EU Referendum


Immigration: wither the EU "incompetence directive"?


30/10/2014



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The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has made serious news through yesterday and the day previously with its report, "Reforming the UK border and immigration system". Covered by the usual suspects in the media, such as the Guardian, it tells us of waste and poor management within Britain's immigration system.

Not least, failed IT systems have cost up to £1bn, officials can't find 50,000 rejected asylum seekers and 11,000 asylum seekers have been waiting for at least seven years to hear whether they can stay. Officials have still not resolved 29,000 asylum applications dating back to at least 2007.

Alongside the media though, the report is prominently flagged up on the UKIP website, illustrating the party's concern about immigration – albeit somewhat distant from the EU issue.

The point, of course, is that unless someone can point me to the "EU Directive on handling immigration affairs with staggering incompetence", there is no direct (or even indirect) link between our EU membership and the tales of chaos that have unfolded. This is entirely a homemade disaster.

As such, one struggles to see why UKIP is so interested in this particular report. It has neither policies nor plans to deal with such incompetence, and has never demonstrated any insight into public policy that might indicate that the party is capable of fixing problems that have eluded several administrations.

Less visible though has been UKIP's response to the government's new immigration strategy of "control by drowning" – one of the outraged responses to the UK refusal to support the search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean, picking up migrants making a dash for Europe in leaky boats.

This, according to Suzanne Moore in the Guardian is the "politics of denial" which is feeding a "growing inhumanity". This is after Theresa May's remarks about saving the lives of drowning immigrants was a "pull factor" in illegal immigration.

Sadly, that is indeed the case, as we hear of people traffickers who dump refugees in the sea in Italian territorial waters, and then call the coastguard to tell them of the location.

It is germane to ask how many migrants must be allowed to die at sea before the message gets through to desperate people that this is not a successful way of entering Europe, but as to the alternatives, UKIP so far has been silent.

If by whatever means, these migrants manage to land on mainland Europe, it is the receiving countries that must bear the expense and disturbance of dealing with them.

In Italy, we are told, they are given food and water, allowed to wash and sent on their way. "I was told that I could go anywhere I liked when I landed in Italy", said one migrant. "There weren't any checks; they know we don't want to stay in Italy as there is no work there and we don't speak the language so they just tell us to get on our way".

Some travel by train up to France, others by truck. None experienced problems or were told to turn around and go back. But by no means all are headed for the UK. By far the majority gravitate to Germany, where 76,000 asylum application were recorded in 2013. France took 61,000 and Sweden 45,000.

Of those who gravitated to Calais, only a relatively modest 22,000 made their way to the UK in 2013, aided as we now learn, by organised gangs of people traffickers.

But, with over 300,000 illegal immigrants landing in Europe last year, and significantly more expected to land this year, is it any wonder that the front-line countries such as Greece and Italy pass the buck, and send the migrants on their ways? They get little help from the rest of Europe, yet cannot afford to be the dumping grounds for the rest of the continent.

When the immigrants finally arrive in the UK, however, the simplistic Steven Woolfe, UKIP's immigration spokesman, has an easy answer. "It comes down to someone having the guts to say to these people, 'sorry, you're going home'", he says.

But these migrants have already destroyed their papers and are effectively stateless. France does not want them back, and if the individuals could be prevailed upon to admit their counties of origin, those countries mostly will not accept them back without papers proving who they are.

Thus, is not as simple as sending them home, which means they end up occupying a legal no-man's land, about which the Public Accounts Committee is now complaining. But with no leadership from the politicians, officials are being asked to do the impossible, leaving the problem to accumulate over the years.

None of this, though, is specifically related to EU membership. Leaving the EU will not stop migrants collecting at Calais and taking their chances of getting to the UK. And as regards immigrants to the UK generally, it is still the case that the majority come from outside the EU.

In fact, Britain admits almost three times more migrants from outside the EU than any other member state. Nearly 2.4 million resident permits were issued by EU countries last year, 30.7 percent of them to people heading for Britain. A total of 724,200 people from outside the EU were given permission to remain in the UK, a 15 percent rise on the previous year.

Even when illegal immigrants are caught out, though, and the employers fined, the fines are not collected, with the government thus failing to create a "hostile environment" for illegal workers.

Then, once resident in the UK, they are allowed to aggregate in squalid, over-crowded housing, with the local authorities rarely taking action, thereby creating conditions where immigrants, willing (or forced) to tolerate substandard conditions, are able to undercut the settled population, often then being paid – illegally – less than the minimum wage.

When proceedings against those responsible for sham marriages are also collapsing as a result of Home Office blunders, what price shallow fools such as Conservative MP Nick Boles jumping on the UKIP bandwagon, saying that Britain will never be able to "entirely" control its borders while it stays in the European Union?

Short of repealing that mythical EU "incompetence directive", leaving the EU is not going to make much of a dent in the problem. As with so many other issues, the UK does not need the EU to assist it in creating its own policy train-wrecks. It is quite capable of doing that unaided.

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