Over half of Albanian illegal migrants were granted asylum by the British government last year despite the fact that they are not coming from a wartorn country but rather a safe European nation, a parliamentary committee revealed.
The Home Affairs committee in the House of Commons has called on the Home Office — the government department tasked with regulating migration — to explain why 51 per cent of illegal migrants hailing from Albania were granted asylum last year, which they claimed to incentivise the record waves of migrants from the country illegally crossing the English Channel.
“Albania is a safe country and we have seen little evidence that its citizens should need to seek political asylum in the UK or elsewhere as a result of the actions of its government,” the MPs said in a report.
“We saw no reason why the UK should routinely accept asylum applications from Albanian citizens, as is the case with many EU countries, other than in specific cases such as those that arise from trafficking.”
The committee went on to note that they found the 51 per cent asylum approval rate for Albanian migrants “unusually high” particularly that other European nations that were considered safe such as Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iceland, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden granting no asylum claims from the Balkan nation.
Illegal migration from Albania surged last year, with migrants from the country making up the largest nationality crossing the English Channel in 2022, totalling 12,301 out of the record 46,000 illegals who landed on British beaches.
Last year, Clandestine Channel Threat Commander Dan O’Mahoney revealed that of those, approximately 10,000 were single, adult men, noting that it represented about two per cent of the “entire adult male population” of Albania between the ages of 20 and 40.
O’Mahoney told the Home Affairs committee that many migrants from Albania actively tried to “game the system” by taking advantage of using the persistent delays in settling asylum cases by the government in order to abscond from authorities in order to work on the black market in Britain.
“We typically put them in a hotel for a couple of days, and then they will disappear. They work illegally in the UK for maybe six months or a year, they send the money home, and then they go back to Albania,” he told the MPs.
Despite the prevalence of criminality among the Albanian migrant population in Britain, with the nationality comprising the single-largest population of foreign criminals in UK prisons, the parliamentary committee said that the government should not “scapegoat” Albanians for their failure to prevent them from absconding into the country.
“Albania is not the cause of the UK’s current migration concerns. It should not be singled out as such or scapegoated for home-grown failure to process asylum applications quickly and to return to their own or other countries those who do not have a right to be in the UK,” they said.
In typical Westminster ‘Blob’ fashion, the lawmakers went on to recommend that the government provide the socialist-run country of Albania with between two and four billion pounds sterling in order to foster “economic development” so that there is less motivation for Albanians to seek work in Britain.
Despite the record levels of migration, the MPs went on to say that the government should work with Albania to increase short-term worker visas for sectors such as farming and construction as a way of further enriching the Balkan nation.