There are four main ways in which a person can become an illegal immigrant: by entering the country undetected in a clandestine way, such as being smuggled in on a lorry or small boat; by entering the country legally, either for a short visit or for work, study or family reasons, and then subsequently staying on after permission to remain here has expired or been denied; by failing to leave the country after a claim asylum has been rejected and/or an appeal has been dismissed and being born to illegal immigrants.
In September 2018, we looked at the scale of illegal immigration and found that a net 70,000 per year were being added to the illegal population of the UK; here is the briefing paper.
I mention this paper and will be returning to it, because at that point in 2018, only a handful of migrants had made their way here illegally in flimsy dinghies. The small boats only started in October 2018. By year’s end, some 299 had crossed.
On 28 December 2018, the Home Secretary (Sajid Javid) declared the increasing number of boats and migrants crossing the English Channel illegally a “major incident”. I wonder how he would have characterised the 2024 figure of 36,816 – a 25 per cent increase from 2023?
I said then that without firm action and lax handling of those arriving, numbers would increase. And so they did.
Why? Well, migrants making their way here illegally were being allowed to stay. They were granted asylum or given leave to remain on humanitarian grounds. Migrants and those being trafficked quickly realised that it was much easier to secure asylum or leave to stay in the UK than it was elsewhere in Europe.
Those coming illegally across the Channel mostly destroyed documents that might identify them or reveal where they were from. They also arrived with concocted backstories (still do) that they and their traffickers knew would be difficult to disprove. They would claim to be younger than they were and presented themselves as unaccompanied minors. One especially egregious example of this mode of gaining entry was Lawangeen Abdulrahmzai, who murdered Tom Roberts – a young, aspiring marine – in March 2022.
There are four main ways to become an illegal immigrant in Britain and disappear forever, writes Alp Mehmet
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Abdulrahimzai, a lying, vicious, psychotic killer from Afghanistan, arrived at Poole from Cherbourg in December 2019 and applied for asylum as an unaccompanied minor, claiming to be 14 years of age. His application for asylum had been rejected by the Norwegians.
He had also already murdered two men in Serbia and was convicted of drug running in Italy. Despite this bloody record and looking a lot older than 14 – to their credit, Border Force officials questioned this – he was admitted. It was two years before something close to his true age was established. Why did he make his way to us? Well, he no doubt believed we were a soft touch. He was right.I use the example of this bloody killer as a way of showing how hamstrung our border officials are in dealing with such people once they have destroyed their passports, even when they are clearly lying through their teeth about who they are and where they are from.
Our asylum system, immigration courts – not to mention the European Court of Human Rights – are heavily weighted in favour of migrants. How many more Abdulrahimzais are there lurking in the shadows? In 2017, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI) reported that there was ‘little evidence that effective action was being taken to locate the vast bulk’ of 55,000 illegal immigrants – including failed asylum seekers, immigration offenders and foreign national offenders – of whom the Home Office had lost track.
As to the size of the illegal population of the UK, while it is impossible to be precise, we estimate this to be between 1.5 and two million people. We base this on what the respected US think-tank Pew Research Center (PRC) estimated it to have been in 2017 (800,000 to 1.2 million). PRC had themselves worked on the London School of Economics 2007 study that placed the number of “unauthorised immigrants residing in the country at between 417,000 and 863,000”. Earlier (2010) estimates by Migration Watch had put it at around one million.
So, 1.2 million, PRC’s upper estimate, seemed right. But back to the 2018 paper already mentioned. The estimate of net 70,000 being added to the illegal population each year would mean close to 500,000 additional illegal migrants here in the past seven years. However, we must bear in mind that fewer immigration offenders, failed asylum seekers and other migrants without a right to be here were being removed.
At the same time, higher numbers have been arriving. It is, therefore, not unreasonable to assume that 90-100,000 per annum have come in that time. In other words, potentially, up to a further three-quarters of a million could easily have been added to PRC’s 2017 upper estimate of 1.2 million “irregular” migrants here. Hence, our estimate is that there are 1.5 to two million people here without leave.
In reality, we can never be sure of the actual number of people living in the UK illegally. Nor do we know many among them are criminals or potential criminals. Even more worrying, the Government has no idea either and makes little effort to find out.
Our leaders seem to be most concerned about the human rights of migrants intent on settling here, irrespective of the impact on and cost to the British people, who have to bear the cost of it all.