The UK government has been accused of granting an “amnesty in all but name” to migrants coming to Britain, with the country announcing it will accept thousands of people’s requests to stay in the country without so much as even interviewing them in a bid to clear its application backlog.
Thousands of migrants are set to be given the right to stay in Britain without any government worker ever interviewing them, with the Rishi Sunak administration announcing on Thursday that it will start granting asylum to large numbers of foreign arrivals without interviews.
Britain’s Tory Party has hailed the decision as a way to reduce the country’s record-high backlog of asylum claims, but critics have slammed the move, with one major border control think-tank describing it as “an amnesty in all but name”.
According to a report by The Times, in the hopes of processing asylum claims faster, all migrants who claim to have arrived from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Syria, Yemen and Libya before June last year will be sent ten-page questionnaires asking them about their claims.
So long as these migrants return this questionnaire within 20 working days, they will be granted asylum so long as officials from the Home Office believe there is enough evidence present in the paperwork to do so, with the migrants being able to bypass any interview where they might be scrutinised.
“This is an amnesty in all but name,” Alp Mehmet, the Chairman of border control think-tank Migration Watch, explained to Breitbart London.
“The message to the criminal gangs is, if you get your clients to destroy their ID and claim to be from a ‘high success’ country, they’ll be tick-boxed into the UK,” he continued. “The triple killer of Tom Roberts came from such a country, and had been denied asylum in Norway before our already-lax system allowed him to con his way in.”
He went on to warn that the plan — which is said will affect around 12,000 migrants in the short term — is a “dangerous folly”, and that the UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, should “think again” before proceeding with it.
Mehmet is not the only individual with such an opinion, with even members of the Conservative Party coming out on Thursday to attack the move.
“No matter how people want to dress this up, this is an amnesty and will cause an outcry in many constituencies,” one unnamed party MP told The Telegraph, who argued that the move would only end up increasing immigration into Britain, not help tackle the backlog.
“Rishi will become the poster boy for the smuggling gangs, and encourage yet more to come across the Channel,” he went on to explain.
Lawyers have also reportedly warned that the suggestion of handing migrants forms to fill out to finish their asylum claims could end up not working, with there being a danger that they could disappear into Britain’s criminal underworld long before the state realises they are unaccounted for.
Despite the obvious concern about opening the country to thousands without due diligence, in most cases, all of the migrants immediately impacted by this amnesty would have been allowed to stay anyway. Offical statistics indicate that over 95 per cent of migrants who claim they are from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Syria, Yemen and Libya have their requests for protection granted.
The scheme is also in keeping with other measures being heavily pushed or implemented by other Western nations.
U.S. President Joe Biden has been keen to see his country grant a large number of illegal migrants amnesty, dedicating part of his recent State of the Union address to push for the American government to grant these “essential workers” the right to stay.
Ireland meanwhile has already implemented its mass migrant amnesty, which saw a large number of illegals — some of whom may have had criminal convictions — the right to stay in the country legally, as well as even earn Irish and EU citizenship in the future.