Patrick Christys: We are not a racist country

Priti Patel is under massive pressure to justify her claim that 70% of those coming across the Channel in small dinghies are economic migrants and not genuine asylum seekers.

I can’t help but wonder whether or not things should be the other way round. Shouldn’t it be up to those coming over the Channel to prove that they are genuine asylum seekers and not economic migrants, not us having to prove they aren’t?

Priti Patel’s claim seems to centre around the demographics of those arriving on our shores. A Home Office source revealed that of the 8,500 people arriving by small boat in 2020 87% were men and 74% were men aged between 18 and 39.

So women and children seem a lot less likely to flee war, apparently. Dr Peter Walsh, a researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said: “The Home Office reports that 59% of claims filed in 2017 to 2019 inclusive were ultimately successful.”

That’s a pretty high number. And, according to Migration Watch, we haven’t sent back a single channel migrant who’s landed on our shores so far this year.

Figures out today show that crossings in October this year were six times higher than they were in October last year – that’s 2669 last month compared to 475 in the same month in 2020.

So, let’s break this down – we’re going to have a record year of arrivals, and potentially a full year of none of those arrivals being returned to even just another safe country, let alone returned to a war zone.

Right then, so can we all just stop thinking for a single second that we’re a racist country. Or that our Home Secretary hates asylum seekers, or that this government doesn’t like foreign people, or, even, that it doesn’t like illegal immigrants, which by definition, a lot of them are.

And then let’s stop the idea that our population is racist. If I was a homeless military veteran, I’d be pitching a tent outside one of the many migrant hotels and begging to know why we can find shelter for those people, but not our armed forces.

If I was a single mum living in squalid social housing unable to get the council to come round and repair it, I’d stand outside one of those hotels with my child and demand, again, to know why we have good accommodation for these people, and not her.

If I was someone who’d lost their job as a result of the government’s response to the pandemic and was evicted by their landlord, I’d do the same thing again.

In this country now there are hundreds of thousands of these people. And yet we’re not seeing that response are we? Because we’re not a racist country.

But we are decent, we are principled and I think it’s fair to suggest that can we only take so much.

I think the government, but more so really those calling for essentially an open door approach asylum claims and illegal immigration, should tread very carefully. How long before the population stands up and says – actually, we want to be looked after as well?