Immigration: the great divide
RICHARD NORTH
Just about all the major papers – even the tabloids – are covering it on their front pages, with the headlines similar to the one on offer from the Telegraph: “Trump tells Starmer: Use military to stop the boats”, with the sub-head for this paper reading: “US president insists ‘it doesn’t matter what means you use, illegal immigration must stop’”.
This extraordinary but welcome statement emerged during the press conference at Chequers marking the end of Trump’s state visit, when the president was asked by a journalist what advice he would give to Starmer on tackling illegal immigration.
Trump – who had been uncharacteristically diplomatic on other pointed questions – did not hold back on this one: “We had millions of people flowing in totally unchecked, totally un-vetted from the Biden administration”, he said.
His estimate was twenty-five million, amongst them the dregs of society, from prisons and mental institutions, gang members and drug dealers. “They came from the Congo, they came from all parts of South America. They came from everywhere”.
In an interesting insight, he added: “I couldn’t believe it and one of the reasons I decided to run, I decided to run because I don’t wanna be controversial but you see what’s happened and you see all the information that’s come out. We won in 2020 big and I said let’s run, we’ve got to run…”.
Continuing on theme he stated: “But what I saw happen with millions of people pouring into our country, I couldn’t stand to watch it. And we’ve done a great job. Nobody, absolutely zero, and I’m not even sure that’s possible but it’s a very liberal group who come out with those statistics. The last three months we had zero people enter our country illegally”.
Trump went on to emphasise that “we do have people come in legally”, asserting that “I think your situation is very similar” – which, strictly, it is not. We do not have anything like the same volume of illegals and the so-called “legal” route is a much bigger problem.
Nevertheless, he said: “You have people coming in and I told the prime minister I would stop it. And it doesn’t matter if you call out the military, it doesn’t matter what means you use”.
Then came the money quote with Trump declaring: “it destroys countries from within”. This is the phrase that The Times uses for its headline, only then telling us that the president advised the prime minister to consider using the military to stop crossings.
Trump himself then goes on to say: “we’re now actually removing the people that came into the country. It’s a very hard chore, we were given a very, very bad hand… We have to remove them and we are removing them, we have no choice and I feel very strongly about it”.
In his general sweep of things, Trump is of course absolutely right, but it isn’t only illegal immigration that is doing the damage. His solution, therefore, is (or should be) the only appropriate response. But with Starmer standing next to the president with a face like an overdone fried egg, no-one is under any illusions that he is going to take the advice.
By coincidence, even as Trump was speaking, the Mail was running a story which revealed: “Egyptian illegal migrant, 42, who raped woman in Hyde Park while living in the Hilton hotel is a convicted Islamic terrorist”.
This is Abdelrahmen Adnan Abouelela, who was found guilty in his absence of being part of a bomb-making cell in Egypt and given a seven-year jail sentence on 5 May 2015. He and six other men were said to have manufactured explosives in a safe house flat to carry out “terrorist” acts such as the bombing of electricity pylons and gas lines.
He is believed to have lived for periods in Malaysia and Sudan after he fled from Egypt, and apparently first claimed political asylum when he arrived in Turkey. There, he was detained for at least 72 days at Ataturk airport in Istanbul after his asylum request was reportedly turned down by Turkish authorities in early 2019.
On grounds not specified, he managed to avoid extradition to Egypt and was allowed to remain in Turkey – despite expressing overt support for the Muslim Brotherhood – where he married in December 2020 and went on father a child.
Again for reasons not specified, he left Turkey and his wife and child, making his way to the UK where he claimed asylum when he arrived in April 2023, claiming that he would face persecution if he was returned to his native Egypt. Despite his background, he was housed in the Hampton by Hilton hotel in west London, at public expense.
While his case was being considered, he was allowed to roam freely and even posed for a selfie picture in January last year outside the Imperial War Museum North Museum in Trafford, Greater Manchester (with no explanation of what he was doing there or how he managed to afford the cost of the trip).
Home Office officials, we are told, spent 17 months pondering over whether or not to grant his asylum application, despite apparently knowing of his bomb-making conviction, before he raped the vulnerable woman in Hyde Park last November.
He has now been jailed for eight and a half years and, on release, faces automatic deportation under the UK Borders Act 2007 as he will have served a sentence of over a year in prison. But “astonishingly”, as the Mail remarks, he could potentially manage to stay if he launches a successful appeal on the grounds that deportation would breach his rights under the ECHR or the UK’s obligations under the Refugee Convention.
Of course, it cannot be claimed that all illegal immigrants seeking asylum are terrorists or potential rapists (or worse), but we have had enough experience of these people to warrant block exclusion to any undocumented (and un-vetted) male coming ashore. On arrival, these people need to be detained in secure accommodation and kept there until deportation can be arranged.
And yet, despite endless accounts of the wrong-doings of asylum seekers, in today’s Financial Times – which also headlines the Trump story – we have a column by a Fraser Nelson-type idiot by name of Tim Harford who writes under the heading: “The UK’s problems aren’t caused by immigration”, with his sub-head asserting: “It’s not hard to see how so many came to worry about the issue. But the data isn’t there”.
Start with personal experience, this idiot tells us. “We all have problems in our lives, and some of those problems feel like the kind of things our political leaders should be dealing with. Maybe you’re looking for a job and can’t find one. Maybe you’ve recently been burgled or robbed. Maybe you can’t afford a decent house, have been waiting too long for a medical appointment, or are aghast at how much tax you have to pay”.
“Any of us can make such a list”, he says, “a sort of satanic inversion of the gratitude journal”, then declaring: “But when I look at my own list I’m quite struck by how hard it is to connect any of my actual, real-world, everyday problems to immigrants in general or asylum seekers in particular”.
From his write up in Wikipedia, it is evident that Harford is not a stupid man – an idiot he may be, but not stupid. Therefore, he cannot seriously be arguing that, because he personally does not experience the downside of immigration, there are no problems. Those such as I could quickly disabuse him of that premise.
One struggles, therefore, to come to terms with Mr Harford’s motivation, but from this side of the divide it looks like the typical arrogance of the well-heeled chatterati who would seek to dismiss others’ concerns because he personally is not affected by them.
But standing alongside us on this is the president of the United States. He is not everybody’s cup of tea but even if one takes the view that his wisdom is “out of the mouths of fools and babes”, he speaks a universal truth. No society can absorb the scale of immigration to which the UK has been exposed and remain intact.
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