Many asylum seekers have risked everything to seek new life in Britain - Greg Wright

According to the Home Secretary Suella Braverman, illegal migration is out of control and too many people are interested in “playing political parlour games” instead of fixing the problem.

Speaking in the Commons, Ms Braverman said: “Let’s be clear about what is really going on here: the British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast and which party is not.

“Some 40,000 people have arrived on the south coast this year alone. Many of them facilitated by criminal gangs, some of them actual members of criminal gangs. So let’s stop pretending that they are all refugees in distress. The whole country knows that is not true.”

So where is the evidence to support the Home Secretary’s claims? We need to look at the bigger picture. Despite the political focus on asylum applications, the number of people using safe and legal routes to find protection in the UK has greatly outnumbered asylum seekers, who must find their own way to the UK, often through hazardous means.

A study issued by The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford sheds light on what it described as “a tale of two protection systems”. Data released by the Home Office in August showed that Afghans were among the top nationalities using small boats to reach the UK in the second quarter of 2022, while Ukrainians, one of the only groups of refugees who can travel to the UK on a visa to seek safety, were absent from the “small boat” statistics,

Dr Peter William Walsh, Senior Researcher at the Migration Observatory, said: “The data show the vastly different experiences that refugees from different countries have reaching the UK. Most Afghan refugees cannot access the UK resettlement schemes, and there is no way to apply to them. That explains why a substantial number of Afghans are coming through the asylum system despite the prospect of long waiting times and recent policies designed to deter asylum seekers.

“Is the number of asylum applications a big number? In the context of the overall immigration system, no..The big issue is not the overall numbers, but the risks that people take to get here and the difficulty the Government has faced running an efficient asylum system to assess their claims.”

Most people who wish to claim asylum in the UK can only do so if they can reach UK territory first, since there is no asylum visa. Data released in August showed that the Government’s backlog in processing asylum claims has now reached 118,000 people, according to the Migration Observatory.

Albanians were the largest nationality crossing the channel in small boats in the first half of 2022. In the second quarter of the year, Albanians also became the top country of nationality for asylum applicants (3,289 people).

Mr Walsh added: “There’s a common assumption that Albanian asylum seekers will go on to have their asylum claims rejected, but in the most recent data this was not true: the UK government has recognized the asylum claims of thousands of Albanians over the last decade. In the year ending June 2022, 53 per cent of Home Office decisions on Albanian asylum claims were positive.”

These facts should provide something for the Home Secretary to ponder. Many asylum seekers have risked everything to seek a new life in Britain. At the very least, we must treat them with respect and compassion. ​​​​​​​

Greg Wright is the deputy business editor of The Yorkshire Post