Quote Originally Posted by OngBonga View Post
Let's just clear one thing up.

What do you consider to be a greater evil? Migrants being refused entry to a country? Or people trafficking?

People crossing the channel is a huge problem. A very, very huge problem. You conveniently ignore me when I mention people trafficking. By insisting that the UK allows boatloads of people to turn up on the coast, you are de facto supporting people trafficking. That's an unavoidable fact.

So make you choice. Migrants on boats without documents means people trafficking, which means criminals exploiting migrants making a fortune.
It's irrelevant to the refugees themselves how they got here. Once they're here, they have to be treated as asylum seekers, not sent to some other country for "processing," or whatever they keep trying to do with them. When they're in the English channel rowing over here, they should not be met with a battleship to scare them back to France.

The people traffickers are scumbags, and if we capture people traffickers we should prosecute them, assuming there is even a law against it. What we shouldn't do is assume every man woman and child who arrives on a dinghy is themselves a people trafficker and treat them like a criminal, as that makes no sense at all. The people who've paid the criminals for passage to the UK are not themselves criminals.

The number of people who are crossing the channel in dinghies is a problem, I agree. But the solution is not to send out a battleship to steer them back to France. The solution is to enable them safe passage. It costs a lot less to send a ferry from Calais to Dover than to send a battleship out to patrol the Channel, so there can no whinging about costs.