This is a preview of the Migration Watch weekly newsletter. You can read the full version here.
Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every Friday as soon as it is released.
Whether it is pledging to reduce immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’, that ‘overall immigration will come down’ or to ‘Stop the Boats’, the government has an unmatched track record of failing to fulfill its immigration pledges.
This week, we have had this woeful performance starkly illustrated.
Since Saturday (20 Aug), over 1,700 more migrants have arrived by small boat. In fact, they are now frequently being packed eighty to a single dinghy according to some reports. On Monday, a whopping 661 arrived in 15 small boats. Overall, crossings are down by around 17% (at the time of writing) but such a reduction could be overturned in a week. We won’t know until the end of the year what progress there has been on the small boats pledge. Our belief is that it will be negligible.
Sadly, the Channel crisis will get worse before it begins – courts and loophole-exploiters permitting – to improve. And if the EU’s borders continue to be as porous as they are (a third of a million illegal migrants entered the EU last year – and that’s just those the EU authorities know about) the open-borders Schengen arrangement will lead to many of them eventually making their way to Britain by whatever means they can.
However, bad (and ‘bad’ perhaps underplays it) as the chaos of the Channel and the broken asylum system are, the out-of-control legal immigration we now have is even worse. And we ignore at our peril the dire longer term risks inherent in mass, uncontrolled immigration for the well-being of the country and stability of our society. It is also short-sighted, if not perverse, to continue to make light of the huge overall cost of immigration to the exchequer.
This is a preview of the Migration Watch weekly newsletter. You can read the full version here.
Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every Friday as soon as it is released.