As you know, we have been raising the alarm about Britain’s overwhelmed and abused asylum system for some time. Well, this week the rest of the media caught up, as it emerged that the cost of asylum to the British tax payer rose by 42% this year to nearly £1.4 Billion. To add to this, there was the news that the government intends to resettle over 20,000 refugees from Afghanistan in 343 local council areas.
Britain has already done a great deal to help people genuinely fleeing persecution, and we should continue this where we can. However, it is also vital to consider the impact that such sudden inflows of new people will have on our communities. We wrote a paper on the impact of immigration since 2001 on our towns and cities, which you can read here. Britain already has a housing crisis as it is (read our briefing paper on it here), so it begs the question what the priorities are among our political class. The needs of UK voters are being shunted aside in a negligent manner. There is no easy answer when a humanitarian challenge erupts as it has in Afghanistan, but any policy proposal must be conceived with the interests of the British people firmly in mind.
On the subject of Afghanistan, the novelist Lionel Shriver this week wrote an excellent piece for The Spectator on the disruption that mass inflows of people have had, and will continue to have, on Britain’s communities and towns and cities. She cited two of our most recent papers (you can read them here and here), which show that the changes the UK has seen over the last 20 years are unprecedented and radically transformative. Ms Shriver rightly points out it is neither racist nor small-minded to question why successive governments have instigated such fast-paced societal change despite the British public not having given their consent to mass immigration. People have a right to defend what they love about their home, and it is no use denying mass immigration has a huge impact on these things. The piece is well worth reading in full.
Blog of the week
Staffing The Health Service Requires Training Not Immigration
It is too easy for policymakers and NHS managers to lean on the crutch of mass immigration to fill healthcare staffing vacancies. Yet this comes at the expense of further pressure on communities and services as the population soars while qualified UK young people who wish to train for such roles are too often shut out by a shortage of training places (see our paper on this topic). This has meant that thousands of ambitious, educated, aspiring health-care workers have been rejected, even as thousands of recruits were taken from much poorer countries that need them more. In fact, Britain’s NHS brings in significantly more doctors and nurses than Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands. Government ministers must incentivise the NHS and other employers to do better at training and retaining (through higher pay and more decent working conditions) those who want nothing more than to be of service to their country. For more read our blog here.
Migration Watch in the news
Our Chairman Alp Mehmet has had a busy week in the news once again. See below for his comments and appearances:
‘One of the principle reasons why the traffickers are able to sell Britain as the destination of choice is that having arrived here there’s very little chance of being sent back – very few people who apply for asylum and fail actually are sent back.’
‘The only way to check this uncontrolled trend is to return substantial numbers of irregular arrivals and failed asylum seekers. Alas, this appears to be beyond the Government’s competence.’
Telegraph: No Channel migrants removed from UK this year as enforced returns hit record low
‘Our government’s pusillanimous approach to enforcing the immigration rules with regard to those with no right to be here is not lost on people who benefit most from this lamentable state of affairs. It’s time ministers and the courts faced up to the stream of challenges, which, all too often, are unfounded, abusive and vexatious. The only answer is proper and resolute enforcement of the law. Otherwise, the numbers coming and the cost to the taxpayer will continue escalating.”
And please see below for Alp’s conversation with Nigel Farage on GB News:
GB News: Our asylum system now costs nearly £1.4 billion a year
‘We’ve got to think of the consequences and impact on people at this end as well.’
Make your voice heard
Mass immigration does not just raise issues about overstretched services, overcrowding and the erosion of common culture; it goes right to the heart of what it means to live in a democratic society. Despite the vote to leave the EU and reclaim our border sovereignty in 2016, the government has substantially weakened key checks on mass immigration. It has lowered skills and education thresholds and scrapped a yearly cap on work permits for migrants – severely weakening requirements for those in 80% of the world’s countries while pretending to restore ‘control’. If this sleight of hand concerns you as much as it does us, please consider writing to your MP to let your voice be heard.