Last week, almost a thousand more illegal migrants entered the country via small boats. Over 204,000 have arrived since 2018. And of them, 76,352 have broken into Britain since Labour’s election win, just under two years ago. Almost all of them claim asylum. Almost none of them are ever deported. Meanwhile the migrant crime wave rolls on. On Friday, three Afghan men who raped a teenage girl before fleeing the country in the back of a lorry were found guilty.
Our borders are not secure. It would be an act of wilful neglect to introduce another route for those who wish to live here at our expense
On legal migration too, the signs are bleak. The Home Secretary’s long-promised reforms to Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) are yet to be enacted. This means that migrants who came to the country post-Covid as part of the Boriswave are now being granted ILR, entitling them to benefits and housing. They will even be entitled to state pensions under the pensions credit scheme. According to the Home Office’s core estimate, 1.6 million will settle by 2030. Under their ‘high case’ forecast, 2.2 million will. The cost of these people, generally low earners, who will never be net contributors, could be in the hundreds of billions. It is fiscal suicide for Britain.
Our borders are open, and nothing is being done to undo the ruinous harm of recent migration policy. The government’s latest response to this has been appalling. Home Office minister Mike Tapp wrote an article for the Times in which he proposed exempting care workers from the new rules. According to the Home Office those care workers make up around 25 to 30 per cent of those expected to settle in Britain by 2030. At a stroke Tapp’s proposal could cost British taxpayers hundreds of billions.
Meanwhile his boss, the Home Secretary, has announced a new asylum scheme. According to the Home Office ‘the rollout of new, safe and legal routes for refugees will begin in the autumn’. I understand that they are keen the British people understand this system won’t bring asylum seekers to Britain – instead their claims will be approved abroad so they arrive as refugees.
Under this scheme, ‘communities’ will be allowed to ‘sponsor refugees to resettle in their area’. It seems these sponsors will be required to support these new arrivals for the first 12 months after they arrive in the UK. Given the lifetime costs of the average asylum seeker, based on a detailed study from the Netherlands in 2024, are believed to be around £345,000, such a private contribution does nothing to protect the taxpayer. According to reporting by the Times, the scheme will ‘resettle refugees who are fleeing their country due to conflict, famine, drought and other disasters and are referred to the UK by the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency’. It will also prioritise those from destabilised, wartorn countries such as Sudan and Eritrea – likely to be among the least economically productive, and in the case of men, with high levels of criminality. Apparently the intent is to ‘offer a route to the UK for migrants who would otherwise make dangerous journeys across Europe and across the Channel in small boats.’
The Home Office’s sales pitch is that this will somehow replace illegal migration, and that it will be better for integration than the current system. The system will ‘operate at a much higher capacity’ than existing sponsorship schemes, and the plan is to also create routes via which universities and employers can sponsor refugees to move here. The Home Office have attempted to reassure the public by stating that they ‘will retain full control over who can act as sponsors’, something which is little comfort given the current skilled worker sponsors list they control includes vape shops, hand car washes and kebab shops.
They also, tellingly, say that this model is ‘something the voluntary sector [by which they mean extremist open borders activists and charities] has long supported’. No doubt they have. Because this is a system which will flood the country with more costly and unwanted people.
Commenting on the policy, Zia Yusuf, Reform’s shadow home secretary said: ‘Unbelievably, Andy Burnham plans to bring thousands more migrants here from countries like Sudan and Eritrea – the very nationalities the illegal boats are full of. This was not in the Labour manifesto. There is no mandate. We are putting Burnham on notice: Reform will reverse this scheme. If he really believes the British people want it, he should put in his manifesto and call a general election. If he fails to do so, when voters do get their say, if they choose a Reform government this illegitimate scheme will be reversed.’
This whole proposal is absolute nonsense. Our borders are not secure. It would be an act of wilful neglect to introduce another route for those who wish to live here at our expense. All that will happen is the most sympathetic cases will secure ‘community sponsorship’ – i.e. limited financial support from their relatives already here, or extremist open borders organisations (many of whom receive their funding from taxpayers), while the less sympathetic cases will continue to cross the Channel, knowing that they face no prospect of ever being deported. Even the promised cap on numbers is no reassurance – inevitably charities and activists will challenge it under Human Rights law, and inevitably our courts will side with them. There will also, inevitably, be crimes committed against well-meaning British people by the migrants they’ve invited into their homes.
A government which was serious about solving Britain’s migration crisis would understand that it has to bring both ILR and the asylum system to an end. They are vastly costly both in economic and social terms, and it is not in our national interest to invite all the world’s poor, troubled and violent to our shores. Instead, the government’s plan is that ‘the rollout of new safe and legal routes will begin in the autumn…ahead of wider reforms to the immigration system’. Accept the extra migrants now, and hope that future reforms will reduce numbers. It’s not a serious, nor patriotic proposal. This week Labour have showed us that they are unwilling to undo the Boriswave. Now they are about to give us a Burnhamwave too.
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