Allison Pearson in the Telegraph yesterday:
“We were having dinner on holiday in Turkey last year, when the British couple at the next table started complaining how difficult the Covid regulations made it to return to the UK. “Be Syrian refugees!” advised the restaurant manager with a cheeky grin. Plenty of Turks he knew had travelled to the French coast, cut up their documents and credit cards and taken a small boat to England. Many were now happily working for their uncles in Tottenham.
Relatives in London, the manager explained, sent money back to their village in the Kurdish part of Turkey. Their nephews used the cash to pay the people smugglers for passage from Turkey to Greece, then, via France, by dinghy to England. And Ahmet’s your uncle!
Once the Turkish lads landed at Dover, they would claim their free smartphone and tell border officials they were persecuted Sunni Muslims from Syria. Even some of the north Africans now claimed they were Syrian so they’d improve their chances of being granted leave to stay.
The manager’s enthusiasm for this ruse was so infectious that, amidst our laughter, we forgot it was our own country that was the butt of the joke.
Quite clearly, the 600 people who scrambled ashore at Dungeness and Dover on Wednesday had not all decided to masquerade as desperate people from Aleppo. But, equally, not all 600 are the “vulnerable” asylum seekers cited by the refugee agencies who have been wailing on the airwaves since we learnt that “Priti Vicious” (as one newspaper called her) plans to send single, male asylum seekers on a one-way flight to Rwanda.”