Will the relentlessly pro-migration crowd finally accept that this situation is unfair, unsustainable and unreasonable?
A migrant can see what our Home Office can’t (Image: Getty)
A relentless myth about the migration crisis gripping Britain has endured no matter how ridiculous the situation on our southern shores shows itself to be. That myth – an article of faith on the Left – is that newcomers who enter this country illegally are asylum seekers, not economic migrants, who deserve whatever largesse they receive from the taxpayer once they have arrived here illegally. It doesn’t matter how many small boats packed with young men cross the Channel. It doesn’t matter that after leaving a safe country some chuck their passports into the sea so that we can’t verify whether they have reasonable grounds to enter the UK. It doesn’t matter the women and children supposedly so central to the small boats crisis are often notably absent from intakes on the Kent coast. The myth persists that we owe these people.
This is partly how we’ve ended up spending more than £383million on accommodation for migrants since 2019 and why we’ve seen more than 50,000 arrivals on small boats since Labour came to power. And this week a BBC investigation found yet more ridiculous spending splurges that befit the myth that Britain is required to splash huge amounts of cash on migrants. So absurd were its findings, that one migrant described the situation as “crazy”.
The man in question, Kadir, was told to take a 250-mile taxi ride to a doctor for a knee problem. His driver told him it would cost the taxpayer £600.
If Kadir can see how stupid this is, and he evidently can, given he questioned why the Home Office couldn’t just pay for a cheaper train ticket, then why can’t our Government?
And will anybody be so infantilising of newcomers to suggest that Kadir is the only one of them who can see this?
Whether incompetence, the ineptitudes of vast bureaucracy, or the myth that migrants need and deserve this level of spending are to blame, this confirms that newcomers can see what many British people can too – there is absolutely no need for things to be this way.
The age-old enemy of the belief that migration numbers are too high is the assertion that thinking so must be motivated by racial bigotry.
It’s easy to see where this comes from – by looking back to vile racist outbursts in response to black and Asian immigration to post-war Britain.
But the point at which it became necessary to concede that there are other types of concern regarding immigration is long past.
When we reach the unprecedented levels of legal and illegal migration that recent years have delivered, and people seem angry, then there’s a good chance that numbers are a big part of the conversation.
When you can arrive in Britain by a known illegal route after paying scumbags to get you there, it’s reasonable to conclude that security, fairplay and the very notion of having a border are on Britons’ minds.
And when the authorities are using our money to pay for a £600 taxi journey on top of the benefits and accommodation that newcomers already receive, then it’s possible, just possible, that Brits would find themselves exercised no matter the colour of the recipient’s skin.
Kadir is right. This is crazy. His words suggest a sympathy with the taxpayer. A sympathy that is apparently too much to expect from the very people elected to do their best for the British people.
