Britain faces the prospect of a record-smashing 100,000 illegall boat migrants landing in 2022, on top of other illegal entrants, visa overstayers, genuine refugees from Ukraine, and increasing legal non-EU immigration.
Tony Smith, former Director-General of UK Border Force — and, he predicts, likely the last borders chief to have risen up through the ranks — said during a Policy Exchange think tank panel discussing his recent book on his decades-long career that there “comes a point where we need to get a grip of our border and stop the boats.”
That has proven difficult, he explained, because the French government and the European Union have refused to “play ball” on taking back migrants, leading to an increasingly out of control and sometimes deadly crisis.
“The numbers are going up, a fourfold increase already this year – 28,500 last year,” Mr Smith told The Daily Mail at the event, warning: “That’s going to be over 100,000 this year just by migrant boats alone.”
Smith also stated the obvious that migrants coming to Britain from France, contrary to the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury, have not “got a fear of persecution in France; they’re not fleeing a war in France” and that the fundamental problem of the Channel crisis is one of organised crime facilitating people-smuggling between safe countries.
BoJo Braces for Clash with ‘Army of Politically Motivated Lawyers’ Over Migrant Relocations https://t.co/fmrO6AlCiC
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 16, 2022
Discussing “huge community tensions” during his time in border enforcement, Smith further revealed that”some senior police officers told me that there were no-go areas” where arrests of people residing in the country illegally “can’t happen” for fear of inflaming locals — contrary to the claims of many in law enforcement and the political and media class who wish to deny that so-called no-go zones exist.
He also suggested that, in his view, Border Force officials today are poorly trained, and highlighted some of the fundamental issues with fighting illegal immigration within a British framework that does not even comprehensively log entry and exit at the individual level.
While the boats crisis, as is now typical in British immigration discourse, occupied most of the attention of Smith and questioners at the panel, is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of illegal immigration, with thousands more illegally migrating by stowing away in cars and heavy goods vehicles and tens of thousands more resorting to the tried and true method of overstaying on otherwise legitimate short-term visas.
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