LeSving wrote:
A couple of generations ago the UK had a high influx, but today? not so much.
The UK continues to be the number one destination for migrants from pretty much everywhere in Europe, Africa and Asia. This covers both legal migrants going via official channels and the many undocumented ‘asylum seekers’ which spurn numerous safe and prosperous countries in Europe on their way and put themselves in mortal danger to reach the UK. I only put ‘asylum seeker’ in inverted commas since an asylum seeker is technically supposed to seek asylum in the first safe country they arrive in. For someone fleeing the Middle East or Africa over land and sea rather than by air, this cannot possibly be the UK.
Why the UK has such a draw, who knows. Probably some combination of a generous welfare state and sloppy procedures for managing illegal immigration, coupled with it being easy to live undocumented in the black economy compared to other European countries. Perhaps also the fact that many speak a bit of English and a general perception that London’s streets are paved with gold. One of the more insightful and effective strategies our government ran a few years back was to distribute asylum seekers around the country – particularly to the less glamourous parts – and make it clear that if you came to the UK you had zero chance of being housed in London.
Graham wrote:
Not at the moment, they’re completely locked down and are likely to remain so for the next few months. All hospitality is closed other than take-aways.
Are you refering to Australia? I don’t think New Zealand has had a lockdown for quite some time and its economy has largely remained operational during the pandemic.
Graham wrote:
Zero tourism will be costing them an awful lot, particularly New Zealand.
Do do they really have zero tourism? In Ireland we have had very restrictive conditions on tourism visitors, particularly from North America which is very important for our tourism market. However the tourist facilities (once opened for the summer season) have been as busy as ever. Those who normally leave the country on holidays can’t do so, so they’ve chosen to holiday at home instead. Many tourist business are reporting higher spend from these tourists than normal years! Perhaps the NZ economy will experience the same as their own population can’t holiday aborad.
Graham wrote:
It’ll be left to atrophy and in a few years the last person to leave the office will turn out the lights
That might well be the case in your business. But in general, business is less sentamental than that. It’s much more forward looking, and cares only about the potential for future profits. Problems in the past are quickly forgotten, if they are going to stay in the past, when they see potential for future profits. Graham wrote:
That seems the only logical way out for them. But when they do that, they will still need to accept infection rates far, far higher than they have seemed prepared to accept to date.
Well it would appear to me that they never intended to keep it out indefinately. What they did, successfully, was buy themselves time. If other countries effectively fought off the desease then they could join the “clean world”. If not, then they could wait until a vaccine came along (and remember many were predicting it would take much longer to come along) and vaccinate their population. It’s a nice position to be in.
Our crowd just left us with a partially shuttered economy, everyone working from home, while we stumbled from lockdown to lockdown hopeing a vaccine would come along soon. We had absolutely no backup plan if the vaccines turned out to be ineffective or took 3-5 years to make work.
NZ & AZ’s biggest problem seems to be that their own population now have little motivation to get vaccinated and they can’t move to reopening until they all get vaccinated.
We had absolutely no backup plan if the vaccines turned out to be ineffective or took 3-5 years to make work.
There is no Plan B.
Without a vaccine, around 1% of the country would die, eventually, plus many more would be in a bad state due to the collapse in health care.
Lockdowns would just delay this outcome.
So it is just as well we got the vaccines 
Graham wrote:
… an asylum seeker is technically supposed to seek asylum in the first safe country they arrive in.
That is true under the EU’s Dublin Regulation, if you substitute “EU country” for “country”, but the UK is no longer a party to that.
It is not true under the UN Refugee Convention, see eg here
However, as I understand it the nth safe country where an asylum claim is made can remove the asylum seeker to another safe country, but obviously only if that other safe country agrees to it. That is how the Dublin Regulation works. Removal to an unsafe country is “Refoulement” and a definite no-no.
Graham wrote:
The UK continues to be the number one destination for migrants from pretty much everywhere in Europe, Africa and Asia. This covers both legal migrants going via official channels and the many undocumented ‘asylum seekers’ which spurn numerous safe and prosperous countries in Europe on their way and put themselves in mortal danger to reach the UK. I only put ‘asylum seeker’ in inverted commas since an asylum seeker is technically supposed to seek asylum in the first safe country they arrive in. For someone fleeing the Middle East or Africa over land and sea rather than by air, this cannot possibly be the UK.
That’s actually not correct @Graham
Updated with 2019 EU numbers
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Migration_and_migrant_population_statistics
The UK’s population growth has been the lowest since 2013 (also driven by immigration)
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-population-growth-slows-weakest-since-2003-2021-04-16/
The United Kingdom’s population growth rate in the year to mid-2020 dropped to 0.47% from 0.54% in the year to mid-2019, according to provisional data published by the Office for National Statistics on Friday.
The ONS described the growth estimate as “marking one of the smallest increases seen in the context of historical trends”.
Annual population growth in Britain exceeded 0.8% in 2011 and 2016, reflecting high levels of net migration, especially from eastern and southern Europe.
As far as ’’workers’’ go there is also a net decrease in the UK official UK government numbers here —>
or the period January to March 2020, the LFS estimates show that there were an estimated 2.34 million EU nationals working in the UK and an estimated 1.36 million non-EU nationals working in the UK.
The latest period available (April to June 2020) showed that there was a decrease in both the number of EU (down 284,000 to 2.06 million) and non-EU (down 84,000 to 1.27 million) nationals in employment.
apologies for the many edits
Peter wrote:
There is no Plan B.Without a vaccine, around 1% of the country would die, eventually, plus many more would be in a bad state due to the collapse in health care.
Lockdowns would just delay this outcome.
So it is just as well we got the vaccines
If we vaxed 100% of humans against the flu, the flu would still come back. Which is why we only vax the high-risk population, every winter.
That chart places the UK and Germany joint top (albeit the UK estimate has a lower bound lower than that of Germany), but does not account for the fact that Germany has a population some 15-20m greater.
And in any case, that is only ‘unauthorised’.
Italy is high on a per-head-of-population basis because of proximity to Africa.
Based on their notes, I would hazard a guess that a potentially significant proportion of those presently in various EU countries are, one way or another, en route to the UK. It says it includes those waiting for a decision, not that it is just those who have applied.
Graham wrote:
The UK continues to be the number one destination for migrants from pretty much everywhere in Europe, Africa and Asia. This covers both legal migrants going via official channels and the many undocumented ‘asylum seekers’ which spurn numerous safe and prosperous countries in Europe on their way and put themselves in mortal danger to reach the UK.
That’s a myth (for asylum seekers). The UK is nowhere near the number 1 destination. In 2020, the UK took 45769 asylum sekers, versus 128,590 in Germany, 124,795 in Spain, 86,330 in France, 62,155 in Greece. For every asylum seeker that makes it to Europe, less than 1 in 10 try to get to the UK (around 480k new asylum seekers in the EU as a whole in 2020).
alioth wrote:
That’s a myth (for asylum seekers). The UK is nowhere near the number 1 destination. In 2020, the UK took 45769 asylum sekers, versus 128,590 in Germany, 124,795 in Spain, 86,330 in France, 62,155 in Greece. For every asylum seeker that makes it to Europe, less than 1 in 10 try to get to the UK (around 480k new asylum seekers in the EU as a whole in 2020).
I’m not talking about how many each country grants asylum to, I’m talking about where these folks are trying to get to. Significantly more try to get to the UK, or are looking to get to the UK, than actually make it. Even then, a large proportion of those who make it to the UK are not granted asylum and then are either deported, spend forever in the appeals system, or disappear into the black economy. The ~45k that the UK ‘took’ is nowhere near the complete picture as regards attempted migration to the UK outside of official channels.
Why they want to come, who knows, when e.g. France / Germany / Italy are attractive options. But for some reason they want to come to the UK specifically. Last Monday a record 430 people (in one day) risked their lives crossing the channel in small, overloaded boats unsuited to the voyage, presumably having paid criminal gangs handsomely for the trip. It is hard to understand how so many people could be so dissatisfied with France, where they already were and could claim asylum at any time, that they would pay serious money and take such enormous risks to reach the UK.
Anyway this is going way off topic and not really relevant to Covid-19.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
They obviously held onto a zero covid policy and expected everyone to do the same. Turns out, they won the war against Covid and we lost.
We lost the war before it began. The only disease that we have ever managed to eradicate is smallpox, and that took 179 years from the first vaccine.
It is extremely sarcastic to now criticize them and demand they let the thing in,
I’m not criticizing them. I genuinely do want to know how they expected things to end.
