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Britain’s immigration system is in a panicky state of collapse

The Home Office’s farcical questionnaire to decide which asylum seekers are allowed in would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous

Protests against deportation
Even when bad guys from overseas are removed for the sake of public safety, attempts are made to block their deportation Credit: Henry Nicholls

Peter Ustinov used to poke irritable fun at the immigration forms he had to fill in on his travels. On entering Australia, the great raconteur claimed that one of the questions was, “When was the last time you had indigestion?” and the next, “Whether or not you are insane?” On another occasion, arriving in New York and trying to penetrate American Border Protection, Ustinov came across a particularly stupid question. “Have you ever, or are you now, planning acts of terrorism against the United States?”

“No other purpose for visit,” wrote Ustinov solemnly.  

Now, that’s funny. Considerably less amusing, I find, is the prospect of our own Home Office using equally fatuous questions to reduce the vast backlog of “asylum seekers”.  

Yet, unbelievably, that is exactly what is planned. About 12,000 people from five countries – Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea, Libya and Yemen – will be sent a 10-page questionnaire which will be used to decide their claims, generally without the bother of a searching, face-to-face interview where an official could deduce whether they, you know, might not be telling the whole truth.

And once those 12,000 have been granted refugee status, they’ll be able to bring relatives here through the family reunion scheme, which could easily quadruple the figure. They will all have to live somewhere. But where?

My daughter is currently searching for a room in a flat in London where a Dickensian hovel starts at £600-a-month plus energy bills so she can defrost her cell, and her extremities. We have a generational housing crisis and are unable to meet the accommodation needs of our own young people. Not to mention the fact that millions of Britons are struggling to access medical care. Yet, a Conservative government apparently believes now is the right time to introduce a barely-disguised amnesty, a ruse to make it look like the Prime Minister is fulfilling his promise to reduce the vast asylum backlog (unofficially more than 160,000 outstanding cases) by the end of the year.

It’s about as honest as claiming you’ve cut the seven-million-plus NHS hospital waiting list when what you’ve done is make it almost impossible to get on the waiting list in the first place (a cunning stratagem which I’m told is already widespread).  

The latest wizard wheeze from our hopeless Home Office is to speed up the processing of applications for people from countries that typically have a high “grant” rate in the UK.  Those same applicants have often been refused the right to remain in other, saner nations – countries whose immigration system is not in a panicky state of collapse, as ours is, and which continue to put the interests of their own citizens first.  

The figures are simply unbelievable. According to Migration Watch, in 2021 the UK’s asylum grant rate at the initial decision stage was almost three times that of France. (The UK accepted 72 per cent compared with France’s 25 per cent.) The UK grant rate is now a “permissive outlier” compared to most of Europe. We are, for example, much more generous than the cuddly EU (37 per cent acceptance for initial applications; less than half of what the UK takes) although, as everyone outside Whitehall has noticed, our public services cannot cope.

Perversely, this unaffordable largesse creates an incentive for even more to come illegally. Word has spread that we have a far higher grant rate than adjacent countries: the British are mugs, roll up, roll up! Unlike our embarrassed leaders, we should try to be honest about what is going on here. Increasingly, as Migration Watch’s Alp Mehmet says: “The reason we grant asylum to so many people is not because they qualify but because we can’t get rid of them”. With hotels and B&Bs filling up, creating consternation and unwelcome headlines locally, there is no longer any pretence about “managing migration”: it’s a shameful surrender.

Officials concede that the vast majority of migrants who claim to be from the five, specified countries will now be able to fill out a form and stay in the UK. Dropping interviews with asylum seekers, they say, indicates “the Home Office is prepared to take a bit of a risk in order to get the backlog down”.

It’s not the Home Office running the risk, though, is it? “A bit of a risk” is frightening if it involves asylum seekers of the kind who go on to commit serious crimes here in the UK. A bit of a risk is not OK if you are a teenage girl in a school that has given places to migrant adult males from misogynist cultures who claim to be 15 (as Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, a double murderer, did). So great is the shambles at the Home Office that exposing the public to potential danger is now considered acceptable in order to spare official blushes.

Just imagine what would happen if they sent one of the new application forms to a young asylum seeker called Salman Abedi. Because he’s from Libya, one of the countries with a high “grant” rate, Abedi would be waved into the UK. No interviewer would have a chance to pick up his connections to Islamic State or his fearful radicalisation. No questions on the form would be likely to elicit an honest answer in the Ustinov style: 

Q: Do you intend to murder 22 men, women and children and injure 250 more in a suicide bombing in the Manchester Arena?

A: No other purpose for visit.

Later this week, MI5 will face scathing criticism in the official report into the Manchester atrocity. They had Abedi on their radar but failed to act on intelligence because the 22-year-old was no longer considered a “significant threat”. I have a good deal of sympathy for the security services. The Government blithely waves thousands of undocumented, fighting-age males from the Middle East and North Africa into the UK as “asylum seekers” (an insult to genuine refugees, quite frankly), fails to pass the necessary legislation to boot them out and then passes the buck when MI5, unsurprisingly, lacks the resources to keep tabs on any varmint who may want to don a suicide vest.

Even when bad guys from overseas are removed for the sake of public safety, attempts are made to block their deportation. Take the appalling case revealed this week of Ernesto Elliott, one of 50 Jamaican-national criminals convicted of violent, sexual or drug offences. 

Elliot was due to be on board a flight chartered by the Home Office, but last-ditch legal appeals in December 2020, involving claims the passengers’ human rights had been breached, blocked the deportation. Virtue-signalling celebrities like Naomi Campbell, actress Thandiwe Newton and historian David Olusoga signed an open letter urging airlines not to comply with deportations. And a letter to the PM, signed by Labour and Lib Dem MPs, including Sir Keir Starmer, claimed that the planned deportation epitomised the “hostile environment” agenda which led to the “inhumane treatment of the Windrush generation”.

That surge of nauseating and naïve do-goodery caused Nathaniel Eyewu-Ago to lose his life. He was stabbed to death by one Ernesto Elliott. I have yet to hear an apology from the bien-pensant fools who kept the murderous Elliot and villains like him on British streets because to deport them was not very nice.

This scheme to fast-track 12,000 asylum applications using only a questionnaire is a sly, shabby betrayal of the British people. A total farce, it would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. It claims to bring efficiency when its aim is to cover up the exact opposite. Only when individuals who have no legitimate claim for asylum are removed immediately and with alacrity (as other countries like France somehow manage to do) will we be safe. And when might that be, Home Secretary?


You can read Allison Pearson’s column every Tuesday and listen to Allison with fellow columnist Liam Halligan on The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, featuring news and views from beyond the bubble, on the audio player above or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your preferred podcast app

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