With figures showing Boris Johnson’s government has deported zero Channel boat migrants in 2021, two-thirds of local government authorities are refusing to further burden themselves by hosting Afghans evacuees.
Of 333 councils in England, only a third have offered up accommodation for thousands of Afghans airlifted out of Kabul in August, with a Telegraph report citing “concerns over the impact on local needs for affordable social housing and school places” for the reluctance of the remainder.
Victoria Atkins, a Minister of State at the Priti Patel-led Home Office — the government department roughly responsibly for borders, policing, and national security — conceded that local Britons were already struggling with social housing shortages when asked it Afghans would “skip the housing list” ahead of locals who have been stuck on “waiting list[s] for some years”.
“We’ve got to do this in a way that’s fair to British people,” she said, with the vagueness characteristic of the Johnson administration on all issues related to the negative impacts of immigration.
Many local communities are already struggling to accommodate the thousands of sometimes violent migrants who have entered Britain by boat in recent years, with reports on August 31st indicating that not one such illegal entrant has been removed from the country this year, despite France and the Low Countries from which they depart being safe, first world EU member-states.
France Wants Migration Deal – So They Can Send More Asylum Seekers to Britain https://t.co/kaVPASUpV8
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) August 27, 2021
Despite tougher and tougher talk from the Home Office and the government at large ever since illegal Channnel crossings were first declared a “major incident” in 2018, enforced returns of illegal migrants of all stripes have now hit a record low, with other migrants including killers, sexual predators, and violent criminals seldom being removed either.
Indeed, the Johnson administration can boast just 2,420 people enforced returns in the year to March 2021, not even half the already historically low number removed the year before.
“If migrants motoring across the Channel in small boats know they can stay in the UK even when they have no legal right to do so, then they will keep on coming, and in greater numbers. That’s what is happening,” said Natalie Elphicke, the Tory MP for the English port city of Dover, which lies opposite Calais, France.
“If other countries aren’t playing their part in returns, we must make sure the boats don’t get here in the first place,” she added — although senior Tories including the Prime Minister and Home Secretary Priti Patel have so far been unwilling to countenance simply taking boat migrants back to France without France’s enthusiastic consent — which is not forthcoming.
Indeed, the deal Emmanuel Macron’s government want is one that would allow them to send more migrants on to Britain, and Britain’s Border Force, far from turning boats back, has at times sought permission to enter French waters to pick migrants up and bring them to England faster.
The cost of looking after migrants who illegally entered our country is now £1.4bn. Enough is enough.
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) August 31, 2021
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