Keir Canute

Stemming the tide. (09jul25 v.1)

Pete North sees no alternative to realism. we are being taken for suckers by the French. Again.

As regards to Channel migrants, I think we're all being a little naive. I've read just about every permutation of proposed solutions and I think they are all flawed, including my own. I do favour the removal of incentives and offshore detention, but in the long run, I don't think even that is going to work as a disincentive. We're all assuming the migrants themselves have a level of sophisticated reasoning ability - when they actually don't.

Many assume they're coming for the benefits or to game the asylum system, when in fact many (possibly most) have no knowledge of the asylum system or benefits  until their first contact with NGOs in Calais - and what they know is through word of mouth. The opportunity to live in Britain is a pull factor in its own right. They don't know what they will do when they get here. They only know it's better than wherever they came from. 

We can remove benefits and housing entitlements etc, and that is instrumental to a remigration strategy, but it's not going to stop migrants graviating to northern France. Even if we have long term detention, they are still going to try their luck. This problem isn't going to go away, and in fact, as soon as EU states start cracking down on illegal immigration, it's going to get worse. 

Presently, I see no scenario where pushback tactics will work for as long as we're seeking to do it in a humane and legal way, and for the moment, the public would prefer we keep it humane and legal, and will not tolerate pratting around that will in any way put our own people in danger.   

The arithmetic changes, however, according to scale. I don't recall who it was who put it to me, but they used the example of the kitten cuteness scale. Nobody but a monster would ever consider harming a kitten. And even if you suddenly had fifty kittens dropped on you, you would still do your best to re-home them. But if you suddenly had ten thousand kittens in your house, you'd be shovelling them into a tree shredder. Empathy doesn't scale up. The same is true of migrants. 

Eventually, a crisis point will come when all of our reception machinery is saturated. At that point, there will be no talk of pushbacks. We're simply going to have to deploy Archer class boats with a mounted fifty cal, and we will have to fire live rounds. It will become a defence issue, to the extent that even the French won't tolerate it. 

Essentially, there is no reason to expect that catastrophically low IQ African migrants will respond to measures born of our motivational reasoning calculations. We are still going to have to cancel benefits and implement hostile environment measures, but these measures are only likely to work on visa overstayers, who will eventually hand themselves in for repatriation. Nothing short of force is going to stop the flow of migrants. 

I am dimly aware that Dominic Cummings has proposed the use of special forces. I don't know his exact thinking on this, but it's likely that wouldn't be enough. In all probability we're going to have to set up clandestine bases in North Africa, and set up a drone wall, with a view to intercepting migrant flows across the Sahara. Mass immigration in the future will become an existential issue. It's us or them, and we're going to have to purge our squeamishness about killing.

In the interim, though, we must prepare for the eventuality that within ten years, at least one major EU state will close its borders and begin expelling migrants on a scale unseen for a hundred years. The diplomatic tensions over immigration will bring Europe close to war.  From there, we will see unprecedented numbers of migrant boats, and we'll have no choice but to sink them. There are ugly choices ahead, but we're going to have to decide whether it's them or us.