Tony Abbott gets it right on Syrian refugees

The Australian
Tony Abbott got the policy and the politics of Syria right yesterday. He was a bit slow off the mark at the weekend but he quickly identified this shortcoming, read the community sentiment ­accurately and drove government processes to produce a credible policy response. .....In particular, this act of generosity is possible only because the flow of illegal immigrants by boat to Australia from the north has been halted.  ......
But the Australian people want to know that it is their government that controls Australia’s borders, and that refugees come here in an orderly way, given that there is no immediate neighbour from which anyone can legitimately be fleeing persecution to Australia.
In other words, this generous action is possible only because of Abbott’s success in stopping the boats."

Turning back refugee boats saves lives - as Australia found out
"The conclusion from the Australian experience is that those who benefit most from tough border protection are the immigrants who come here fairly and legally. Strict controls help dampen down xenophobia, and ensure that decent treatment is given to those seeking the nation’s hospitality. If only you Poms had not surrendered your sovereignty to Brussels! "  (Spectator, Australia)

Welcome Islamic Neighbors: Europe Welcomes You With Open Arms! …Yours For The Taking!

NoTricksZone
I’m feeling cynical this evening. Off topic… How incompetent and clueless are Europe’s leaders? Well this may be the first time in human history that Europe has chosen not to defend itself against an invasion. In fact it is even surrealistically welcoming it! Dear Islamists, you have been dreaming a long time of overrunning Europe, with many of you thinking it will involve patience and might take some decades, or even a century or two. Well, good news for you – your wait is over! It can be yours in less than 10 years! It’s for real. Tens of thousands have already done it. Why now? Never have European leaders been so incompetent, naïve, and so generous. They are welcoming you with open arms, gifts, food, money, free healthcare and warm places to stay. They want to show the whole world how good and moral they are – because they are suffering from a guilt trip of some strange sort."
.....And there is nothing that will be done about it. European leaders, by allowing a totally uncontrolled mass immigration across their borders, have thrown the national security of their citizens overboard. These fools don’t seem to realize it, but the first target of terrorists is often the state itself. There’s no way of knowing how many terrorists and fighters are embedded among the refugees. This is negligence of the worst kind."

As Europe opens its doors, Japan considers clamping down harder on asylum seekers

Reuters

As the worst refugee crisis since World War Two forces Europe to break down hurdles and accept hundreds of thousands of migrants, Japan, which took in just 11 asylum seekers last year, is looking to clamp down even further.
Measures including deporting failed applicants, curbs on repeat applications and pre-screening of new asylum seekers are being considered as part of changes to the country's immigration system, an official said on Wednesday.
If implemented, the changes would make Japan an even harder-to-reach destination, activists say. The country is already one of the developed world's least welcoming countries for refugees, accepting 11 of a record 5,000 asylum seekers in 2014."

Merkel’s grandstanding on Syrian refugees will lead to many more deaths at sea

Spectator
Of all the irresponsible decisions taken in recent years by European politicians, few will cause as much human misery as Angela Merkel’s plan to welcome Syrian refugees to Germany. Hailed as enlightened moral leadership, it is in fact the result of panic and muddled thinking. Her pronouncements will lure thousands more into the hands of unscrupulous people-traffickers. Her insistence that the rest of the continent should share the burden will add political instability to the mix. Merkel has made a dire situation worse.  ......Merkel’s actions, now, will be hard to correct: her words cannot be unsaid. She has exacerbated a problem that will be with us for years, perhaps decades. More than 40 per cent of those who applied for asylum in Germany in the first half of this year came from the former Yugoslavia; the last of its wars ended 14 years ago. Handling all of this correctly will require true statesmanship, which means thinking through consequences. Merkel is failing that test spectacularly. "

Denmark suspends ferries as migrants demand route to Sweden

Telegraph
The refugees refused to register with Danish authorities, which would mean having to apply for asylum in Denmark or returning to Germany, preferring instead to seek asylum in Sweden, where asylum conditions are more generous.
Sweden, one of many European countries struggling with the worst migration crisis since World War II, has become a top EU destination for refugees by issuing permanent residency to all Syrian asylum seekers."

This has never been about race... 8million foreign newcomers is far too many for a small country like Britain to absorb

Daily Mail
It has just been revealed that the number of people who were born abroad and are now living in Britain has hit a staggering 8.3 million.
That’s almost exactly the population of London, our capital city.

While we remain in the EU and chained to the pernicious Human Rights Act (another broken Tory promise), we are powerless to prevent mass immigration, both from within and without Europe.

It’s pointless putting forward any proposals to stem the human tide and protect our borders, since the political will simply doesn’t exist.

Donald Trump, the U.S. presidential candidate, may be a rabble-rousing circus act, but he is surely correct when he says a country which won’t secure its borders isn’t a country at all.

The 8.3 million already here are only those we know about. How many are here illegally?

The Government can’t, or more likely won’t, say.

But getting on for 15 years ago, the then Commissioner of the Met told me he reckoned there were at least 300,000 people living in London the police knew nothing about.

What’s the score today? Your guess is as good as mine."

BBC coverage of the migrant crisis is the gospel of the liberal left

CW
It’s plain that many if not most now camped out in Budapest and Kos and Calais are not ‘refugees’ or ’asylum seekers’. Because of the EU’s open borders, no one seems to have a clue about their point of origin or their reasons for being here.
The suspicion is that a high proportion are economic migrants; pictures suggest they are mostly male and they are desperately trying to queue jump in order to get what they want.
This is potentially worrying because it suggests the beginnings of the complete disintegration of border controls. The EU’s ‘free movement’ principle has seemingly transmuted into a total free-for-all."

'They're NOT refugees, they're migrants after a German life': Hungarian PM claims thousands fleeing war zones should stay in Turkey because they are no longer in danger

Daily Mail

Viktor Orban says many migrants are seeking the 'German life' because they refuse to stay in other safe countries

Calls on EU to provide financial support to countries such as Turkey so migrants stay there and do not move on

Germany expects to receive some 800,000 refugees this year and has urged other EU members to open their doors 

President Francois Hollande said France would take in 24,000 refugees over the next two years to help the burden

But he warned that without united EU policy to share migrants the borderless Schengen system would collapse

Refugee crisis: What will the true cost of taking Syria's displaced be?

Telegraph
In March 2015, a Freedom of Information request revealed that the UK spends more than £700,000 a day housing and feeding asylum seekers – prompting representatives of Ukip and the Taxpayers’ alliance to complain that people were not being processed quickly enough. Once the cost of taking, say, 10,000 Syrian refugees is properly understood, we could see a political backlash against it. Where are the school places? The hospital beds? ......  But even if we help bring peace to Syria, we shouldn’t expect the Great Migration to stop. Because it’s about more than people fleeing immediate peril. It’s about a desire to economically better oneself and it’s made possible by a revolution in cheap communications...... Intellectuals and populists warn that huge transfers of populations are bound to change the culture of the country involved. That's the argument of Hungary's controversial premier, Viktor Orban, who has spoken of the erosion of Christian identity"

This child's death was tragic but it was not our fault

Daily Mail

Which brings us back to the child’s corpse on the beach in Turkey. I repeat, it’s awful. Heartbreaking. But it’s not our fault, and it’s not our responsibility, however compassionate we might feel.

The father told the Mail that the family were fleeing the war in Syria when the dinghy capsized.

Miraculously, he survived, although he couldn’t save his wife and two children.

But here’s what puzzles me. They’d been living in Turkey for the past year. So why didn’t he apply for asylum there? After all, surely culturally Syria has more in common with Turkey, another Muslim country, than with Tunbridge Wells or Trondheim.

We’re also told that he’s a Kurd. So why didn’t he move to Kurdistan? Who knows? And that’s just the point. No one knows anything for sure.

Similarly, the shocking death of a child should never be exploited just because media tarts and ‘liberal’ luvvies such as Jackboots Jacqui and the absurd Emma Thompson can feel good about themselves.

However horrible, however tragic such cases are, they’re not a sensible basis for a realistic asylum policy."

Tragic Aylan's final journey: Father of drowned boys returns home to bury his wife and two sons - in the war-torn city of Kobane

Daily Mail
The barber had paid people smugglers £2,900 over the course of three attempts to reach Greece from a refugee camp in Turkey."

OPINION: This man is responsible for the deaths of his wife and children. He took them from a safe place - Turkey - and placed them at great risk using people traffickers and THEY paid with their lives.

From the comments:

"Ok it's time all EU countries return anyone that comes by boat! Let them know if they do they will be refused entry full stop! Then this would stop the trafficking and the drowning,"

"These children and their parents left the safe haven of Turkey and in the Father's own words undertook a hazardous journey on an unsuitable boat on rough seas. Turkey is not an island, it has land borders with European countries, just not very attractive countries to migrants. Migrants are dying because when they are safe from ISIS/war/famine etc, they choose to head for a 'prosperous' life in Western Europe."

"Cameron, would you enlighten us as to where the UK is going to find the 'thousands of houses' needed to accommodate the 'thousands of refugees/economic migrants' that you have agreed to take? What about their health care, school places for their children and of course Benefits for the whole bunch? Where are the jobs? We can't house, provide adequate healthcare & schooling for our own people. As for jobs, what a laugh - the influx of 'free movement' workers has taken care of that! What's the long-term plan, I'm sure we'd all like to know! "

"Very sad story, but this country had its own problems, 50,000 children on the at risk register in Britain today. So before the lefty tree huggers invite every refugee into the UK, I would suggest we fix our own mess first."

  

For pity's sake, we must shut the borders: DANIEL HANNAN says the only way to control who comes here is to leave the EU

Daily Mail

What, then, is the solution? First, Schengen needs to go. The Euro-fanatics have done enough damage in their pursuit of political integration. 

The restoration of sovereign borders would mean the authorities of each country no longer had an incentive to wave migrants through, knowing they would become someone else’s responsibility.

Second, we need to follow Australia’s example. Faced with a surge of seaborne migration, it towed ships to an island and processed claims offshore. 

Since then, there has not been a single death through drowning and far fewer people attempt the journey.

To emulate Australia, though, we would have to stop interpreting the 1951 Refugee Convention in a way that obliges us to allow every asylum-seeker to remain in the EU while their claim is assessed.

That charter was designed in a very different age. Its authors were understandably haunted by the memory of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s who had been turned away from safe countries. 

They could not have dreamed of an era of cheap travel, when perhaps two billion people could theoretically claim to be victims of oppression.

To do what the Australians have done, the EU would have to abandon a great many accords, starting with its Charter of Fundamental Rights.

That, though, is unlikely to happen. So if Britain wants to control its borders, it will have to do so unilaterally, by leaving the EU.

Ministers are tying themselves in knots trying to avoid this conclusion. 

But all the schemes they propose – tightening benefits, requiring evidence of a job – fail to address the huge, clunking fact that, as long as we are in the EU, we cannot control who settles here or in what numbers.

Eventually, our hand may be forced. With no let-up in the numbers reaching Italy across the Mediterranean, there will come a point when the Rome government, tired of carrying the burden for other EU states, gives identity documents to all those migrants who want to move on and settle in Germany or Britain or Sweden.

The only question is whether this moment comes before or after Britain’s referendum.

If it comes before, no force on Earth will persuade people to remain in. 

If it comes after we’ve voted to stay, it will be too late to change our minds."