The official petition against Boris Johnson’s proposed amnesty for illegal migrants who have been in the country for some years has broken the 10,000 signature threshold in a few days, meaning the Government will respond to it.
Boris Johnson pushed for an amnesty for illegal migrants who have been in the United Kingdom for 15, sometimes only 12 years in his former roles as both Mayor of London and Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, and indicated he was still in favour of the scheme during his first parliamentary question and answer session as Prime Minister.
“As London Mayor, the Prime Minister courted popularity with pledging an amnesty for illegal immigrants… Now that he is a position to do something about [this], is he a man of his word?” Labour’s Rupa Huq demanded.
“[F]or the amnesty on illegal immigrants, it is absolutely true that I have raised it several times since I was in Government,” Johnson replied.
“I think that our arrangements, in theoretically being committed to the expulsion of perhaps half a million people who do not have the correct papers, and who may have been living and working here for many, many years without being involved in any criminal activity at all — I think that legal position is anomalous” he continued, leaving the question of how someone could enter the country illegally and live by crime or work in the black economy “without any criminal activity at all” unaddressed.
“I do think — I will answer the hon. Lady directly — that we need to look at our arrangements for people who have lived and worked here for a long time, unable to enter the economy and to participate properly or pay taxes, without documents. We should look at it… we should look at the economic advantages and disadvantages of going ahead with the policy that she described, and on which I think she and I share a view.”
While the Prime Minister stressed the importance of the “enter the economy and… pay taxes”, the evidence suggests that the impact of regularising half a million illegal migrants who have been in the country for several years, allowing them to access to welfare and social housing, would far outweigh any revenue generated — an impact which would likely be compounded by chain migration, as the newly legal residents exercised their rights to bring in spouses and family members.
Critics of the policy have also pointed out that the authorities would struggle to ascertain whether illegal migrants coming forward under an amnesty scheme had really been in the country for 12-15 years, and that there could be far more of them than estimated 500,000 currently under discussion in the press.
Migration Watch UK, the United Kingdom’s leading migration-sceptic think tank and pressure group, had therefore prepared a petition against such an amnesty in advance of Johnson’s elevation to the office of Prime Minister, in anticipation of his putting it on the agenda after a decade of rejection under previous Tory leaders.
“Amnesties are manna for traffickers, rewarding illegality,” the petition, in the name of Migration Watch chairman Alp Mehmet — himself a legal migrant from Cyprus — begins, adding that “The experience of Italy and Spain suggests that they encourage more illegals.”
This has also been the experience in the United States, according to American migration-sceptic groups like NumbersUSA, which notes that multiple illegal migrant amnesties have tended not to wipe the slate clean, as many amnesty proponents suggest, but instead encouraged more illegal migration, with new illegals believing that they, too, will eventually be regularised if they remain below the radar for long enough.
Should the Mehmet’s petition against the proposed amnesty break 100,000 signatures, it will not only receive a Government response, but will also be considered for a parliamentary debate.
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