Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

Albanian channel crossings are making our borders look like a joke

(Photo: Getty)

The wholesale abuse of the United Kingdom’s asylum system has taken a novel, absurdist twist in the last few months.

Recent years have seen thousands of young men predominantly from war-torn or extremely oppressive countries – such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria – chugged across the English Channel from the safe country of France to lodge asylum claims here.

But a new dispensation involves thousands of young men from a European country that has not seen a war for a quarter of a century and aspires to join the EU travelling through a series of other safe countries before reaching France and then crossing the Channel to claim asylum in the UK.

This is Asylum Abuse 2022: Albanian Edition. No war zone has been inhabited at any stage of the trek by any of the self-styled refugees coming from Albania. During the first six weeks of summer a leaked intelligence report estimated that almost 40 per cent of Channel migrants were from Albania, a country with a total population of less than 3 million.

More recently that proportion has at times climbed to well over half. Out of 1,295 Channel migrants arriving on Monday – a record for a single day – at least 700 were reported to be Albanians, overwhelmingly young men.

Among 2019 Conservative voters the mood is one of cold fury



It gets worse. While some may be legitimately claiming asylum, there are strong grounds for believing that the Albanian criminals who have recently muscled in on the cross-Channel migrant racket are shipping in reinforcements for organised drugs gangs in big British cities where they now have ‘considerable control‘ of the cocaine market. 

Lucy Moreton of the Immigration Service Union, representing Border Force officers, says: ‘We are getting an increasing amount of violence.

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