I’m in favour of an exhange program, for every person/family that risks their life to cross a continent to get into either the UK or USA, we send a family that’s anti-immigration to Central/South America/Africa/Asia/Middle East with just the shoes on their feet and a bag of belongings.
Go down and meet some of these people, listen to their stories and be amazed at their resilience. My husband provides work placements for asylum seekers. The one he recently was working with traveled from Darfor, where his family was subject to genocide, travelled with his brother through Africa, to Libya (which is now totally failed state, got on an overcrowded boat that drifted across the Mediterranean for seven days, three to four days without water. Got rescued by Italian coastguards, traveled across Europe to UK and claimed asylum ( which he has just been granted) They are hero’s, most of us couldn’t make it to the bottom of our streets.
The Asylum seeker I’m talking about ducked everytime a helicopter or small place flew over his head because the people that killed his tribe used small aircraft to shoot at them from the sky. We think we have a bad day when we don’t get what we want for dinner. Our experience as westerners is so far removed from the experience of these “fake” asylum seekers we have no currency to treat them this way.
Also successful capitalist societies require an underclass to exploit and generate income, so either the asylum seekers/ illegal immigrants do it or the working classes do it. Closing boarders and starting trade wars are not the way to make any country great again
