Albanians require a visa to come to the UK. Your point just shows that our border controls are crap, which has nothing to do with the EU.
For pity's sake... 1. Albanian visitors need visas to come here. That's nothing to do with the EU. 2. Foreign criminals are in jail? Surely that's a good thing - you don't want them out on the streets. 3. We're not a Schengen signatory and won't be - so we can refuse anyone entry at the moment. Voting to leave will not change that. 4. 'Mass Immigration' is scaremongering. You intimate that a Remain vote will open the floodgates and we'll be inundated. Rubbish. I'm beginning to think that you've not really thought out your argument here...
250,000 Romanians and Bulgarians last year is not scaremongering. It's fact. Lined up to join and have free movement are 75,000,00 Turks and millions more from Albania, Montenegro, Croatia . . .Room up top
Free Movement? You do understand what the Schengen agreement is, don't you? And that we have a negotiated, safeguarded opt-out? Free movement doesn't apply to the UK or Ireland (who have also opted out), and suggesting that there's nothing we can do to stop this imagined tsunami of immigrants is scaremongering pure and simple.
I hope you don't mean to imply that people who think the UK should stay in the EU and sort out the issues rather than leave aren't proud British people too. That would be stereotyping of the worst kind. This is a decision for logic, not emotion.
Just as an aside to all this well thought out discussion... It is well known in certain professions (sales being one of them) that people make emotional decisions about things and then search for reasons to justify their emotional bias towards one thing over another. This is striking a chord with me at the moment for some reason...
Morning all - been in Spain for a week (enjoying my visa free travel to Europe while I still can!) I've seen the latest polls - anyone think the Remainers are being a bit coy about it (similar to the Tory voters at the last election, and the Scottish No voters in the IndyRef) as it's not the populist response?
WRONG! Free movement of people does apply to the UK and Ireland. What doesn't apply is visa-free travel under Schengen.
Remanian Teresa May says she is unhappy with the volume of immigration, the population is thought to grow by 3,000,000 by 2030. Six cities the size of Newcastle. Old smug Vince Cable with his big grin at Gatwick Jan. 1 2015, when one Romanian entered the country. Should have stationed himself at Victoria bus station as 5,000 a week pass through
just as well, the EU are fast forwarding visa-free travel to Turkey to ensure they stem the human tide of misery trying too enter Europe
No, not wrong. We can refuse whoever we like. Being opted out of Schengen means that papers and identities have to be disclosed and proved, and that we can identify people we do not want to let in. Without Schengen, EU people would not need to prove identity at all, so we would have no way of telling who we want to allow in and who we do not. And leaving the EU will make no difference to that whatsoever - which is my point.
Don't know why. There are reasons to want to leave the EU , which are being stated here. There are reasons others want us to remain which are also being stated here. It's a mixture of emotion and reasoned thought imo.
Forgive me. I wasn't implying anything about you personally, but something that I believe applies to all of us contributing to this topic. Our emotions pick a side (it's a subconscious decision) and then we look for reasons to justify our emotional choice. There's a lot of research that supports this concept. You might be aware of something called "selective evidence" where we only remember the things that support our choices and are virtually blind and ignore things that do not. It's very hard for normal people to overcome. So, me, I've always identified with being a European as well as English and British. So naturally I'd want to be part of the EU - it fits my emotional identity.
Free movement is a fundamental principle of the EU, so to say it doesn't apply to us is grossly misleading. All EU citizens have the right to live and work here. There have been a small number of serious criminals which the EU rules have allowed us to exclude, but for as long as we remain in the EU, the final decision whether we can exclude is made by a foreign court not the English courts. A big issue for sovereignty.
Fair enough. You may have a point, as I've always identified myself as English first and then British.....never European.
Good points, which I'm sure are valid. I am surrounded at work by marketeers and they are always banging on about emotion, which I used to mock but have seen in action in what we would expect to be very scientific, rational decisions (prescribing medicines). I share your emotional identity (as far as Europe is concerned) and combined with a visceral emotional recoil from most of the public faces of the Brexit campaign it has made it pretty easy to argue from a position on here. But the longer the debate goes on the more convinced I am that even if we were able to make purely rational decisions, we lack the data (which at best is ambiguous) and decent models to second guess the future (too many variables and the more you hear from them the more you realise economists know **** all of nothing), to make one. So emotion, supported by ersatz logic, will have to do. I just wish the EU was a bit better, would make this debate much easier.
I think you are overplaying your hand Chaz. There is very little incorrect on here, just different interpretations and perspectives, forcefully put. No one ever backs down, least of all you, which leads to this endless tit for tat. I am as guilty of it as anyone, sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's dull.
