Turkey- Europe has it wrong on migrants UK minister says
Date
10/6/2015 12:19:00 PM
(MENAFN- The Journal Of Turkish Weekly)Immigration to the U.K. must be curbed because it is bad for British society the country’s interior minister has said.
Theresa May said on Tuesday that Britain was historically not a country of immigrants but one of “population stability” and that the number of people coming to the U.K. had to be controlled.
In a speech to the Conservative Party conference May said they had a “moral duty to help people in desperate need” but said she would not join a common European response to the refugee crisis “in a thousand years”.
“There are millions of people in poorer countries who would love to live in Britain and there is a limit to the amount of immigration any country can and should take” she said. “When immigration is too high when the pace of change is too fast it’s impossible to build a cohesive society. It’s difficult for our schools and hospitals and core infrastructure like housing and transport to cope."
“And we know that for people in low paid jobs wages are forced down even further while some people are forced out of work altogether” she added.
May said migrants had played “a massive part in making this country what it is” but dismissed claims that Britain is a traditional country of immigration “In fact compared to the countries of the New World and compared to the countries of Europe with their shifting land borders we’ve until recently always been a country of remarkable population stability” she said.
The effects of unrestricted immigration were displayed by Germany in recent months she said.
“When the German government motivated by compassion and decency said they expected to receive 800000 asylum seekers this year it prompted hundreds of thousands of people to try to get to Germany" she said. "Some of these people were refugees coming directly from Syria or the camps in Turkey Jordan and Lebanon but many – in fact up to half of them – were migrants from other parts of the world.”
She said “the best way of helping the most people” fleeing the Syrian civil war was not to accept more migrants into Britain but to help Syria’s neighbors host them.
May indicated Britain was spending 1 billion pounds ($1.52 billion) on humanitarian aid refugee care and support for the governments of Lebanon Jordan and Turkey.
“After the United States Britain is the biggest donor country in the region and no European country has come close to matching the amount that what we are spending there” she said.
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