So, if you’re to believe the constant stream of articles and headlines churned out by the mainstream media over the last few years – and the actual words of the Home Secretary Suella Braverman herself – England is currently in the grip of a supposedly unprecedented “invasion”.
According to the government and the media, countless hordes” of “illegal economic migrants” – mainly from Albania and other apparently “safe” countries – are “swarming” to Britain in dinghies across the English Channel in order to steal all of our jobs whilst simultaneously sitting on the dole and milking unemployment benefits.
Due to this supposedly record-breaking influx, Britain’s asylum processing system has – they claim – become so overwhelmed that immigration detention centres are now at breaking point, meaning the government has been “forced” to house thousands of asylum seekers in hotels across the country – costing the taxpayer around £7 million every day.
The situation has, unsurprisingly, led to a feeding frenzy amongst the right-wing press – with streams of articles and editorials insisting that ‘Britain is full up already’, ‘there aren’t enough houses or jobs to go around’, and pointing to the fact that ‘our public services are already overstretched as it is’.
This increasingly febrile atmosphere has already led to numerous violent far-right protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, self-proclaimed “migrant-hunters” are now routinely targeting refugee accommodation, and there was even an anti-immigration terrorist firebomb attack on an asylum detention centre in Dover in October.
However, the situation isn’t anything new. And, believe it or not, the government actually wants things to be like this.
Indeed, all the evidence shows that this so-called “crisis” has been entirely manufactured – and intentionally stoked up by the media – purely for their own mutual benefit.
And in this video, I’ll explain exactly how they did it, and why.
Why are asylum seekers crossing the Channel?
Firstly, believe it or not, there’s no legitimate way for the vast majority of asylum seekers to actually claim asylum in the UK.
Currently, there only three “safe and legal” routes to enter the UK – for a very select number of people who meet strict criteria and are fleeing from the countries of Afghanistan, Ukraine and Hong Kong.
Secondly, unless you meet these criteria – which the overwhelming proportion of refugees do not – government rules state that you have to physically be in the UK in order to make an asylum application.
This means that refugees from some of the most dangerous countries around the world – many of whom have links to the UK through family, speak the language, and would choose to come here and benefit society if they could – have absolutely no legal route to claim asylum here.
The absurd reality of the current system was summed up perfectly during an exchange between Tory MP Tim Loughton and the Home Secretary Suella Braverman during a Home Affairs Committee hearing back in November:
In addition, whilst it’s true that the number of asylum seekers using small boats to enter the UK has increased dramatically over the last few years, the overall number people applying for asylum has only slightly increased on recent levels – and it certainly isn’t at record levels as some would have you believe. What’s actually happening s simply alternative logistics.
Before 2019, most asylum seekers attempted to enter Britain in the back of lorries crossing through ports from France. However, largely due to increased checks at the French border implemented because of Brexit, this has become increasingly difficult – meaning that people smugglers are now choosing to move groups of asylum seekers via boats across the Channel rather than lorries through official ports.
The UK Representative to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Rossella Pagliuchi-Lor, explained the situation succinctly during a Parliamentary Committee hearing, stating:
“the overall number [of people entering the UK irregularly] has not changed. It is pretty stable. What has happened is simply that smuggling rings moved from moving people largely through trucks and other vehicles to using boats.”
And the reason?
“One of the reasons is the securitisation of the border and the fact that there are far more controls on trucks and lorries than there were before. I think it has to do with Brexit. That has reduced the truck vehicular traffic. Covid has been fundamental, because for months there has been hardly any way. Of course, smuggling rings are nothing if not incredibly adaptable. They have moved their business from trucks and vehicular movement to boats, but this does not represent a change in either the nature of those who travel or the nature of the movement. It is simply from one to the other.”
Why don’t asylum seekers just stay in the first safe country they reach?
The fact is that the vast majority of them do.
Statistics show that around three quarters of all refugees flee to neighbouring countries.
For instance. Turkey – which borders war-torn Syria – now hosts more than 3.5 million of the 5.6 million Syrian refugees.
Whilst, of the 3.4 million people to have fled Afghanistan, around 2.2 million are hosted by neighbouring Iran and Pakistan.
And, when it comes to the 8 million Ukrainian refugees, around 4.4 million of them have fled to either Russia or Poland next door – with Germany granting asylum to over a million as well.
In comparison, over the same timeframe, the UK has granted asylum to just 161,000 Ukrainians, around 20,000 Syrians, and around the same number of Afghans – a tiny percentage of the overall total.
And, when compared to our closest European neighbours, Britain takes in fewer asylum seekers than Austria, Slovenia, Greece, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Switzerland, Holland, Lithuania, Spain, and Sweden as a proportion of their overall population.
Why do some asylum seekers want to come to the UK?
Around half of all asylum seekers who make their applications in the UK do so because they already have family living here.
The other half have various other reasons, but the main one is that they already speak the language fluently and think it will help them settle in to society more easily.
The media often claim that many asylum seekers only make the perilous journey across the Channel simply because the UK welfare system is supposedly more generous to them than it is in other countries – but this is patently untrue.
Whilst waiting for their applications to be processed in the UK, all asylum seekers are prohibited from carrying our any paid work in the UK, and they are not entitled to state benefits. Instead, they receive temporary accommodation plus £45 a week – in the form of a pre-payment card, not cash – to buy essentials such as food, clothing, medication and toiletries.
Yet, in France, asylum seekers are entitled to a very similar weekly allowance and the same type of accommodation, but with the added benefit that they are entitled to work after just 6 months if their application hasn’t been processed yet. In the UK, asylum seekers can only apply for permission to work if their application hasn’t been processed after 12 months.
Whilst in Germany, the asylum welfare system is more generous than both the UK and France – with asylum seekers able to claim around £65 a week and be eligible to work after just 3 months.
And, when it comes to the generosity of state benefits – which asylum seekers in this country are only entitled to claim if they are granted leave to remain – the UK ranks extremely poorly compared to our close European neighbours such as Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Spain, and Germany.
How the government intentionally manufactured the immigration crisis
The fact is that the solution to this supposed “crisis” is incredibly simple.
If the government really wanted to stop the Channel crossings, literally all they’d have to open safe and legal routes for all asylum seekers – or simply allow people apply for asylum from outside the UK. This would immediately end the need for asylum seekers to take such extraordinary risks to reach our shores, and it would also put the people smugglers out of business overnight.
But the government continually refuses to do so.
Why? Well it’s clearly not because of how much implementing such measures might cost!
Currently, the UK is spending around £2.5 billion a year in hotel bills to house asylum seekers awaiting their decisions – all because of a decade of unprecedented Tory mismanagement in the Home Office.
According to research by the Institute for Government, over the past 11 years the government has systemicatically increased bureaucracy and scrapped standards within the asylum decision-making process – changes which have resulted in plummeting productivity and an astonishing backlog of over 160,000 pending decisions; an 800% increase since 2011.
The UK currently employs 1,237 asylum decision makers. Yet, to employ 1,000 more for a whole year, it was cost the equivalent of 4 days’ hotel bills – at just £27.5m a year.
However, simply fixing the truly absurd productivity problem that the Home Office appears to have created would be an even cheaper fix!
The government’s failure to solve this apparent “crisis” isn’t through lack of implementing “solutions”, either. It’s just that all the “solutions” they’ve tried have been, strangely enough, been catastrophic – and intentionally divisive – failures.
Take for example their widely-derided scheme to send asylum seekers to be processed in Rwanda – a policy which has so far cost the taxpayer £140m, with precisely zero applications having been processed there.
Not only is the plan intentionally barbaric – dividing the public against eachother rather than focusing their ire on the government – it’s also ridiculously expensive, inefficient, and doomed to failure.
And now, in yet another attempted “solution”, Rishi Sunak has just unveiled new legislation which would simply ban Channel crossers from claiming asylum here – whilst at the same time opening absolutely no alternative safe and legal routes – in direct contravention of international law and the 1951 Refugee Convention, of which the UK is a signatory.
As a result, surprise surprise, the impending legislation is sure to create yet more arguments among ordinary people, and even bigger legal problems for the government – hence more division, more delay, and an even bigger problem at the end of it!
But, as is surely now becoming clear to you, that is the entire point.
Why the government manufactured the immigration crisis
So, you’re probably asking yourself why on earth would any government intentionally screw something so important up – and waste a whole bunch of public money in the process?!
Well firstly, as has been emphasised quite a lot previously, the government is intentionally trying to cause division amongst the public.
Why? Well, people are justifiable furious at the state of our country right now.
The NHS is broken: people can’t get a GP appointment, waiting lists are at unprecedented levels, ambulance wait times are counted in days rather than minutes, and people are literally dying in corridors because there simply aren’t enough staff to cope.
Then there’s the Cost of Living crisis, with the price of everything – such as food, energy, transport and other essentials – going through the roof, whilst Liz Truss’s astonishingly stupid mini budget caused interest rates to soar and left the Tories’ very own core voter base – middle-aged homeowners – facing rocketing mortgage costs.
Elsewhere, the police are so underfunded and understaffed that they essentially don’t investigate crimes anymore, teachers are having to buy school supplies out of the own pockets and bring in food for malnourished kids – all whilst corruption and cronyism run rampant amongst the ruling class.
Meanwhile, poverty is soaring, rough sleeping is through the roof, and foodbank usage has become the norm – all whilst wages are falling and welfare is being cut.
And that’s just for starters.
Yet, despite all these catastrophic systemic failures – which have so obviously been caused by the government and their own actions – what are the Establishment, in both the media and the ruling class, trying to get us arguing about?
Immigration.
It’s all a massive con. It’s all a huge distraction. And it’s being perpetrated purely so the ruling class can stay on their gravy train and continue to line their pockets – with absolutely no concern for the fact that their actions are burning our country to the ground.
Yet, for as long as we keep falling for it, for as long as we keep arguing amongst ourselves about it, and for as long as we fail to realise that we all have far more in common with any refugee than we do with any Tory MP, the longer that we – and our country – will continue to suffer.
The only people to blame for this “crisis” are those who make the decisions.
It’s time we finally started blaming the powerful, not the powerless.
