[pjc50]

The government can very easily change your status from "legal" to "illegal" by flipping a bit. And the newspapers, who are driving this, don't care about skills, they care about the raw numbers. The members of the public driving this don't even care about immigration status, but skin colour.

[graemep]

They can change people's status, but I am saying they will not. It is not Reform party policy (as Rupert Lowe keeps pointing out!) and it would be disastrous to do it.

The net immigration numbers are falling!

I disagree about the public. Its very clear that the opposition to immigration is almost entirely about small boats and illegal entry.

As for skin colour, of the tiny number or racists I have heard of in real life, one comment repeated back to me made it clear the person involved preferred at least some Asians (those with skills etc.) to Eastern Europeans.

[ben_w]

> Its very clear that the opposition to immigration is almost entirely about small boats and illegal entry.

No, that's just the current talking point.

A decade ago, small boats not in the news, somehow managed to still be a big talking point on Brexit campaign. Worse, part of the Brexit campaign was scare-mongering that the EU had made it so the UK had no control over its borders, no control over its immigration laws, and even had one poster further scare-mongering that the UK would be forced to allow in the entire population of Turkey* even though Turkey wasn't actually in the EU nor did anyone think it would get in any time soon and the UK had a veto on expansion anyway (plus the more fundamental pretentiousness in thinking they'd want to come en-masse anyway, given that Turkish people are like everyone else, in that almost none of them really care for the idea of moving to the UK).

Even for "unlawful entry" of asylum seekers who were still allowed to lawfully claim asylum, the UK was part of the Dublin III system, which oh-so-conveniently meant the UK could argue that all the other countries most people would need to go through to get to the UK should have taken them first, to which I'd like to say this:

J'ai obtenu la note D au GCSE de français, et pourtant j'ai étudié la langue à l'école. À votre avis, comment un demandeur d'asile lambda originaire de l'ancien Empire britannique va-t-il s'en sortir?

Most asylum seekers do, in fact, stop at the first safe country; the UK has always only had a tiny fraction of the total, and loses its collective mind anyway.

* Note my careful phrasing and also their careful phrasing in this specific ad; they note the population to give the implication, I did not say they said all of them will come in**, only that they said all of them must be allowed to, when EU membership never did any such thing: https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-brexit-turkey-loses-its-bi... and https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/07/facebook-relea...

** apparently one of the "senior Brexiteers" did, but I can't trivially find any actual citation and don't care to put in the effort to look harder

[tokai]

Lots of things are disasterous to do, and still UK has a proud traditions of doing those things.

[n1b0m]

Are you aware that Rupert Lowe was kicked out of Reform?

[pjc50]

We heard all of that in the US before ICE.

[dwedge]

Have you ever spoken to any member of the public in support of Reform to base your opinions on, or is this just similar to when every single brexit voters (millions of people) was assumed to be racist and uneducated

[dTal]

Almost everyone voting Brexit was uneducated on the issues, a fact rapidly borne out by actually speaking to them. Actually "uneducated" is quite charitable as quite a lot are racist also. I don't know how anyone can claim otherwise with a straight face.

[dwedge]

Which issues were they uneducated on? How many did you speak to, and I'm not talking about the engagement-bait bots on places like the Trending side of Twitter

[thunderfork]

A lot of Republican supporters would have, and still might, insist that the US's current purge is focused on "criminals" despite the quota-driven shitfest it's become. People say a lot of things, and they rarely line up with policies in practice.