Large numbers of men continue to be admitted by the state despite a clear risk to public safety
The Telegraph’s latest investigation into people-smuggling networks suggests they are now using Channel migrants as drug mules as well as cash cows. Our dysfunctional, widely-abused asylum system is becoming inseparable from criminality. How could we expect anything less, given it is already rooted in brazen lawlessness?
Yes, it’s correct to assert that many asylum seekers are legitimate refugees fleeing war or intolerable persecution and will work, live, assimilate and contribute to Britain when they get here. But it’s also true that we are granting sanctuary to some individuals whose presence poses a genuine threat to our safety and security.
In their tens of thousands, people are boarding overloaded dinghies to voyage from a safe country to British shores outside of any authorised process. So it should hardly shock us if many people with this attitude to the law go on to commit other offences.
Over just six months the media – not the police, Home Office or Border Force – have informed the public of 339 criminal charges linked to residents of asylum hotels. In June, an illegal migrant was convicted of raping a 20-year old woman in a churchyard. Last month, an Afghan pleaded guilty to raping a 12 year old girl in Nuneaton. Just this week, two Afghan teenagers who had crossed the Channel on small boats were convicted of raping a 15-year old schoolgirl. These are not isolated incidents, but avoidable horrors.
But we should not rely on anecdotes. Even before nationality, language, culture are considered, young men are statistically the demographic most likely to commit crime. This has been true throughout history, across all civilisations. Yet recent migration flows from the Middle East and Africa have disproportionately comprised young, unaccompanied men. It would defy logic if these flows did not contain a sizeable minority of offenders or extremists.
According to figure compiled by the Centre for Migration Control, there were 412 non-summary convictions of Iraqi nationals in 2024, which is more than for the nationals of France (176), the United States (105) and Germany (104) combined.
No system designed for thousands can cope with tens of thousands, year after year, whoever is running the country. In 2010, Britain received 17,900 asylum applications: by 2015 this had risen to 32,700; today it exceeds 110,000. And whilst small boats are the most visible demonstration of this broken system they are not the only one: in the year to June 2025 14,800 people on student visas claimed asylum – nearly 70 per cent from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
Behind this lies a far bigger global trend few politicians dare confront: extraordinary population growth in countries already driving migration pressure. Afghanistan – the source of about one-fifth of Channel migrants – will add 30 million people in the next 25 years. Pakistan – currently the most common nationality among asylum applicants – is projected to grow by 150 million. Even if a small fraction seek to move north, the numbers far exceed what any conceivable asylum system could process or the country integrate.
“It’s less than ideal that crime data is not routinely published by the state. We have a little on nationality and absolutely nothing on immigration status. It makes it very difficult to determine asylum crime versus crime of the wider population,” says Robert Bates of the Centre for Migration Control.
We have fuller data on labour market outcomes: Home Office analysis shows that just 12 per cent of adults arriving via refugee resettlement schemes were in work as of 2021, along with only 37 per cent of those granted asylum after arrival. Just 23 per cent work full-time. Only 5 per cent hold professional roles. Language proficiency is poor: only 75 per cent of refugees achieve functional literacy in English. More than half of resettled refugees, and nearly half of asylum-status recipients, rely on social housing.
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