MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: The Left’s shameful sneers at Suella Braverman’s plan on migrant crisis
The liberal elite of this country – a very real and very influential group of people – often claim to be horrified by objections to unlimited migration.
They have many responses. The first, increasingly impossible to sustain, is to pretend that nothing much is going on, that unregulated immigration is not taking place on any significant scale. The dogged work of the organisation Migration Watch has largely put paid to that line of argument.
The facts are that large-scale migration is a significant cause of social change and has some severe costs – though these fall mostly on the poor, rather than on members of the liberal elite in their comfortable postcodes.
Pictured: tA group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dungeness beach by the Dungeness lifeboat following a small boat incident in the Channel in October
When that case fails, they like to insinuate that opponents of mass migration are racial bigots, a charge which can be made without evidence in most places, as ‘progressive’ media will endorse and amplify it.
Finally, they refuse to accept that economic migrants to this country are in many cases arriving on our shores claiming, with little evidence, to be seeking asylum from persecution. One effect of this controversy has been a cruder-than-necessary division on the issue.
Any intelligently-run nation welcomes some controlled migration, which brings talent into the country and helps to overcome labour shortages.
All civilised people recognise the absolute duty of free nations to take in refugees from persecution. It is not just that this is the right thing to do. Such refugees, as it happens, generally greatly enrich those societies which welcome them.
This country benefited hugely, for example, when it rightly took in large numbers of refugees from Uganda and Kenya half a century ago. It is quite clear that such migration should be legal and under the control of the authorities.
Just as we welcome those who have good reason to come here, we reserve the right to refuse those who have no such claim, or who have criminal pasts which make them undesirable. A country is not truly sovereign if it cannot decide who it allows on to its territory.
So the current unprecedented arrival of significant numbers across the Channel, brought here in defiance of the rules by criminal people smugglers, undermines our sovereignty.
In hard practical fact, very few who arrive here by this route will ever leave.
Suella Braverman, Home Secretary, arrives in Downing Street for a Cabinet Meeting, Nov. 1
International law, and the incessant activities of pro-immigration pressure groups, ensure that this is so.
As the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, rightly says in The Mail on Sunday today: ‘It cannot be right that thousands of people are paying smugglers to make a lethally dangerous journey across the Channel before disappearing into the black economy or seeking financial support from taxpayers.’
Nor can it be right, thanks to such queue-jumping, that the British people face a bill of £2 billion a year to pay for the consequences.
Mrs Braverman is taking this seriously. She is plainly working hard to ease the crisis in the asylum system – and her critics should note that this crisis has been caused by people smugglers, not by her policies.
She is also seriously pursuing what must be a key option, greater co-operation with France. As she points out, France, with our support, has stopped more than 29,000 illegal crossings since the start of the year – twice as many as last year – and destroyed over 1,000 boats. This is something to build on.
Rather than sneering at Mrs Braverman, who grasps that this is a major issue and is exploring practical ways of dealing with it, responsible people in this country should support her in upholding law, fairness and sovereignty by regaining control of our beaches and borders.
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