"It's Time to Scrap the Asylum System"

It’s been exasperating to watch as, in defiance of the wishes of Western electorates, the cultural make-up of our countries is radically transformed, writes Lionel Shriver in the Spectator. It’s time to recognise that the problem is the asylum system itself and it needs to go. Here’s an excerpt.

I’ve suggested scrapping the entire postwar asylum apparatus before, if only in passing, and Patrick O’Flynn concluded an article for the Spectator website last week with the same recommendation. So let’s take up this proposal in earnest. Unlike (largely theoretical) gatecrashers in China or India, absolutely anyone can enter the US or Europe and claim to be persecuted, and then the Government is immediately obliged not only to take this often-spurious assertion seriously, but to grant the foreigner access to expensive judicial, welfare and healthcare systems – to which this stranger has never contributed and may never contribute. For the developing world, the offer of such refuge is irresistible. For Western taxpayers, it is ruinous.

It’s blithely accepted that asylum is widely ‘abused’, an eye-popping understatement. The preponderance of folks who claim ‘credible fear’ of political persecution are economic migrants coached by smugglers and gormless NGO worthies on what to tell the authorities. Hence we have scores of Muslims who’ve ostensibly converted to Christianity, whole cadres from socially conservative countries who are purportedly gay and entire boatloads of heavily bearded males who say they’re 15 years old. Why are we committed to this farce? Why should a sovereign country abdicate control over who enters its territory and usurps its resources?

The scandals are legion. An activist judge has determined that a family of six from Gaza can claim asylum through a programme established by Britain’s Parliament to shelter Ukrainians. Oh, grand. Someone tell Trump. Clearing the Strip for luxury hotels? Just send all 1.7 million terrorist-indoctrinated Gazans to Stoke-on-Trent. Infamously, a criminal Albanian can now remain in the UK because his son will only eat British chicken nuggets. Likewise, a Pakistani imprisoned for sex offences gets to stay in the UK because deportation would be hard on his children – whom he’s legally forbidden to see without supervision anyway, since he’s a paedophile. In the US, millions of the credibly fearful who crossed the southern border under Joe Biden were provided immigration appointments up to a decade in the future – at which point they’ll claim to have made a home in the US and will never be forced to leave. Meanwhile, stories about disgruntled asylum seekers ploughing vehicles into crowds in Germany are becoming practically ho-hum.

In the UK, a Nigerian woman was denied asylum eight times in a row, but just won her case on the ninth try because she’d joined what’s regarded as a terrorist organisation in her home country. This is despite the judge’s acceptance that the woman had only joined Indigenous People of Biafra “in order to create a claim for asylum”. But never mind the sly ploy. What leaps from that story is the number of appeals she was allowed – and plenty of UK immigration cases entail the same multitude of foot-dragging court appearances. How much does trial after trial cost the public, including the asylum seekers’ taxpayer-funded lawyers? …

Granted, withdrawing the offer of unlimited asylum doesn’t sound very nice. Yet a functional state puts its citizenry first. Overwhelmingly, Americans and Europeans want to curtail mass immigration. Droves of poorly educated, low-skilled arrivals are diluting social cohesion, increasing criminality, depressing GDP per capita and costing the public hundreds of thousands of dollars, pounds or euros over their lifetimes. Why don’t our governments be nice to us? And if that means would-be righteous politicians feel less warm and fuzzy, there’s nothing warm and fuzzy about being a sucker.

Worth reading in full.