As Trump wins in America and Europe tilts to the right, the British government is beginning to resemble the last Japanese holdout after World War II.

The rest of the world has realized that many of the asylum seekers arriving in the West look much more like economic migrants than genuine attempts to flee war and peril; Sir Keir Starmer, meanwhile, continues to speak hackneyed phrases about “crushing the gangs”.

Sir Keir’s big speech on the importance of tackling the problem was backed by extra funding of around £75 million for his Border Security Command; around 1.6% of what we spend supporting asylum seekers in the UK, or just under four hours of NHS spending.

This is not a serious commitment, because breaking up gangs is not a serious policy; it’s a slogan.

It’s no wonder people at the Home Office are skeptical about this: does the Prime Minister really think we’re going to disrupt networks operating in uncooperative countries across a continent with a budget of £150 million over two years and a hundred people in an office near Whitehall?

Will his pursuit really be so ruthlessly effective that gangs charging thousands for a place on a boat disband without replacement? Or is the idea more that a few announcements simply distract the government’s attention for a few days?

Gangs are not the cause of the problem, they are the catalysts. The fundamental question is The UK’s failure to address the factors which make the country so attractive for irregular migration.

The economic aspects of this situation are not difficult to analyze. People come from areas where life is difficult to places where life is easier. The UK accommodates asylum seekers in hotels, has a large and flexible labor market, a thriving underground economy and makes little effort to deport those who do not have the right to stay. stay here.

The result is a flow of people passing through safe and prosperous countries in Europe for a chance to claim asylum in Britain.

And why not? If you sit in France considering a trip across the English Channelyou are probably well aware of two things.

The first is that if you throw away your papers and claim to be persecuted, you have an excellent chance of obtaining asylum and the right to stay and work. In 2023, France accepted 31% of requests received before appeal. Britain accepted 67%, granting 63,010 asylum applications – 21,000 more than France, with 38,000 fewer applications.

No EU country with more than 20,000 applications in total had a higher acceptance rate than Britain. Better still, while Labor is keen to catch up, the direction appears to be towards automatically approving applications in order to empty asylum seeker hotels.

The second thing you’ll be aware of is that if your application fails, you can probably stay anyway.

The UK is believed to be home to Europe’s largest population of illegal migrants, with up to 745,000 people living here without permission. On the contrary, this figure is probably a significant underestimate: it is seven years old and may have been low at the time; the Pew Research Center provided an estimate of up to 1.2 million that same year. Additionally, only 41% of people refused asylum between 2010 and 2020 had been deported from the UK by 2022.

Better yet, your chances of being caught working illegally are slim; we carry out around 11 illegal labor monitoring visits per day across the country, while an old estimate is between 190,000 and 240,000 companies employing illegal migrants.

Even if we had a list of doors to knock on, it would take us over 57 years to visit them all at the current rate. For every £1 we spend on immigration control, we spend £9 supporting and welcoming asylum seekers.

If Starmer and his colleagues are serious about destroying the gangs, they should destroy their revenue model. The best way to do this is to take a leaf out of Trump’s book and engage in a policy of mass deportation.

If you live here illegally or cross the Channel on a small boat, you end up on a flight back or to the third country that will take you.

The long-term benefits could be significant. The Office for Budget Responsibility has calculated that low-skilled migrants arriving for work present a net cost to the taxpayer of £150,000 at age 65, £500,000 at age 80 and more than a million £ to 100 years.

Asylum seekers have no recourse to public funds, although they are still housed by the taxpayer, have full access to state-funded healthcare, financial assistance for their travel costs, livelihood and enjoy full rights to education services. However, once an application is accepted, entitlement to public funds follows, along with all expenses.

Meanwhile, people who initially came to Britain to seek asylum are far less likely to be employed than their British peers – with an employment rate of 51% compared to 73% – and earn 55% less per year. week, while reporting significantly higher rates of long-term health problems. .

In other words, we have a particularly well-placed cohort of people, at the intersection of low tax advantage and high fiscal cost, crossing the Channel in significant numbers. The University of Amsterdam, for example, has estimated that asylum seekers in the Netherlands ultimately cost the state £300,000 over their lifetime. Some will be real refugees and deserve our support.

But even if it costs £100,000 for a Channel migrant to catch their flight home before they retire, it would be well worth deporting those who game the system.

This may not be easy. The entire edifice of human rights law is essentially structured to take control away from politicians and ensure that the flow of people can continue to flow – see for example the recent court ruling by Giorgia Meloni. setback on its migratory center in Albania.

But the status quo is clearly intolerable. The desire to reform a broken system designed to confront the world as it was half a century ago is growing.

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