Britain’s broken asylum system is a danger to us all

Feb 3, 2024 by Jill

by Rakib Ehsan, spiked:

The horrific alkali attack in south London has exposed failings at every level of our immigration system.

The UK’s asylum system is utterly dysfunctional. Time and again, we see criminals, traffickers and terrorists slipping through the net. But even by Britain’s woefully lax security standards, the case of Abdul Ezedi has plumbed new depths.

Ezedi is the 35-year-old Afghan suspected of attacking a mother and her two young daughters with alkali in south London this week. This was a crime that should have been prevented. Indeed, there were multiple opportunities to stop Ezedi and to have him deported from the UK.

[…] What both of these cases reveal is an asylum and migration system that has little regard for public safety. One cause of this is the UK’s onerous ‘human rights’ commitments. All too often, these favour the desires of foreign-born criminals to remain in Britain over the safety of the law-abiding majority. Last month, a known ISIS propagandist from Sudan managed to escape deportation on human-rights grounds. Similarly, the Home Office was prevented from expelling an Albanian crime lord, on the grounds that to do so would deprive him of his human right to a family life.

The UK’s asylum system is beyond broken. The British state is apparently open to granting asylum to a convicted sex offender on the questionable grounds that he had converted to Christianity. And yet it fails miserably when it comes to providing sanctuary for people who are actually in need of our protection. The same government that granted Ezedi asylum has outright refused to lend a helping hand to Christians who are known to be facing persecution or to Afghan soldiers who assisted the British Army during the war in Afghanistan.

More alarming still, in the aftermath of Ezedi’s alleged rampage in south London, our politicians have refused to even admit that his asylum status was relevant at all. It is as if they are determined not to learn any lessons from this horrific crime.

The Clapham attack was totally avoidable. The whole purpose of offering asylum is to stop people from coming to harm. Instead, we have a system that is so broken it is actively facilitating harm. We need to radically overhaul our asylum system and finally get a grip on our borders.

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Read also: What do microaggressions have to do with acid attacks? by Tom Slater, spiked