Prime Minister Rishi Sunak plans to clear the ever-growing backlog of asylum applications by simply granting what amounts to an amnesty to migrants from a number of African and Middle Eastern countries, reports suggest.
In order to tackle Britain’s growing backlog of asylum claims, which was already up over 300 per cent to around 110,000 in March and is now even higher at around 150,000, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is plotting with immigration minister Robert Jenrick to simply rubber stamp all claimants from high “grant rates” countries such as Afghanistan and Syria after basic identity and security checks, according to The Times.
According to Matt Dathan, one of the Times journalists who broke the story, the policy “sounds like an amnesty” — although the Home Office, which is notorious for trying to dress up its repeated failures on border control in tough language, insisted “it won’t go that far”.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who is far more hawkish on immigration than most government ministers, is said to have been “sidelined” by the globalist Prime Minister who has “completely taken control of the policy”.
“[The Prime Minister has] got teams of Home Office officials working directly to him and Suella has been sidelined,” a source told The Times, the United Kingdom’s de facto newspaper of record.
“It’s basically him and [Robert] Jenrick running the policy,” they added, referring to a junior minister at the Home Office theoretically subordinate to Braverman.
At least one minister within the government expressed concern that the policy would ultimately make Britain’s irregular migration crisis even worse, however, with a policy of fast-tracking migrants from certain countries — or at least claiming to be from certain countries — without the usual follow-up interviews with and assessments by officials serving as a “pull factor”.
As things stand, grant rates for asylum applications from Afghanistan, Syria, and Eritrea — with a combined population of around 65 million — are an astonishing 98 per cent, while grant rates for Sudan are a still very high 87 per cent and grant rates for Iran are 82 per cent.
While some of the countries are undoubtedly “war-torn”, as The Times puts it, migrants from them who reach Britain via France were clearly already well out of danger, and not thoroughly vetting migrants from Afghanistan and Syria, in particular, could prove highly dangerous to national security, given they could turn out to be affiliated with Islamist organisation such as the Islamic State, the al-Nusra Front (Jabhat Fatah al-Sham), or the Taliban.
It is likely that the government regards clearing the backlog as a matter of urgency due to revelations in October that only four per cent of boat migrants who arrived in 2021 had had their claims processed — with 85 per cent having those claims accepted — although immigration sceptics will wonder whether reducing the backlog at the cost of controlling and properly vetting migration is not putting the cart before the horse.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.