Suella Braverman is in the firing line. But when she took to her feet in the Commons yesterday, she showed exactly why there is so much pressure on Rishi Sunak to get rid of her: Braverman actually wants to reduce illegal immigration.
The Home Secretary’s critics have condemned her for using the word ‘invasion’. ‘No responsible person should ever use language that risks inciting hostility and hate,’ says Amnesty International. The problem is that Braverman’s statement is essentially correct. When she asks MPs to ‘stop pretending they are all refugees in distress, the whole country knows that is not true’, she is not engaging in ‘far-right and inflammatory rhetoric’, as one SNP MP claimed. She is highlighting the failures of twenty years and counting of British government policy.
The number of migrants crossing the Channel is growing exponentially. In 2020, 8,404 people made the journey. In 2021, 28,526. This year, we are at 39,430 and counting. On Saturday alone, 1,000 migrants in two dozen boats crossed the Channel.
When we look at who is making these journeys, images of infants in wicker baskets fleeing the wicked pharaoh quickly dissolve. Nearly nine in ten of those arriving are male; 75 per cent are between the ages of 18 and 39.
Britain has lost control of its borders
When we look at where they’re coming from, we find that some 1-2 per cent of all the men in Albania have made the journey. You would have to be mad to believe that these men are so persecuted that each and every one deserves to claim asylum in the UK. To the best of my knowledge, Albania is not currently committing Pogroms against ethnic Albanians. It opened negotiations for EU membership just a few months ago.
There is a simple reason that these people want to come to Britain. Our economy is strong, work is easy to find, English is the global language. None of these are sufficient reasons to say that they should be allowed to come. Fortunately for them, the UK is a soft touch. If you pay for a boat from France, burn your papers, and say the right things, you stand a good chance of being given asylum. This is why Britain grants 76 per cent of asylum claims, compared to the EU average of 34 per cent. If you’re Albanian, your chance of getting in is 52 per cent, against just 8 per cent in France.
If this fails, remember: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Perhaps, like the Liverpool suicide bomber, whose asylum claim was rejected, you might want to consider a conversion to Christianity?As a last resort, you can always rely on the sheer incompetence of the Home Office. The number of deportations has dropped steadily year after year even as the number of people arriving has risen. This isn’t because people deserve to stay; it’s because we don’t properly keep track of people arriving, and sometimes even expect them to return home voluntarily.
If you were in any doubt, this is a crisis. Britain has lost control of its borders; it can no longer say who is permitted to live here and who is not. Yet we are told by some of those currently calling for Braverman’s head the real crisis is that when these people arrive, they are not permitted to immediately begin working. What Britain needs, in their view, is another incentive for young men across the world to try crossing the Channel. And once that right to work was granted, and applications still failed from time to time, it’s not hard to guess what the next step would be: ‘the government is trying to deport your friends and colleagues’.
Or perhaps the real crisis is the lack of safe routes. Let’s take this idea more seriously than it deserves for a moment. Say tomorrow that Britain announces a new scheme: you can apply for asylum in France, your application will be processed, and, if successful, you will be put on a safe train through the tunnel to begin your new life in the UK. Exactly how long do you think it would be before people who were turned down decided to chance their arm on a trip across the Channel anyway? Remember, if your application fails, you still have a better than 50 per cent chance of just slipping away into the underground economy to earn more than you would at home.
This is not a sustainable situation. At some point, we will have to confront a simple choice: either we have borders, or we do not. On this issue, British politics is divided into two broad camps. In the first, you have the people who think a combination of open borders and institutions would give you tens of millions more Britons. In the second, you have people who think the cultural and political changes this would cause would mean you end up without a Britain at all.
Many of our politicians belong broadly to the first. Suella Braverman, and much of the rest of the country, belongs to the second. Controlled immigration can be a boon. But for it to be so, Britain needs to support it. And looking at the backlash to ‘uncontrollable’ immigration – from Brexit in the UK, to the rise of the Sweden Democrats, to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni – for that support to be in place, we need to take back control of our borders from the people smugglers.
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