People’s Perceptions

People’s perceptions are based on someone’s immediate or intuitive recognition or appreciation, as of moral, psychological, or aesthetic qualities and values. They can be often influenced by social media and other factors but they are what someone believes in in a particular topic. With the refugee crisis there are many different perceptions based on people’s values and awareness of the issue and their response. Many different views are held on the refugee crisis, due to it being a global issue there are many different views from different countries all over the world. The three I am going to focus on to voice their perception on the refugee crisis, are the British Government – this is a government in the midst of all the crisis, receiving around 120,000 refugees, and 40,000 pending asylum cases per year, that is less than one quarter of the percent of UK’s total population around 0.24%. Asylum applications to the UK are relatively low, 36,733 in 2016 although they have increased a little in the recent years they are still significantly lower than the peak in 2002 of 84,000 applicants. The British Governments viewpoint on this refugee crisis has been very undesirable in the recent years, after playing the blame game, the UK state they are starting to move to a common approach to the immigration crisis. Realising ‘they had failed in the face if human agony on its frontiers’ UK government feel that the migrant crisis may now be forging a better way forward.’ Alistair Macdonald investigates to say that ‘the failure is evident.’ UK have perceived to step back to just watch millions fleeing from war, oppression and misery, hundreds of thousands have been desperate enough to brave the sea to reach the UK, thousands have died, but numbers have slowly raised despite the harsh welcome UK gave. UK felt that ‘razor wire, hunger, filth did not end the blaming other countries other than their own common duty to help refugees. I think this perception that the British Government held was because of the global influence the European Union had on them, it has been described as an emerging superpower. When the UK left the EU in a referendum on Thursday 23 June, 2016 they were given more of a chance to realise their own values in the issue and improve on the failures they had made. Pollesters and scholars commonly assess levels of public concern in the UK, asking the ‘most important issue’ ‘or issues’ they value facing the nation. In the UK refugees/immigration consistently ranks in the top five issues in recent history, as of August 2016, it was the issue picked most often by respondents as shown on the graph Figure 1 tracks the percentage of respondents naming race relations or immigration as one of the most important issues facing Britain, relative to the other five most frequently named issues as of August 2016. These other issues are presented as six-month moving averages to make the chart easier to visually interpret.[pic 1]