More details on the tragedy have been released
LONDON (AP) — All 39 people found dead in a container truck near an English port were Chinese citizens, British police confirmed Thursday as they pressed to investigate one of the country's deadliest cases of people smuggling.
The Essex Police force said 31 men and eight women were found dead in the truck early Wednesday at the Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, a town 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of London. The force says one victim previously thought to be a teenager was instead a young adult woman.
Britain's National Crime Agency warned in 2016 that people smuggling using containers on ferries was "the highest-priority organized immigration crime threat." The same year, the U.K. Border Force identified Zeebrugge and the Hook of Holland in the Netherlands as key launching points for people trafficking into Britain.
The vital difference between an illegal immigrant and refugee is that
the latter has protected status in law and is granted certain rights.
Within the EU the rights of refugees are constrained/delineated by the Dublin Agreement.Illegal Immigrants have no such protection and most regard them as economic migrants. No one would wish on them the fate that this particular lorry load suffered. Countries have always had borders and have always protected then. Even areas within the Schengen zone have reintroduced checks in recent years. In Denmark in the not so distant past I had to go through security checks on disembarkation aswell as the usual ID checks. That was a first for me. Uncontrolled flows of immigrants put pressure on housing, educational facilities and medical services to name but a few.
Between 1971 and 1981, the foreign born population only grew by about 100,000 and then by about 400,000 in the subsequent decade.
It was in the next decades that the pace and scale of immigration increased dramatically. Between 1991 and 2001 the foreign born population increased by about 1.1 million (with by far the highest levels of immigration taking place from 1997 onwards). It then increased by almost three million between 2001 and 2011. The change in the size of the foreign born population between 2001 and 2011 was absolutely without precedent in British history. Post WW2 some 192000 Poles were given residence in the UK. I think everyone can agree they more than earned that right.
Some facts that not everyone is prepared to accept.
It is adding more than a million to the UK population every three years Mass immigration places major pressure on public services. There were an average of 2,000 new GP registrations by migrants per day in 2016/17. Current levels of immigration to England will require a home to be built every six minutes, night and day
Immigrants overall were a net fiscal cost to the Exchequer of £4.3 billion in 2016/17. Joe Average has no problem with immigration, the problem is the scale and to a lesser extent the documented downward pressure on wages for both the unskilled and certain tradesmen None of the above is intended to detract from what is a ghastly event but simply to put immigration in some kind of perspective.