The Conservative Party-led British government’s long track record of failure on immigration is continuing, according to recent statistics, with enforced removals of foreign nationals down 51 per cent compared to 2019.
New official government statistics comparing the year to September 2022 to 2019 — because 2020 and much of 2021 were aberrant due to the impact of the Wuhan virus pandemic and associated state control measures — show enforced return deportations of foreign nationals fell from the already low figure of 7,198 to a mere 3,531, despite visa overstaying and so-called “clandestine” migration by small boat passengers and vehicle stowaways, for example, both being in the tens of thousands.
In contrast, Cyprus, a Mediterranean island nation in the European Union with a far smaller population than the United Kingdom, managed to deport approaching twice as many migrants, representing around 70 per cent of the annual influx.
“Enforced returns have been declining since the peak in 2012,” the government admitted in an official release accompanying the new figures, emphasising that “[n]umbers have increased to over 1,000 during July to September 2022” but conceding that “this is still below the pre-pandemic levels in 2019 (which saw around 1,800 returns per quarter).”
Returns of so-called Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) — i.e. foreign criminals — specifically are also down by double digits compared to 2019, seeing a 42 per cent from 5,128 to 2,958.
To put this in context, Breitbart London has obtained figures from London’s Metropolitan Police force showing that they alone arrested foreign nationals 38,701 times in 2022.
The figures may prove embarrassing for the Rishi Sunak-led Conservative (Tory) Party — though similarly embarrassing revelations have never inspired them to change course before — given they have long sold themselves to their voters as the party of stronger borders and robust action against illegal immigrants and foreign criminals.
This rhetoric was particularly prominent during and after the EU referendum — most Tory MPs opposed Brexit, but Prime Minister Sunak was a Leaver — as a result of Boris Johnson’s “take back control” narrative on the campaign trail.
The reality is that the Tories under both their first post-Brexit leader, Theresa May, and later Johnson himself did nothing to bring down immigration — indeed, party grandees admitted that they never intended to keep their election promises to do so — and in fact they have legalised an annual influx higher than at any time in history.
Sunak recently indicated to the Confederation of British Industry, or CBI, which represents large vested interests hungry for cheap, pre-trined foreign workers, that he believes he can continue getting away with this provided he can be seen to be doing something about illegal immigration — but that also remains out of control, particularly in the English Channel, and the new poor deportation figures drive home the fact that the Tories seem incapable of dealing with the crisis even after the fact.
Indeed, their latest scheme to clear the overgrown asylum backlog involves processing thousands of applications from five so-called high grant-rate countries without even interviewing them — despite the fact almost 1,500 nationals of those countries were arrested by the Met alone in 2022, for crimes including murder and rape — in a move one writer likened to clearing one’s work backlog by “putting it in the bin”.
A majority or plurality of voters for all of Great Britain’s major political parties — not just the Conservatives and Labour but also the likes of the far-left Greens and the Scottish and Welsh left-separatist parties — believe immigration is “too high”, but it seems unlikely that anything short of a shock election victory by the Richard Tice-led Reform Party, formerly Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, would result in a Parliament interested in reflecting its voters’ views on the subject.
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