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stella41b -> RE: New York City buys one-way tickets home for the homeless (7/31/2009 12:01:11 AM)
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I have mixed feelings on this one. I work with the homeless here in London especially with those migrant workers from Poland and the City of Westminster has, among others, set up an arrangement with the Polish homeless charity BARKA also to send people back.
As I'm one of the few people working with the homeless who speaks fluent Polish I've been involved in repatriating quite a few of the Polish migrant workers who ended up homeless and sleeping rough in Central London.
Some come to London with quite unrealistic expectations, others have been 'duped' with false offers of work, some others have been attacked and robbed of everything they had by organized criminals working in gangs between Poland and London, but a considerable number have clearly been sent to London by officials either in labour exchange offices or people like probation officers.
Poland is in the European Union, there's no immigration issues such as visas or work permits, but you are required to register with the DWP for a National Insurance number and also with the NHS. I would estimate that around half of the Poles who come to the UK looking for work don't bother to do this.
A sizeable minority of Poles coming to work in the UK don't speak English which means that most of those I deal with - in some cases all or almost all - don't speak any English and this obviously is a major barrier to finding any work or accommodation in London.
I've lost count how many times I've had to advise someone to go back to Poland, find a job in a larger city, learn English, save about £500 and come back better prepared. For these people the fare back is the best solution.
Now I realize and understand that in some regions in Poland unemployment can be as high as 45% but I wish the Polish media and other official sources would quit giving these people the idea that they can find work and a better life in London, or the UK. I really do. It makes me angry.
What pisses me off just as much are those people who think that there's a simple solution to homelessness. There isn't.
This scheme I believe would help some people, and for this I think it's a good scheme. But in general I don't think it is a good scheme at all. It's not solving anything, it's just moving the people and their problems somewhere else with the potential of creating new problems.
Many of the people I see are middle-aged men. They haven't got a cat in hell's chance of finding work back home, usually they have a wife and kids and often the wife doesn't work, and in some cases their welfare ran out and they have no income. They've quite often borrowed money to come to London in the hope of finding work so that they, together with many of the Poles working in the UK at the moment, can work two or more jobs and send a decent amount of money back home.
In travelling to and from the UK they run the risk of being robbed by gangs of organized criminals who travel on the buses running between Polish cities and London, usually when they arrive either in London or when they arrive back in a Polish city.
Are the UK authorities concerned by this? Not really. Until they have been here for two years usually Polish migrant workers have no recourse to public funds.
There's also a considerable Polish LGBT community in London, concentrated in the Stoke Newington area of London, where such people are free to be themselves unlike back home in Poland.
Some of these men who get sent back are probably going to end up homeless in Poland anyway as their return increases in the likelihood of divorce with additional debts, and still no realistic way of finding sustainable employment.
To me a better solution would be to set up temporary emergency shelters using empty property where you give these people emergency short term accommodation and give them the opportunity to find work and solve their own homelessness.
People tend to become homeless through a lack of opportunity when their options run out. I feel when you present them with at least one well considered option, most will take it, and you start to move towards a solution.
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