Migrant crackdown: 'Soft touch' days over
BRITAIN must improve its record on removing people who have no right to be here, Immigration Minister Damian Green said yesterday.
He also pledged to crack down on bogus colleges operating as “visa factories”, after a dramatic rise in foreign students coming to the UK.
But he defended the Home Office’s record on immigration appeals after a huge increase in the numbers of people who won leave to remain – when no officials turned up in court.
Mr Green was opening two new wings at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre near Heathrow airport, which were rebuilt after being burned down in 2006 by detainees.
The centre is for 600 of the “most challenging” detainees, mostly foreign criminals who have committed serious offences and are awaiting deportation.
The Home Office says more than 1,900 failed asylum-seekers and more than 990 foreign national prisoners have been removed since the coalition took office in May.
Mr Green said: “It’s important to make sure we remove people who have no right to be in this country. Britain has been too often a soft touch for illegal immigration. Britain is no longer a soft touch.”
He said he was evaluating the student visa system “to minimise abuse and tighten the system further”.
The number of non-EU students coming to Britain rose by more than 75,000 in the year to March, following introduction of Labour’s points system, which was designed to control immigration from outside Europe.
Some 313,011 non-EU students got visas, and brought 31,385 dependants with them, up from around 235,300 students and 24,800 family members in 2008.
Mr Green said: “It’s clear that there have been some large-scale scams. We know that bogus colleges have been set up to act effectively as visa factories and we are determined to crack down.”
But he defended the Home Office after more than 17,000 migrants won appeals last year at hearings where it was not represented.
Five years ago, there were fewer than 1,500 such cases.
Labour MP Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, said it was “shocking and a waste of money”.
The Home Office said officials were at more than 90 per cent of the most serious cases and across all cases, representation rates had improved to 69 per cent.
Mr Green said the process was designed to ensure many cases could be decided from documents alone, without the need for representation.
Part of improving the process was choosing the right cases to defend, he added.
