The post you are reporting:
A letter to the editor:-
While the narrative countrywide seems to be all about EU migrants this past few years and 'seizing back control of our borders', for some strange reason, nationally we don't seem to be that bothered about the almost daily arrival of 'asylum seekers' whose arrival by small boat is now so brazen that, as reported in the EKM, they are landing in St Margaret's Bay on a beach actually overlooked by our MP's house.
The history of modern day asylum goes back to the 1951 Convention which was designed to deal with the hundreds of thousands of refugees in Europe post WW2. It was initially limited to protecting European refugees from before 1 January 1951.
It was NOT set up to deal with large scale cross-continental migration, specifically excluding for example the 14 million displaced during Indian Partition.
In 1967 a Protocol removed the time limits and applied to refugees "without any geographic limitation" and we all felt suitably virtuous signing it in the knowledge that the literal millions 'with a well founded fear of persecution' had no chance of arriving here and pursuing the 'rights' we had just given them.
In the mean time we could all celebrate the occasional plucky individual who had 'escaped the Communist Block', grateful secretly that their border guards were so effective, otherwise we'd have had millions of them.
Time and life have now moved on. In 2017 there were 65.6 million people forcibly displaced worldwide because of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations alone, each and every one of them who would qualify for asylum were they to arrive on a beach near you.
Perhaps it's time for a little bit of realism. Life for many on this planet is still, in the words of Hobbes ' solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'. Meanwhile if you are on the average UK full-time salary you are in the top 0.7% of the world's richest people. - take 140 random people and the chances are YOU will be the richest.
Surely it is mere virtue-signalling hypocrisy to continue granting asylum to those who have had enough money to bribe an airport official or an Albanian smuggler just so we feel a little bit better, while secretly glad that we don't have 700,000 Rohingya living in squalour in refugee camps as Bangladesh, a much poorer country, has today.
Japan, another small island, had 20,000 applications for asylum last year and working to the same UN Protocol accepted only 20. If you visit Japan you will find it has the lowest crime rate in the industrialised world, a fully functioning Health Service, a high GDP and still remains wonderfully 'Japanese'.
Perhaps it's time to be a bit more like Japan, especially when the worse that might happen to the latest armada of chancers is that they might end up back in France. It's meant to be a Border Force - not a Taxi service for wet Iranians.
Captain Haddock
Marlinspike Hall