We continue to get immigration wrong!

Today an old colleague reminded me of his reasons for always used to complain about income tax going higher and higher for him and those of us who pay £hundreds of thousands in income tax each year and are not obese, never ill, have rarely ever used the NHS, use private heath services that we pay for, send our kids to fee-paying schools etc. While you read of benefits cheats and today there was a main story about a Kuwaiti guy who fled to the UK and was granted refugee status with his 5 children and wife, but instead of getting a job, he led a gang of people-smugglers to bring people into the UK illegally. He is in a £500,000 house in North London, with the rent covered by the government (taxpayers) and receiving £3,700 in benefits per month. It is very clear that we need an overhaul of our entire system to ensure the UK’s generosity isn’t so rampantly exploited

It is not grounds for us to become ungenerous or for us to start hating on people coming into the country, but it is definitely grounds for us to really fund and upgrade our processes, to ensure it is robust and not exploited. Many of the thousands who spew hate and promote intolerance are very low income folk who pay very little tax anyway. Moaning about benefits going to refugees etc., is just a deflection. What the government should focus on, is how we can come up with a very robust system and new fit-for-purpose processes. If/when we stop people coming in in small boats across the channel, they will find other avenues. Finding deterrents such as the much ridiculed Rwanda plan, isn’t going to solve the problem either.

There needs to be a system where all genuine local UK folk who need benefits such as housing etc., must get it and it: they should never be left in a spot where they feel that people coming into the country to seek refuge are getting those benefits ahead of them. So, we need to fund this properly. Then we need to tackle poverty and get people working so that we don’t have so many depending on benefits.

The government’s focus on sorting illegal entry into the country should never the centrepiece of all this. It is very necessary and needful, it must be sorted, BUT it should not be the main talking-point. The focus should be on investing heavily in hiring case-workers and loads of immigration staff to ensure there is never a backlog and we are ready to whittle through applications speedily, sort net-migration (the legal migration) to keep that within reason and then, alongside all that, fix our borders to ensure people only come in through the due processes and not illegally – you simply can’t have a porous border where people, regardless of their plight, can just keep walking in, unless the world agrees to scrap all borders and we ditch passports and everyone just goes wherever they please (the world is clearly not ready for that! as we do not yet have universally shared cultures, values, norms etc.)

I do not believe the folk who moan about immigration see the number of elderly people in the UK who require care. You see them being walked along the streets and it is usually (99%) by immigrants who work for the NHS. How would those elderly folk survive without that service? So, it is ok for us to sit about and moan about the influx of migrants, but the stark reality is that those who need some of these specific services understand better.

The government just needs to switch their focus to where it should be. The deterrence is clearly not working. Why not invest in a robust system and processes that gets the cases sorted promptly, remove backlog, allows for better planning, so that when we need more nurses, we prioritise that, and when we have too many fruit-pickers we reduce visas for those. Tackling illegal migration should not be tied-in with that and as it were, has taken over and covered up the more serious matter of fixing a broken system.

Yes, perhaps easier said than done, but a sharif of focus, with a clear intent, would indeed be a good start!