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News broke this week that, on the face of it looks to be welcome, the government is cracking down on illegal immigration. As if we haven’t heard this all before.
The Home Office’s new rules mean that any refugee convicted of sexual assault “will be denied refugee status”, while the Immigration Advice Authority will be given “expanded powers” to investigate fraudulent immigration lawyers, issuing fines of up to £15,000.
As we pointed out in last week’s newsletter, this must be viewed with scepticism. This is a government led by a man who actively prevented foreign-born criminals from being deported, and – as Matt Goodwin wrote about these latest announcements – this government is gaslighting the public into thinking action will be taken when, really, the opposite will happen.
How might that happen? As Chris Philp says, “foreign criminals will just use ECHR Article 3 instead”; put simply, the European Convention on Human Rights – integrated into British law by the Human Rights Act – will be used to prevent “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”.
Moreover, it is doubtful this will be a sufficient deterrent – the industry that has sprung up around migrant smuggling is highly lucrative. Can we confidently say that these phony lawyers are not in the pay of the smugglers?
Illegal immigration is a problem, of course it is, but at this stage it’s the scale of legal immigration and the government’s complicity in facilitating the sheer size of it all. The news that broke over the weekend of the agreement between the government and the Serco Group to pay landlords to house asylum seekers shows just how much the government is unwilling to confront the real factors fuelling an increase in migration. As the article says, “the list shows local authorities where Serco has been contracted to provide dispersal asylum accommodation under a deal agreed six years ago.”
This is infuriating, definitely, but this is sadly not new. It was, in fact, a programme begun under the Tories, and Serco is one of three organisations contracted by the government to provide these “services”. As is so often the case, we wrote tried to warn people about this; nearly five years ago, in our briefing on what happens to those crossing the channel illegally, we listed those three companies whose 10-year contracts started in 2019:
- Serco, worth £1.9bn.
- Clearsprings, worth £1.1bn.
- Mears, worth £1bn.
Alp commented on this for Michael Portillo’s show on GB News, the full clip of which can be found below, pointing out that the whole British government system is struggling to know what to do.
When will the government make the safety, security and wellbeing of its own people a priority? You can write to your MP – find your MP here – and ask them to speak out against this debacle.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every week as soon as it is released.