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- A Stuijt
- Retired South African medical journalist, ex-Sunday Times of Johannesburg.
Home Office deliberately alienated workers
08:22 | 
Posted by
A Stuijt |
Just as does South Africa, the UK ‘s Home Office ‘s open-door immigration policy also allows in very dangerous people such as the Taliban, East-European sex-slavery gangs and Far-Eastern gold- and drugs-smuggling syndicates…
South Africa ‘s open-borders policy under former president Thabo Mbeki has flooded the country with millions of illegal African migrants and international crime syndicates now have a free reign in the once so orderly country: view
Picture: With only 56,000 of the 694,500 or so asylum seekers’ applications actually processed thus far in the past seven years – and the rest requiring 30 years just to clear up the backlog, chaotic scenes unfold each day at South Africa’s Home Affairs Department’s very few refugee centres: tens of thousands of new arrivals camp out for days or weeks on end outside -- and all are desperate to get their hands on application forms. Fatima Khan, who heads the University of Cape Town’s law clinic providing free legal advice, described the situation as "organised chaos", noting that their clinic alone placed as many as 7,000 people on appeal in a six-month period, yet they had not had a single judgment back since 2006. These people all live in limbo, trying to survive somehow in crowded, filthy shantytowns and seriously overtaxing the country’s limited natural resources. More than 9,000 new shantytowns have mushroomed all over the country over the past 12 years, with the majority of its residents being foreign Africans.
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David Leppard of the Sunday Times of London reports that the UK’s “open door” immigration policy also knowingly risked allowing dangerous people to settle in Britain unchecked, according to documents seen by the journalist. Exactly the same policy was also launched by the Mbeki-cabinet, with disastrous consequences.
The Whitehall correspondence, which was illegally withheld by the Home Office for four years, shows how ministers were told by the country’s most senior immigration official that his staff were to be “encouraged to take risks” when granting visas, work permits and extended residency to hundreds of thousands of new migrants.
Picture: many hundreds of miles of South Africa’s northerly border-fencing have been demolished and stolen by crime-syndicates and the few border guards supplement their meagre incomes with bribes. http://www.praag.co.uk/news/southern-africa/457-sections-of-sa-zim-border-fence-stolen.html
The cover-up of this policy of risk-taking was so concerted that Richard Thomas, the then information commissioner, sent a team of investigators into the Home Office to trawl all the relevant papers. Earlier this year he rebuked the department for breaking the law and ordered it to release the material under the freedom of information (FoI) law.
The documents help to explain the huge rise in the flow of migrants into Britain as the Home Office rushed to clear a backlog of 45,000 cases. Officials agreed to fast-track 337,000 applications with minimal checks. This led to a rapid rise in immigration. In 1999, 170,000 visas were granted; by 2002, this had risen to 300,000.
Taliban allowed to stay in UK
As officials were being ordered to take risks, several potentially dangerous people entered the UK. In late 2001, more than 20 Taliban, who had fled from Afghanistan after their defeat by American and British forces, were allowed to stay in the UK.
The documents cast new light on the row over past immigration policy, highlighted by the recent rise of the British National party.
- Last week Alan Johnson became the first Labour home secretary to admit the government had made mistakes in its handling of immigration. He said ministers had ignored problems about failed asylum seekers and foreign national prisoners.
They had also “failed to grasp” public unease about the growing pressure on jobs and public services.
Alienated indigenous British working-class – deliberately:
Johnson’s remarks signalled the government’s belated recognition that its immigration policy has alienated its ‘white working-class’ vote, tempting a significant minority to back the BNP. The documents indicate that, far from being a mistake, there was a deliberate policy — apparently endorsed at the highest level in the Home Office — to promote concerted risk-taking by immigration staff whose job was to decide whether non-European Union migrants applying to work, study or marry in Britain were genuine.
A key figure in the scandal was Sir Bill Jeffrey, who was the director-general of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, Britain’s most senior immigration official.
- He is now at the centre of controversy as the senior civil servant in charge of the Ministry of Defence.
The other key figure was Beverley Hughes, then minister of state for citizenship and immigration. She was later forced to resign after it emerged she had misled MPs about whether she had been warned that Romanian and Bulgarian crime gangs might want to exploit the UK’s decision to open its borders to those seeking work from eastern Europe.
In March 2003, shortly after the 2001 entry permits to the Taliban had come to light — to an outcry in the press — Jeffrey spelled out the policy in a note to Hughes. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6907991.ece
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