The Prime Minister of Albania has said Britain should look to its own “failed policies on borders and on crime” for the root cause of the Channel boat migrants crisis, instead of “scapegoating” his countrymen in particular.
“It’s not about one person. It’s about the climate that has been created, and it’s about finding scapegoats and blaming others,” said Prime Minister Edi Rama in response to the BBC asking him for his thoughts on Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s use of the word “invasion” to describe the ongoing Channel influx.
“It’s not about Albanians or aliens or gangsters, but it’s about failed policies on borders and on crime,” he said, not entirely without justification, given the British government has in recent years accepted dubious asylum claims at far higher rates than comparable European Union government — in the case of Albanians, in particular, Britain has in recent years accepted 52 per cent of asylum claims, while France accepted only 8 per cent, and Germany and Sweden, despite their soft touch reputation, accepted zero.
Similarly, French president Emmanuel Macron has previously said that Britain should accept more “responsibility” for the Channel crisis due to its failure to “limit its economic attractiveness” to migrants, highlighting in particular the thriving black economy that migrants who cross the Channel are able to profit from.
Rama was noticeably tetchy in much of the rest of his BBC interview, intimating that the Britsh government’s rhetoric on Albanian illegal immigrants was not only lacking in substance but, in his view, discriminatory.
“This kind of language is not a policy, is not a programme, is not a vision. [It] is nothing but fuelling xenophobia and targeting, singling out a community,” he said of the “invasion” remarks.
“I admire everything that Britain represents. But I really am disgusted about this kind of politics that at the end is doomed to fail,” he added.
Britain’s so-called Clandestine Channel Threats Commander recently told Parliament that up to two percent of the “entire adult male population” of the Muslim-majority Balkan country have landed in the United Kingdom by boat, later clarifying that this figure referred to the segment of the Albanian population aged between 20 and 40.