. It is a deliberate policy aimed at transforming Britain.
WHY LABOUR HAS NO REAL DESIRE TO SORT OUT ASYLUM RACKET
Thursday June 25,2009
By Leo McKinstry
THE grotesquely mismanaged asylum system created by the Labour Government is an affront to justice.
Riddled with abuses, it provides both lucrative opportunities to greedy lawyers and a political cause for left-wing zealots who loathe their own country.
But for the rest of us, the asylum racket means higher taxes, a greater strain on public services and the accelerating breakdown in social cohesion.
The shambles has again been highlighted this week by yet another asylum scandal.
Recently the Government spent £1 million on a project, based in Kent, which was meant to give support to failed asylum seekers while they awaited their return home.
Run by the charity Migrant Helpline, the open residential unit was hailed as an alternative to locking up families before their deportation.
It was estimated that over 260 families would be assisted by the scheme. But in practice, the unit dealt with just 13 families, only one of which actually went back home.
Effectively, the taxpayer has been forced to squander £1 million on a single family of bogus claimants.
Only in Labour’s world of epic waste would such nonsense be tolerated.
The whole asylum system has become synonymous with fraud, incompetence and contempt for the rights of British citizens.
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The vast majority of so-called asylum seekers are not genuine refugees at all, but are simply economic migrants seeking a better life here, particularly by exploiting our ludicrously generous welfare system.
So enfeebled is the British state that just 10 per cent of failed asylum seekers are ever deported when their claims are rejected.
According to the London School of Economics, there are more than 500,000 bogus refugees living in Britain, a population bigger than most of our major cities.
Fearful of public anger on the asylum issue, Labour has tried to talk tough in recent years. But Ministerial words have just been hollow rhetoric.
In fact, asylum claims are up by 27 per cent this year, while the backlog caused by unresolved cases and missing files is getting larger than ever.
All this represents a huge burden to the taxpayer. The total cost of Home Office support for asylum seekers is running at more than £500 million-a-year and over the last eight years the Government has spent no less than £6.6 billion on such assistance.
Similarly, the bill for helping rejected claimants is rocketing, reaching £73 million in 2008 compared to just £4 million in 2005.
There is a simple solution to the asylum racket. We should reassert our national integrity, strengthen our borders and concentrate on the needs of the British population.
It is absurd to waste so much money on giving support to bogus refugees. Claims of asylum should be dealt with rigorously at the point of entry. All those who are rejected should be deported immediately without being allowed to stay for a moment on British soil.
Residence here is a privilege, not a human right.
But none of this is likely to happen. The problem is that it is impossible to have a rational debate about asylum because of the malign influence of political correctness.
Asylum campaigners, led by left-wing politicians, trade unions, pressure groups and hand-wringing church leaders, have donned the mantle of moral righteousness, constantly accusing their opponents of cruelty or racism.
Through a barrage of propaganda, they wail about the destitution endured by failed asylum seekers or the horrors of places like Somalia, Eritrea or Afghanistan, from where the majority of claimants originate.
Their campaigning is pure emotional blackmail. It is the politics of the madhouse to argue that we in Britain have a duty to help all the oppressed people of the world.
The United Nations estimates that there are more than 30 million individuals around the globe who have a right to refugee status. Our small island could not cope with even a fraction of that number.
Yet all the asylum lobbyists’ imagery of tear-stained victimhood hides the reality that the majority of asylum claimants are single, often tough, young men, who appear only too keen to leave their families behind.
They should be rebuilding their own countries and looking after their own neighbourhoods instead of aggressively sponging off Britain.
Moreover, successful claimants often do far better than the fashionable myth of suffering would suggest. In one disgraceful case last year, an Afghan single mother was given £170,000-a-year in housing benefits to live in a vast Edwardian villa in West London, a lifestyle far beyond the dreams of most taxpaying Britons.
The Government could dramatically reform the asylum system tomorrow if it wanted.
After all, this is an administration that is able to ban all smoking in public places, carpet the country in surveillance cameras, and go to war in two distant countries.
The truth is that there are huge financial and ideological vested interests behind maintaining the current asylum shambles. On one hand, lawyers can make a fortune from stringing out cases through appeals and judicial reviews.
Last year the legal aid bill for asylum and immigration cases was over £77 million. Pressure groups do equally well out of the racket.
Since its creation, the National Lottery has handed over £75 million to asylum causes, such as the £400,000 grant last December to the North of England Refugee Service to help asylum seekers claim benefits.
Just as importantly, the asylum mess is another part of the civic order’s drive to destroy our nationhood.
The destruction of our traditional British identity through the promotion of asylum and mass immigration has been a fundamental theme of socialism over the last twelve years.
The chaos is not a mistake. It is a deliberate policy aimed at transforming our society.