Open Borders Are a Threat to Integrated Ethnic Minority Citizens Too

One aspect of the debate around mass immigration that is rarely discussed is how de facto open borders also have a negative effect on our well-integrated ethnic minority citizens, along with legal immigrants from culturally compatible cultures who want to integrate with us. Before examining that phenomenon, let’s focus on some concerning details about immigration policies in the UK and Republic of Ireland that are rarely scrutinised by pro-mass immigration media outlets.

Every now and again one of Europe’s ‘progressive’ political class inadvertently admits to the public how their immigration policies are inimical to the security and well-being of their own citizens. Last October, the Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Michael Martin stated that roughly 80% of asylum seekers in the Republic of Ireland are in reality economic migrants. If this is true for the Republic of Ireland, then the number of economic migrants making false asylum claims in Northern Ireland and the wider UK must be similarly high – in that both countries receive large numbers of asylum seekers from countries like Nigeria, Somalia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Also, as the UK and Republic of Ireland share a porous land border due to the Common Travel Area, many people purporting to be asylum seekers have been moving between both jurisdictions. Indeed, Hadi Alodid, the suspect charged with June’s attempted beheading in Belfast, travelled from Dublin to Belfast in 2023, where he was granted leave to remain in the UK by the Home Office.

Despite the Irish Prime Minister admitting that most asylum seekers are attempting to defraud the Irish taxpayer, the Irish state, according to EU data, allowed 63.4% of asylum applicants to stay in 2025. In the UK, data cited by the Refugee Council shows that in the year up to March 2026, 39% of asylum claims were successful at the initial stage. When appeals were taken into account in the same period, the success rate for asylum applications was 66%. If the Irish Prime Minister knows that most people claiming asylum are economic migrants abusing the asylum process, then the UK Government knows this too. What we have, then, in both the Republic of Ireland and the UK, is the state overseeing an asylum system – aided and abetted by a government-funded NGO sector – that is committing mass fraud to the tune of billions of pounds and euros annually against its own tax-paying citizenry. If we had a responsible media class that wasn’t dominated by people with open-borders biases, they’d be asking why the governments of our islands are not moving immediately to shut down an asylum system that the Irish Prime Minister inadvertently admitted facilitates large-scale immigration fraud at an exorbitant cost to the taxpayer.

Some years back, when I lived in Dublin, I worked with a Somalian Islamic supremacist who was granted refugee status because he claimed to have fled Somalia in fear of his life. Once he was allowed to stay in Ireland, his fear of being murdered in Somalia magically disappeared and he returned there every year for a holiday. Shouldn’t those annual trips back to Somalia have automatically rendered his refugee status null and void? We became aware of his Islamic supremacist attitudes when one day at work he openly declared his approval of the death penalty for homosexuality. He left the company when he got a job within the Irish public sector running workshops instructing Muslim “asylum seekers” how to integrate into Irish society – despite being a fake refugee who was in no way integrated himself. They must have sat around laughing at the gullibility of the Irish state at those taxpayer-funded ‘integration’ workshops.

Apart from the UK and Irish states imposing an enormous financial burden on their own citizens to knowingly facilitate fake asylum seekers, their preferred immigration and asylum policies are putting their own citizens in harm’s way. What unites last October’s gang rape by Middle Eastern migrants in Brighton, the murder of two gay men in Sligo in 2022 by an Iraqi migrant – one of whom was decapitated – the Manchester Arena atrocity, and the attempted beheading in Belfast, is that all of these incidents were carried out by people who would not have been present on these islands if the UK and Republic of Ireland were not signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights. These incidents are, by the way, just a minuscule sample of how the ECHR continues to facilitate the maiming, murder and rape of the citizens of our islands and those on the broader European mainland.

Being a signatory to the ECHR means that the UK and Republic of Ireland can place no limits on the numbers of people arriving from countries rife with Islamic supremacism, brutal misogyny, tribal violence and anti-western hatred. To be sure, far from every individual – or indeed every Muslim – coming from Africa and the Islamic world is a threat, and some are genuine asylum seekers. There are many brave ex-Muslims living in the UK and Republic of Ireland who fled the imminent threat of death for apostasy and blasphemy in the Islamic world, who have integrated successfully and are productive members of their adopted countries. Unfortunately, for them as much as for us, our asylum and broader immigration policies facilitate the Islamic extremists from whom they fled to move to our islands. We need a more robust asylum system that first and foremost does not compromise the security, economic well-being or cultural cohesion of the native citizens of these islands, but that can at the same time offer refuge to manageable numbers of people who are culturally compatible with us and will be of benefit to western society.

Our chaotic asylum systems in the UK and Republic of Ireland, along with unsustainable levels of legal immigration, are not only detrimental to the interests of the indigenous peoples of the British Isles – they also increase hostility towards law-abiding, well-integrated immigrants and ethnic minority citizens born and bred on these islands. When you have unmanageable numbers of immigrants, it inevitably leads to severe constraints on resources. When the cost of housing rises sharply because of a surge in demand, and it takes a month to see a GP because of the burden of mass immigration, much of the native citizenry will increasingly and understandably call for strict limits on immigration from everywhere. Another depressingly predictable consequence of these extremist open-borders immigration policies is that it leads some people to take an extremist position themselves in reaction. We saw such genuinely deplorable racist sentiment on the streets of Belfast this summer in the aftermath of the aforementioned beheading, when thuggish elements targeted and attacked ethnic minority healthcare workers.

After the attempted beheading in Belfast, there were certainly many people who came out to peacefully express their opposition to immigration policies that have brought imported violence and Islamic supremacism to our shores. However, there is no denying that some people used that incident to unjustifiably place collective blame on all non-European immigrants – as though non-Europeans are a homogeneous bloc that advocates public beheadings. Most people would agree that perpetrators of violence and racially motivated intimidation must be held accountable for their crimes. However, our ‘progressive’ political class – who have championed decades of unprecedented levels of mass immigration and operate an asylum system being widely abused by fraudsters and dangerous individuals – are ultimately responsible for flare-ups of social disorder when someone they have allowed to enter these islands attacks innocent members of the public.

Over the last few decades, many ordinary people on our islands have witnessed gradual demographic changes in the towns and cities in which they live. In other places – Belfast being one – that demographic change has happened far more rapidly, within the space of just a few years. When you have rapid demographic change involving people from a multitude of cultures and various religious backgrounds from outside Europe, most native residents are not going to take the time to investigate the cultural differences between a culturally compatible, western-oriented Coptic Christian from Egypt and a Somalian Islamic supremacist, or the myriad characteristics of every immigrant group. Consequently, when faced with resource constraints due to unprecedented population growth, along with an Islamic supremacist terror threat and a significant increase in sexual violence, some people simply start to oppose all non-European immigration and wrongly view all non-Europeans as a threat.

Why do our governments, which go to such great lengths to tell us how abhorrent racism is, then enact de facto open-borders immigration policies guaranteed to increase a degree of racism and hostility towards decent immigrants and ethnic minority citizens? Not to mention that they remain completely silent on the anti-western hatred that some immigrant groups make no effort to conceal once they are allowed to settle here. No sane western society should be allowing its entire state apparatus to be used to facilitate the importation of an Islamic supremacist culture that openly asserts it wishes to replace western civilisation with its own. At the end of the day, we should expect Islamic supremacists and foreign violent criminals to act according to their nature and cultural conditioning. What we should not have to endure are our own governments, along with a taxpayer-funded ‘progressive’ deep state, enacting policies that bring them here. If someone in your family allows a wild animal into your house and it mauls you, the fault lies not with the animal but with the family member who opened the door to the danger. De facto open borders are chaotic, erode social cohesion and are inimical to the security and well-being of the indigenous people, fully integrated ethnic minority citizens and culturally compatible immigrants. If we do not get leaders who start to recognise this fact, then we are heading for calamity in the not too distant future.

Andrew Devine is a 2010 Orwell Prize winning blogger and author of Generation F (under the pseudonym Winston Smith). Former radical Leftist. Fully recovered. He blogs on his Substack page, the Devine Message. Subscribe here.