Read on Twitter
Remarkable how this crisis has brought out people whose confidence in commenting isn’t obviously matched by any expertise
This guy for e.g has got 100s of likes & RTs for a vast thread mixing sympathetic on-the-ground reporting with obnoxious generalisations & flat-out untruths https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296029833928081408
This guy for e.g has got 100s of likes & RTs for a vast thread mixing sympathetic on-the-ground reporting with obnoxious generalisations & flat-out untruths https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296029833928081408
For instance this is flatly false. There is no queue for asylum claims outside the UK which is being jumped. https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296032889134555136?s=20
It is just not true that most people can claim asylum in the UK from abroad (Afghan British Army interpreters had a v specific programme which didn’t even help all of them). That fact (& the difficulty in solving it) is part of the problem https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296033252784910337?s=20
This is incoherent, at best. British citizens *do* have rights to bring (some) family here, usually under ££ criteria. Why shouldn’t they? Many feel criteria shd be wider. What does 'guise' mean? What's underhand about wanting to live with your family? https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296052120727289859?s=20
Why would it make a difference to people’s rights to live with their families how they became British? And in so far as this implies ppl can bring over an entire extended family, that’s false & pokes at some nasty stereotypes https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296053232683360256?s=20
Now we’re just getting a bit obsessive. Why are we focussing on South Asians and their families rather than e.g Czechs or Aussies? In fact, why are people's wishes to live with their families a problem at all? https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296053545914052609?s=20
Here’s a prime specimen in the wild of the technique of artificially taking an argument to an extreme, then going “Wow, doesn’t that sound extreme?” https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296051831685165056?s=20
Now we’re on to refugees as a risk of terrorism rather than as victims of it (most terrorist attacks occur outside Europe; several of the countries mentioned here have endemic terrorism and armed conflict) https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296057408058531845?s=20
And the framing here is of migrants as vectors of disease, rather than potential victims of it, even though they’re a small minority of international travellers https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296063956935757824?s=20
And did you know that alien people bring violence to our quaint cobbled streets, which were famously untroubled by racist attacks or for that matter drunken brawling? https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296055178601418758?s=20
I don’t mean to pick on just 1 guy, who isn’t the worst offender, tho he’s prob the most verbose. He may (idk) even have bn trying to be nuanced, but nuance shdnt lead us to victim-blaming or regurgitating far-right tropes linking people to disease, violence & overpopulation
