ASYLUM CORRUPTION

The recent furore about solicitors charging up to £10,000 to invent fake asylum claims and falsify evidence for their clients is being treated as something new. It is not.

One solicitor was so wealthy that he had property worth many millions, drove a BMW and had sent his son to Eton. Clearly, he had not acquired all this vast wealth and standard of living overnight. Another solicitor wanted a payment in cash in return for falsifying a claim. Another offered to help the claimant find a wife ‘so you will be able to stay in Britain’.

After Rishi Sunak criticised the criminality, a spokesman for the Bar Council, which represents barristers, accused the prime minister of ‘playing politics with the legal profession’. Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, promised a crackdown.

However, the fact is that the whole asylum system is mired in criminality. That the legal profession is itself involved has been common knowledge for years.

In The Hegemony of Political Correctness: and the rise of the woke-Right, I wrote:

“In November 2018, a report from David Bolt, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, found ports were ‘not secured by any stretch of the imagination’. Border guards were not routinely checking vehicles for illegal immigrants. In September 2019, the government announced foreign students would be allowed to work in Britain for two years after graduation. The ultimate aim was to increase the number of foreign students by a third to 600,000 per year. Previously, students could only stay on for four months while they looked for a job, whereupon they could apply for a working visa. In December 2019, in giving judgement in a case, Mr Justice Jay in the High Court, ruled that fees of around £1,000 to register the children of foreign nationals for British citizenship were unlawful. The judge declared the Home Office ‘failed to have regard to the best interests’ of applicants and the fees were ‘simply unaffordable’ for many. The judge further declared the fees made children ‘alienated, excluded, isolated’. Amnesty International UK assisted in the court application.

In January 2019, Home Office figures in a Civitas report revealed that between 2010 and 2016 80,813 people failed in their applications for asylum, yet only 29,659 (36 per cent) were deported. The report writer, David Wood, was in charge of immigration enforcement at the Home Office until 2015. He said:

‘Once migrants reach the UK they are usually here to stay whether they have a valid claim to be here or not. This means that these numbers add to an ever-growing number of migrants in the country who have no lawful entitlement to be here. Furthermore, the failure to deal with this situation provides an incentive to further attempts to come to the UK by people who have no right to be here.’

In 2018, only 5,316 failed asylum seekers were deported, compared to 18,220 in 2016 when Labour was in office, and 10,394 when the Coalition government came to power in 2010.

In October 2018, James Hanratty, an immigration judge, said at the Henley Literary Festival:

‘I had a case where a lady from Somalia came before me and her story was that she had found her husband on the doorstep of their house with his throat cut by the local warlord – so she had to flee to England. The Home Office barrister asked her to explain how this happened. He then said there seems to be a problem here as your husband came over to England 18 months ago and claimed asylum and you’re saying he’s dead on the doorstep in Mogadishu.

There was a stunned silence but she had no answer and shouted at me. Then I found out that the solicitors acted for both the husband and for her, and so they knew that the statement they had prepared for her was rubbish.

I reported it and the regulator unbelievably took no action saying that there was no damage to the public and “we’re very busy”. This was five years ago.’

Hanratty complained that smaller law firms involved in immigration cases tended to close down and then recommence under a different name when threatened with investigation. The judge complained the system was overwhelmed with crooked lawyers and the Solicitors Regulation Authority was doing nothing.

That the whole immigration system was riven with criminality makes the failure to control the borders more catastrophic.”