is no right to migration[1].

[0] https://www.esiweb.org/esi-staff/gerald-knaus [1] https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2023-11/asylpolitik-asyl...

[tpm]

> Why is applying for asylum in the UK more appealing to them than applying for asylum in France?

I don't really care about that. There are plenty of people applying for asylum in many countries.

> If we accept that France is a safe country then doesn't it follow that there is no need for anyone to cross the English channel in a small boat in order to claim asylum?

No, this is not how this works. You can't force them to apply in France. They are people and they have their rights. And France is a sovereign country, you can't force them either. Maybe you could try to negotiate with France and the EU, like the EU negotiated a deal with Turkey, but I understand currently UK prefers to do questionable deals with Rwanda before engaging with EU members.

> there is no right to migration

Of course, that's not an open question.

[logifail]

> No, this is not how this works.

I fear this attitude is partially responsible for the fall in support for what I guess we can call "centrist" parties. The harder this issue is pushed, the more the radical parties win support.

> You can't force them to apply in France.

"The Dublin Convention covering the European Union stipulates that asylum seekers are returned to the country where their entry into the union was first recorded, and where they were first fingerprinted"[0]

Well, perhaps not UK -> France thanks to Brexit, but according to the Dublin convention you certainly can return them to the first safe EU country in which they were recorded.

See "Asylum Shopping"[0] - a term for the practice by some asylum seekers of applying for asylum in several states or seeking to apply in a particular state after traveling through other states.

"In Ireland, two-thirds of asylum seekers whose applications failed were found to be already known to the British border authorities, a third of the time under a different nationality, such as Tanzanians claiming to be fleeing persecution in Somalia"[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_shopping [1] https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/two-thirds-of-failed-a...

[tpm]

> I fear this attitude

I understand that, but it's not like the governments wouldn't like this issue to go away; things really don't work the way some people would like, for very fundamental reasons, like human rights.

> Well, perhaps not UK -> France thanks to Brexit

exactly.

> according to the Dublin convention you certainly can return them to the first safe EU country

Yeah, and so what does a YOLOing country like Hungary do? Exactly, it does not register them and just ignores them so they can go to the next country. So what do you do when you are next in the line like Slovakia, my home country? Exactly, you just pass them on till they get to their target country (Germany mostly in our case). This also happens in thousand-strong waves.

So again, it's not like the UK is unique in this, it's an issue in all of Europe and the US and there are no easy solutions. Even a fascist like Meloni does not have a solution.