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. That tends to go with the nationalities. There are a lot of young males. A lot of prison tattoos and prison haircuts. I have had two staff attacked in the last week.’
Unless ministers have identified violent criminality as an economic sector suffering from acute labour shortages and meriting its own seasonal worker scheme, it is very hard to put a positive spin on this.
Rather, it further emphasises that the tangle of international agreements which dictate the parameters of our asylum system, along with our own easily-exploited Human Rights Act, are wholly unsustainable and should be abandoned forthwith by Liz Truss when she becomes prime minister next month.
The number of migrants crossing the Channel in inflatable dinghies so far this year is about to pass 23,000 – almost twice as many as had made it by late August last year, which was in itself a record.
With autumn being the peak season for crossings owing to warmer sea temperatures, it now looks probable that the year-end total will top 50,000, compared to a little over 28,500 in 2021, 8,500 in 2020 and 1,800 in 2019 when Boris Johnson first promised to ‘send back’ the arrivals.
This scale of open abuse of what we laughably still refer to as the UK immigration and asylum ‘system’ is fast becoming a national emergency. Islamist terror attacks have been carried out by asylum seekers. Now we must add in the threat of gangland killers and enforcers from the Albanian underworld.
Nothing in modern British life – not the cost-of-living crisis, the shocking increase in ambulance service response times, nor even the ongoing re-engineering of the police service into a nationwide progressive dance troupe – has been so corrosive to public morale as the failure of the government to defend the integrity of our borders.
The very social contract that guarantees civilised life, involving the payment of taxes in return for the state assisting our compatriots in times of need, is now under threat. Who will think it fair to pay their taxes in order to put-up foreign gangsters or economic migrants in three-star hotels after they have arrived in deliberate contravention of UK immigration laws?
The ideologues of the ‘no borders’ left certainly will. Which is probably why Keir Starmer and Ed Davey have had so little to say about the Channel crisis. But among 2019 Conservative voters the mood is one of cold fury.
An autumn spent trying to get the Rwanda asylum-processing scheme through the British courts and the European courts too so that a few dozen people can be put on a couple of planes to Kigali is not going to cut the mustard for Truss. Only a diamond-hard, Australia-style response, based around the principle that nobody arriving illegally gets to stay in Britain, will now suffice.
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