Opinion

Perspective needed on Calais migrant crisis

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly is an Irish News columnist with a background in politics and public relations. He is also a former member of the Policing Board.

Migrants continue to risk their lives to reach England from Calais, but perspective is needed on the crisis
Migrants continue to risk their lives to reach England from Calais, but perspective is needed on the crisis Migrants continue to risk their lives to reach England from Calais, but perspective is needed on the crisis

WATCHING the situation develop at Calais with thousands of migrants from Africa trying to reach Britain, one cannot help but feel for the plight of impoverished people risking everything to flee from persecution, war, discrimination and economic ruin.

Each night hundreds of them try to breach the security at the Channel tunnel whilst freight trucks endure 30-mile tailbacks on their way to Europe.

It's an incredible sight to watch shanty towns emerge around the outskirts of Calais. The French authorities may be swamped but they don't give any impression of wanting to seriously curtail the migrants from progressing onwards towards Britain.

One French mayor said it was the UK's own fault because it was regarded as a "soft touch" on benefits by migrants.

At one level this is an international humanitarian crisis but some of the language being used towards to migrants is unnecessarily provocative.

Ulster-born TV star Eamonn Holmes said they should bring in "electric fencing", even the PM said Britain was in danger of being "swarmed".

Tories who loathe the EU are practically begging for help from other European nations. But for a moment let's sort the wheat from the chaff in this debate over migrants.

Firstly, the TV reporting of the migrants at Calais gives the misleading impression that the UK is shouldering an unfair or disproportionate burden of migrants in Europe.

That is simply not true. Of European destinations of choice by migrants, it is Germany that more than does its bit followed by Sweden, Italy, France, Hungary and only then the UK.

That said, the numbers are still staggering. UK border control and French authorities said that in 2014 they prevented some 39,000 attempts to enter into Britain. The Channel Tunnel security operations reported they have turned back some 37,000 entry attempts in the first six months of 2015.

So where do these migrants come from? Well official statistics say that top migrant communities seeking refuge in the UK are from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Eritrea, North Africa, Iran and Albania.

Political instability in Syria, Afghanistan and north Africa is driving hordes of refuges to pay unscrupulous people traffickers to load them into boats like cattle and leave them to be rescued in the Mediterranean.

Western foreign policy that has meddled in Middle Eastern politics and regime changes in the so-called Arab Spring has also resulted in chaos in some of these countries.

The colonial pasts of Britain, France and Italy has come back to haunt them too, as refugees opt for countries with which they have ties of language, culture, history or family.

It is hard to blame people who have lost everything gambling on an uncertain future in a wealthier country. Nearly 40 per cent of all refugee applications to the UK are approved each year.

The problem that the governments face is filtering the genuine asylum seekers from the hucksters and work-shy looking for an easy life in the UK or other parts of Europe.

A report for the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2012 said that whilst 122,000 migrants arrived in Northern Ireland between 2000 and 2010, some 97,000 left.

It must be the warm welcome from loyalist paramilitary fascists that made so many would-be migrants think anywhere but Belfast is preferable.

There is clear evidence that the people traffickers are using Irish ports like Rosslare to sneak migrants into the UK via Belfast to Scotland or Liverpool.

Most migrants here seem to be travelling through. In 2014 the Office of National Statistics said Northern Ireland was the only part of the UK that had a net outflow i.e. that more emigrants leaving than long-term immigrants coming in.

One suspects that this outflow is of locals leaving to other parts of the UK, USA or Australia rather than migrants.

Whilst the demographics of Northern Ireland have changed since 1994 and society has become more pluralist, we actually have proportionately one of the largest Polish communities compared to anywhere else in the UK.

It is almost unspoken but there is little doubt that unplanned for and burgeoning migrant communities are putting additional pressures on to the already hard-pressed health, education and welfare budgets.

That said, we are not carrying a disproportionate burden of migrants.

Irish people working up a lather over immigrants should remember that our forbear once left nothing for the unknown, boarding similar 'coffin ships', and that the scale of Irish emigration during the Famine was phenomenal - Liverpool a city of 250,000 received over 300,000 Irish between 1845 and 1847.

The people at Calais need a proportionate response to their plight - and some perspective.