The illegal boat migrant crisis is driving the criminal underworld of Britain, with aliens being recruited from asylum seeker hotels by organised gangs, a police chief has admitted.
Greater Manchester’s chief constable Stephen Watson said that people smuggling and the illegal migrant crisis are feeling the £8.6 billion black market counterfeit goods trade in Britain, which is also linked to money laundering operations as well as the dealing of drugs.
Watson, who has been one of the leading voices against wokism within the ranks of British police forces, established Operation Vulcan to investigate criminal gangs in his city. The operation has identified 33 organised crime groups in the city, which by themselves account for more than half of the counterfeit goods trade in the whole country.
The police chief constable said that much of the manpower is supplied by illegal migrants, who are recruited by criminal gangs. Previous reports have indicated that many illegals enter into slave pacts with people-smuggling groups to enter into the black market in Britain in exchange for passage across the English Channel from France.
“We have to be clear that there are vulnerable people being rendered more vulnerable but there are also some pretty shady characters who are on the make in the UK and we need to root them out and boot them out,” Mr Watson told The Telegraph.
“The poor souls who are being exploited become cannon fodder to organised crime groups. They become a source of labour. They become a totally beholden, disempowered group of people who very quickly travel the spectrum from being victims and exploited through to exploiters, and people who create victims of others.
“The bottom line is, even if you have a set of circumstances that make more legitimate your claim for asylum in the UK, these people are being exploited to the point that they are hardly likely to develop into the sort of mature, decent, law-abiding sort of people who will integrate and contribute to our society.
“They are likely to become damaged people and hardened criminals and frankly, they will end up in a position where far from contributing, they will be a net burden on the state for the rest of their natural lives. There are so many reasons to sort this out.”
The head of Operation Vulcan, Detective Superintendent Neil Blackwood said that police are encountering people from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria working on the street corners for criminal gangs for as little as £10 to £20 per day.
“They are spotters. They will stand outside the shop and get customers to come in. If police come, then they close the shutters or their role may be to deal drugs,” DS Blackwood said.
The admission that illegal migrants are playing a pivotal role in the criminal underworld of the country came as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his government’s plan to finally crack down on the trade, which has seen over 44,000 illegals cross the English Channel since the start of the year.
A key component of Sunak’s plan focuses on the swift removal of Albanian migrants. Despite being considered a safe country from which there is little to no justification to apply for asylum from, Albanians have made up approximately one-third of all illegal boat arrivals this year.
The vast majority of those were young, military-age males. To put in context the scale of the illegal migration of young men from the country, Clandestine Channel Threat Commander Dan O’Mahoney estimated that 2 per cent of the entire male population between the age of 20-40 arrived in Britain illegally this year.
This has led to concerns about young men joining already-established Albanian gangs in the country. Indeed, even the BBC has highlighted that drug gangs from Albania are actively using the migrant camps in France as recruitment hubs, offering to pay for their way to the UK in exchange for agreeing to work in underground criminal networks in Britain. Currently, Albanians represent the largest foreign ethnic minority group in UK prisons.
In response to the comments from the police, a Home Office spokesman said: “It’s clear that in some cases there are strong links between organised criminal gangs and illegal migrants. That’s why this government is working on options to break the people traffickers’ business model and ensure we stem the flow of small boats crossing the Channel.”
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