ninme

Blair must be thinking this guy picked an incredibly inopportune time to get nabbed.

Telegraph - The chaos that allows a failed asylum seeker to stay and kill, By Philip Johnston

There is no more incendiary issue in the election campaign than what to do about immigration and asylum. When Michael Howard suggested on Sunday that Britain’s security was at risk because terrorists had used the asylum system to enter the country, he was accused by Labour of using “scurrilous, Right-wing, ugly tactics” to scare voters.

Yet the news yesterday that an Algerian asylum seeker, whose case was turned down by the authorities, was able to remain in the country to join a terrorist plot and, ultimately, to kill a police officer illustrates far more graphically than hours of party political posturing how badly the procedures have broken down. The killer, who went under a variety of names, including Kamel Bourgass, even used the envelope that contained his rejection letter from the Immigration Service to store recipes for ricin and other deadly chemicals that were intended to be used in a terror attack.

And we think we have it bad. But pay attention, Americans:

Periodically, both the last Conservative government and Labour have introduced amnesties to legitimise the status of many families who have been in Britain for many years. But in doing so, they encouraged thousands of others to make the journey to Britain in the expectation of being able to stay on.

This turned what was once a manageable number of asylum seekers into a flood that simply overwhelmed the system. Backlogs built up in the late 1990s, with some applicants waiting years for a decision. Despite Home Office targets to remove 30,000 failed applicants a year, there was simply no way of doing so. There were not enough detention places to hold people pending their deportation and too few enforcement officers able to carry through the expulsions. Occasionally, the Home Office would stage a removal exercise for the benefit of the television cameras, busing groups of Afghanis or Kosovans to an airport to be flown home; but it was all for show.

And:

The system was so porous and inefficient that a suspect under surveillance by MI5 was granted asylum on the very day he was to be interviewed by officers from the security service. Last year, a failed asylum seeker from Poland with a history of sex attacks was jailed for murder carried out after the authorities lost track of him.

You could just scrap the whole system and not give benefits to any non-citizen. I dunno, would Howard even be able to fix it?