Immigrants: Why has nothing changed?

Home secretary faces
his toughest ever interview

By Mazher Mahmood

MAZ: My first investigation for the News of the World in 1991 involved entering Britain in the back of a lorry with a load of illegal immigrants.

I've done it twice since and, if I wanted, I could do it again tomorrow. Why is nothing being done?

CLARKE: Your investigations have shown that at times we're not policing it properly. There is a feeling that the system isn't under control. That's why I put a pledge in Labour's general election campaign to address that problem.

MAZ: You didn't meet your targets last year when the Prime Minister pledged the number of long-term removals would exceed applications.

CLARKE: We set that target for 2005 and, at the moment, we're doing very well. In the last five weeks the number of asylum seekers has been going down quite sharply, but you're quite right and that's why this is now a real priority.

MAZ: I'm out on the streets, I meet police and immigration officials all the time and they tell me the system is failing.

Since we're looking at the past, spending on immigration has rocketed by 900 per cent, asylum applications have doubled, immigration has tripled and only one in five failed applicants is sent home. Are you not ashamed of that? I would be.

CLARKE: I'm out on the streets too, all the time, more than most journalists. Speaking as a Home Secretary who started to work on this issue on December 16, I think we have a lot to do about it.

If you look at what's happened to asylum seekers coming into the country over the past decade there was a sharp and sustained rise and now it is falling.

MAZ: What is being done to stop the smugglers?

CLARKE: If you look at the problem of people being smuggled in on the back of lorries, the numbers are falling.

When we first came in to power in 1997, customs officers didn't have any technology to look at lorries coming in and establish whether there were people inside.

They now have that at all the main entrance points to the UK. We have also strengthened border checks.

These are not now taking place on British soil, but at Calais, Brussels or wherever. I had a meeting in Spain this week with the French Immigration Minister and we agreed the system had worked, it was closing some gaps.

He proposed that we do that for all north French ports and I agreed.

Of course we have not reached a state of affairs where it is impossible to come through.

But have we achieved a situation where it is much more difficult than before? Yes we have.

MAZ: Then why is it still happening? I have managed to come into Britain on fake British passports, French documents, Czech documents, Portuguese documents.

We've exposed illegal immigrants coming in as priests, musicians and bogus students at dodgy colleges or with fake work permits.

In my experience, our immigration regulations are seen as a joke around the world. Racketeers say it's out of control. Could you not accept that?

CLARKE: You talk to me as you wish, but if you want to ask me a serious question then ask me a serious question.

MAZ: Is it out of control or is it not?

CLARKE: No, I don't think it is out of control. Take the bogus colleges issue.

A year ago we started closing down bogus colleges and establishing a register of proper colleges.

So if you apply, saying you're going to go to X College of Technology and it doesn't exist, you won't get in.

We have also invested heavily in technology to identify bogus documents. The resources we have are of a different order to what was available just a couple of years ago.

Control

We are giving that technology to airline liaison officers in airports throughout the world to address the problem before people arrive here.

I will give you an example of something that is out of control. At the same meeting in Spain last week I was talking to an Italian minister. He had to leave early.

Why? Because 1,200 people had arrived on the southern coast of Italy from Libya.

They'd come from Egypt, and gone to Tunisia and gone to Libya and got on the boat across, each paying £1,000 a head. That's a £1.2million scam. Do I say we have a vast problem? Yes I do. Do I accept we have the worst border problems in the world? No I don't.

MAZ: If you ask any illegal immigrant: "Where do you want to go?" they say: "Britain—it's a soft touch."

CLARKE: It's not because we're a soft touch. The real reason is the English language and the fact that we have a better economy than anywhere else in Western Europe.

MAZ: Some of the most dangerous people I have exposed have been people smugglers. It is now more profitable to bring a person into Britain than it is to bring in hard drugs. How do you propose to stop them?

CLARKE: We're the first government to work with other countries to look at the routes by which people are being smuggled into the country.

We're now getting major prosecutions that we haven't had before.

It is only relatively recently that we have put people-smuggling at the top of our organised crime agenda.

MAZ: You will go into the general election with a five-year plan on asylum and immigration. What do you want to achieve in that time?

CLARKE: I would like to be in a position where we have secure bordersand where every decision on an asylum application is made very rapidly. Eighty per cent of applications are now assessed in two months. Two years ago it was 20 months.

The third thing I want is a proper returns strategy. That means that if we know you're here, and your asylum application has failed, we can then return you to wherever in the world you've come from.

There are a significant number of countries we cannot return people to at the moment and solving that problem will be absolutely key.

MAZ: There are lots of people coming in and if you can't get rid of them there's no point.

CLARKE: Exactly. If you show up at Manchester Airport you can say: "Blimey, look at my documents, I'm applying for asylum right now." That is still hard to deal with.

MAZ: What really infuriates our readers is the cost of the asylum system. It's costing £8billion a year and your own statistics show that the majority—over 70 per cent of all asylum seekers—are not genuine. Our readers are paying for it and they're fed up.

CLARKE: We will be keeping close control over every single person who comes in. So when they arrive in the country and apply for asylum they are tagged, required to report to police or detained—detained is better.

More people are going straight into detention centres than before.

MAZ: The problem is once they're here they disappear and it's all over. I guarantee I can deliver you a coachload of people every single week.

Your own immigration officers say we just haven't got the resources to deal with them.

CLARKE: I don't think that's true. We are pushing more resources on to the frontline.

MAZ: I did a story a couple of weeks ago about an Albanian thug who's a pimp and a drug dealer.

He admitted he was a fake asylum seeker, but you can't deport the guy. Once he's been granted indefinite leave to remain in this country you can't touch him

CLARKE: That's why our immigration and asylum policy now says you will not get indefinite leave to remain.

There's no magic wand that can be waved to solve these problems—but we are getting there.