Daily Mail, 27 October 2003

While all eyes have been fixed upon the skies by Concorde’s last flight and upon the psychiatric ward by the nervous breakdown engulfing both the Conservative party and the Royal Family, the issue that people care about far more – the government’s failure to control illegal immigration – continues to stagger from crass ineptitude to empty threats and abject surrender.

This week, the Home Secretary David Blunkett will unveil an Asylum Bill which, we are told, will be a package of tough measures to curb the abuse of asylum. Mr Blunkett understands all too well that the public is enraged beyond measure by the asylum scam.

The Home Office is therefore telling us at every opportunity that it is going to be draconian towards asylum-seekers. So under the new bill, those who fail to provide written proof of their identities will be thrown into jail.

Last week, the Government told us it was ‘clearing the decks’ for further harsh new measures. It was ending welfare support for all families denied asylum but who refused to accept the government offer of a paid return home, and it might also make any benefits conditional on complying with the removal process.

In fact, these stern-sounding proposals were merely the bitter coating on a sugary pill. Far from revealing a ferocious new resolve, this was a display of supine capitulation.

The decks are to be cleared through an amnesty to 15,000 families – an estimated 50,000 souls in all – who applied for asylum before October 2000 but were turned down. Despite the fact that they are therefore illegal immigrants, they are to be given indefinite leave to remain and within five years will be eligible for British citizenship.

The government says this will save money by removing these families from the asylum appeals process, and enabling them to move off benefits and into work ‘to fully contribute to society’.

Such arguments are breathtakingly disingenuous. These particular asylum-seekers could in fact have worked, since their cases predated the restrictions on working that were subsequently introduced.

As for saving the cost of appeals, most of these families have already exhausted the appeals process and still had their claims rejected. The only thing that has not been done is to enforce the outcome of that official process by deporting them. This sends the clearest possible signal of weakness and a further invitation to buck the system.

In any event, the reason the appeals system is manipulated so destructively is because of the ammunition provided by the Human Rights Act. That same act is likely to be further pressed into use against the new proposals to place restrictions on benefits, or to jail asylum-seekers, or remove their children into care.

And since many more asylum-seekers have arrived since October 2000, it can’t be long before human rights lawyers are bringing yet further time-wasting claims that it is discriminatory not to give them an amnesty, too.

Above all, the amnesty sends the indefensible message that if people actually get here, then even if their cases are rejected the Government will allow them to stay. No greater incentive could there be for illegal immigrants to try their luck.

Now to make matters even worse, immigration officials say it will take them six months to work out who these 15,000 families are. By the time they have cranked out their letters, the rest of the asylum-seekers will have melted away into the landscape.

Far from being a claimed one-off, we have been taken down this road before. An amnesty granted by Jack Straw affected 21,500 people between 1998 and 1999, and one by the Tories affected 32,300 people between 1991 and 1994. Amnesties are part of the problem, not the solution.

The Government states it has halved asylum claims this year. But the truth is that it hasn’t got a clue how many people are coming or going. And the ease with which incomers can simply disappear is the single greatest incentive behind the flow.

Look what happened last summer after 63 Chinese citizens were found to be working illegally in East Anglia. Four were rejected asylum-seekers, 16 were asylum applicants, 10 had committed other immigration offences -- and no fewer than 33 were simply working here illegally and anonymously. When they were arrested, however, they promptly claimed asylum, triggering years of delay. Meanwhile, the employer using this illegal labour was not even prosecuted.

The Home Office says the new measures restricting benefits will send ‘a clear signal’ that people refused asylum from now on must leave the UK. This is like saying the law against burglary is a clear signal that no-one should rob anyone. But it’s useless if everyone knows that it’s never enforced.

For the problem is that, despite a claimed increase in removals, the Government deports very few illegal immigrants; nor will it lock people up so they cannot just vanish into the ether. Of the 63 arrested in East Anglia, only one was actually deported.

In particular – and this is surely the real reason for the amnesty – the government shies away from deporting families because of the ensuing negative and highly emotional publicity.

Other countries –the Netherlands, France, Denmark – detain and deport illegal immigrants. The only reason our government does not do likewise is a failure of will.

It refuses to face up to the fact that an effective asylum policy is impossible unless it tears up its own Human Rights Act, renegotiates exemptions to the European Convention on Human Rights, and passes its own law defining a refugee.

One wonders, however, what its real motives actually are. In a remarkable but little-noticed line in his amnesty anouncement, Mr Blunkett quoted an observation by the Chief Inspector of Schools that children from asylum-seeking families were ‘especially motivated and doing well in schools’, and that MPs from all sides appealed every week for such families to be allowed to stay.

What’s Mr Blunkett getting at – that illegal immigrants should stay because their children may bost the Government’s education targets? Maybe they are well motivated; but does that mean the UK should take all the millions who want to come here, and about whom the same thing might be said?

His remark not only ignores the enormous pressure on public services from large numbers of extra people descending in rapid and unmanageable succession onto the system. It also comes close to saying that the needs of the indigenous population must take second place to those who have no right to be here at all. It says lawfulness no longer matters.

The message is: arrive with children in tow, and the government will not have the stomach to throw you out. Use children to break the law, and Britain will reward you with the prize of its citizenship.

Once, it was understood that the primary obligation of a citizen was to uphold the law. Now, citizenship is being redefined as a reward for illegality and moral blackmail.

This is not merely guaranteed to increase the flow of illegal immigration. It bespeaks a moral bankruptcy and denial of the civic order at the very heart of government.

Posted by melanie at October 27, 2003