Just 18 votes made the difference blast night between the UK refusing and accepting 3000 unaccompanied vulnerable child refugees. The government narrowly defeated a cross-party amendment to the immigration bill, tabled by Lord Alf Dubs in the House of Lords. Dubs knows the importance of the issue. He came to the UK through Kindertransport, the government backed programme that brought over 10,000 child refugees from Europe in the run up to the second world war.
The government argued that accepting 3000 of these vulnerable children, would encourage families to send children on ahead of them. But it takes a teenage refugee from Syria, who met Cooper and Dubs for an event outside parliament, to make the salient point: “Most of the children in the camps do have their families and parents with them but those stranded around Europe and in Calais are very vulnerable because other people could do something to them. That is the fundamental difference between the children in Europe and those in the camps.”
10,000 of these children have already gone missing according to the EU’s Criminal Intelligence Agency. Many are feared to have fallen into the hands of criminal gangs.
Read more about this on http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/25/tories-Lord Dubs, himseldfvote-against-accepting-3000-child-refugees?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+categories&utm_term=168928&subid=492575&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2
Child Migrant Stories 