I don't know what to say other than the anecdote I gave above after living in Germany for a decade

There is. I've known a few people personally in fact who were from places like Iran who had entered the UK legally, and then their personal situation changed and they couldn't return home, thus they applied for asylum. And got accepted as well.

I also want to stop the boats and the exploitative gangs doing this, but any approach that isn't opening up safe and legal routes for applications to be made is just advocating for everyone else to bear the burden of global instability the UK played a disproportionate role in creating.

Sounds like we're more in agreement than disagreement then?

I assume you mean there hasn't. I think it's a pretty apt way to describe a mob descending on a hotel to try and burn it down because asylum seekers are inside.

No? There has. People in the UK have attacked migrant hotels and even a few got attacked in Larne a while ago during the summer.

I also want to stop the boats and the exploitative gangs doing this, but any approach that isn’t opening up safe and legal routes for applications to be made is just advocating for everyone else to bear the burden of global instability the UK played a disproportionate role in creating.

Safe, legal routes are key, but are also a way to do the opposite of having "everyone else [...] bear the burden", because in a world where refugees are not seen as a global problem to be handled multilaterally to ensure the burden is shared, making it easier to claim asylum means you'll receive a higher share.

This can end up with people talking at cross-purposes because in any disagreement there can be a reluctance to address the numbers: what level of immigration is the right one? We need to balance

1. bringing young people into the country to offset our ageing native born population
2. our obligations to refugees
3. the societal problems that come from rapid change in the balance of cultures. To be explicit, I'm not talking about "white replacement" here, I'm talking about what happens to a society - let's take a coastal Spanish town for a reverse example - and dump a bunch of immigrants - English retirees there - at a high rate. The local population is liable, reasonably in my view, to be annoyed if a load of people arrive and don't integrate well.

So what rate will balance those three things? I dunno, but looking at how migration has changed over the last few decades, it's not surprising that we are seeing a lot more annoyance under the third item.

the UK played a disproportionate role in creating.

I don't think this kind of thinking is very productive though. Maybe the UK as a country does bear some responsibility, but whether it is disproportionate is hard-to-impossible to quantify. Most small boat arrivals over the past few years are from Iran. Should UK citizens now be considered responsible for the actions of our government over 70 years ago? For a counter-coup that could never have been foreseen? Or should radical repressive Islamists bear more of that responsibility?

The next largest contingent is Afghanistan - but the UK went into Afghanistan with as part of a large multi-national coalition, so just what proportion of the responsibility is ours?

The next largest is Iraq - where we certainly bear a higher portion of the blame.

Then comes Albania - I don't know anything we've done to fuck them up. (Arrivals from Albania are now very low)

Next comes Syria - again I don't believe Britain has any responsibility for the situation there.

But if we are to incorporate this thinking into policy, it can't come as some kind of thought-terminator, "we did bad things in the world, so we have to be punished, so we must take whatever." We need to have at least a rough idea of which countries we have adversely affected, how significantly, and therefore roughly how many people that means we ought to take as some kind of reparation.

Otherwise, it's a non-starter; it wouldn't provide any practical guidance, so it would be little more than virtue signalling.