Now that Trump is winning in America and Europe is moving to the right, the British government is starting to look like the last Japanese supremacy after the Second World War.
The rest of the world has realized that many of the asylum seekers arriving in the West look far more like economic migrants than genuine attempts to flee war and danger; Sir Keir Starmer, meanwhile, remains silent worn-out lines about ‘crushing the gangs’.
Sir Keir’s big speech on the importance of tackling the issue was backed up with around £75 million in additional funding for his Border Security Command; around 1.6 percent of what we spend on supporting asylum seekers in Britain, or just under four hours of NHS spending.
This is not a serious commitment because crushing the gangs is not a serious policy; it’s a slogan.
No wonder people at the Home Office are skeptical: does the Prime Minister really think we will disrupt networks operating in non-cooperative countries on a continent with a budget of £150 million over two years, and a hundred people in an office near Whitehall?
Will his pursuit really be so ruthlessly effective that gangs charging thousands of dollars for a seat in a boat will disappear without replacement? Or is the idea that a few announcements will take away the government’s attention for a few days?
The gangs are not the cause of the problem, they are its enablers. The fundamental problem is the Britain’s failure to address the factors that make the country so attractive for irregular migration.
The economics of this are not difficult to parse. People flow from areas where life is difficult to places where life is easier. Britain houses asylum seekers in hotels, has a large and flexible labor market, a thriving shadow economy and makes minimal efforts to remove those who have no right to stay here.
The result is a stream of people moving through safe, prosperous countries in Europe looking for a chance to claim asylum in Britain.
And why wouldn’t they? When you sit in France looking for a trip across the Channelyou are probably well aware of two things.
The first is that if you throw your papers in the water and claim to be persecuted, you have a good chance of asylum and the right to stay and work. In 2023, France accepted 31% of the claims it received before appeals. Britain accepted 67 percent, accounting for 63,010 asylum applications – 21,000 more than France, with 38,000 fewer applications.
No country in the EU with a total of more than 20,000 applications had a higher acceptance rate than Britain. In fact, with the Labor Party keen to clear the backlog, the direction of travel appears to be towards stamping out claims to clear the asylum hotels.
The second thing you will be aware of is that if your claim is unsuccessful, you will probably still be able to stay.
Britain is believed to have the largest population of illegal migrants in Europe, with up to 745,000 people living here without permission. In any case, this number is probably a significant underestimate: it is seven years out of date and may have been low at the time; the Pew Research Center gave an estimate of up to 1.2 million the same year. Furthermore, by 2022, only 41% of people who had claimed asylum between 2010 and 2020 had been removed from Britain.
Better yet, the chance of you being caught working illegally is minuscule; we conduct around eleven enforcement visits to illegal work per day across the country, against an old estimate of somewhere between 190,000 and 240,000 businesses employing illegal migrants.
Even if we had a list of the doors to knock on, it would take us more than 57 years to visit them all at the current rate. For every pound we spend on immigration enforcement, we spend £9 supporting and hosting asylum seekers.
If Starmer and co really want to destroy the gangs, they must destroy their revenue model. The best way to do that is to read Trump’s book and… commit to a policy of mass deportation.
If you live here illegally or cross the Channel on a small boat, you will end up on a flight home or to whatever third country takes you.
The long-term benefits can be significant. The Office for Budget Responsibility has calculated that low-skilled migrants coming to work cost the taxpayer a net cost of £150,000 at age 65, £500,000 at age 80 and more than £1 million at age 100.
Asylum seekers cannot rely on public funds, although they are still cared for by taxpayers, given full access to state-funded healthcare, financial support for living costs and full rights to educational services. However, once a claim is accepted, the entitlement to public funds accrues with it, as well as the full package of costs.
Meanwhile, people who originally came to Britain for asylum are much less likely to be in work than their British counterparts – with an employment rate of 51 percent compared to 73 percent – and earn 55 percent less per week, while earning significantly higher rates report long-term health problems. .
In other words, we have a cohort of people uniquely positioned at the intersection of low tax benefits and high tax costs, crossing the Channel in significant numbers. For example, the University of Amsterdam has estimated that asylum seekers in the Netherlands ultimately cost the state £300,000 over their lifetime. Some will be real refugees and deserve our support.
But even if it costs £100,000 to get one Channel migrant on the flight home before he or she retires, it would be more than worth deporting those who use the system.
Doing this may not be easy. The entire edifice of human rights law is essentially structured to remove control from politicians and ensure that the flow of people can continue to flow – see, for example, Giorgia Meloni’s recent legal report. setback over its migration center in Albania.
But the status quo is clearly intolerable. The will to reform a broken system designed to deal with the world as it was half a century ago is growing.
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