A poll has found that 62 per cent of the British public believe that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is performing “badly” in its handling of immigration, as illegal boat migrants in the English Channel soar to record levels.
The YouGov poll found that just 23 per cent of Britons think that the Conservative Party government is performing “well” on the issue of migration. The survey also showed that the percentage of people who are critical of the government’s handling of immigration has jumped from 44 per cent in March to 62 per cent this month.
Responding to the polling data, the chairman of the London-based immigration pressure group Migration Watch UK, Alp Mehmet, told Breitbart London: “The proposed weakening of the system by removing the cap on workers, the handing of control to employers, the open invitation to millions of Hong Kongers and the clear helplessness in dealing with illegality in the Channel have doubtless all contributed to the public’s perception.”
“And this despite the traditional media all but washing their hands of immigration, an issue still of massive importance to Brits,” Mr Mehmet added.
In the 2019 Conservative manifesto, Boris Johnson pledged to reduce the number of migrants coming to the country through the introduction of an Australian-style points-based system for immigration. However, the system proposed by Johnson government would not set a cap on the number of migrants, which critics claim could serve to increase immigration rather than decrease it.
Three previous manifestos from the Conservative Party pledged to reduce migration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands”. These promises were left unfulfilled and Johnson has now dropped the target.
In 2017, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, admitted that the Tory governments never actually intended on fulfilling their pledges to the public to cut migration.
In a Breitbart London exclusive video, Mr Mehmet said that “the Tories have frankly run scared of their previous commitments and promises that they would reduce immigration. ‘Get it down to tens of thousands’ they said, which frankly was not a bad objective.”
“They couldn’t do it, largely because they were afraid,” he added.
In June, a report from the National Audit Office (NAO) admitted that the Home Office does not have a clear understanding of the number of illegal immigrants residing in the United Kingdom.
The report noted that the Home Office has abandoned attempting to determine the number of illegals in the country, opting instead to estimate the figure through the number of interactions with immigration officials, which the government says is between 240,000 to 320,000 per year.
Independent research conducted by the Pew Research Center estimated that the number of illegal migrants living in the UK could be as high as 1,200,000, compared to the estimated 430,000 claimed by the government in 2005.
In response to the report, Meg Hillier of the Public Accounts Committee said: “The Home Office has no idea how many people are in the country illegally and doesn’t seem interested in finding out. It can’t demonstrate that its actions to control illegal immigration are working as intended, and doesn’t understand how different aspects of its work fit together.”
Compounding the issue, the Home Office has also failed to meaningfully deport illegal immigrants, with just 155 migrants deported between January of 2018 and May of this year.
On Saturday, the Home Office announced the arrest of 11 people believed to be involved in a cross-Channel people-smuggling gang. The arrests followed the creation of a Franco-British Operational Research Unit to tackle the issue, which Home Secretary Priti Patel heralded as a step forward in cooperation between the two countries.
There has still been no agreement reached on returning migrants intercepted mid-Channel to France, a safe, first world country, where, by law, asylum seekers and refugees should remain.
So far this year, there have been at least 3,285 migrants recorded to have reached British shores, travelling on small rubber boats across the English Channel from France. The number has already set a record for yearly illegal immigration and has nearly doubled the number of illegal migrants recorded in the entire year of 2019, which was 1,890.
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