Sir Keir Starmer said his plan was to smash the gangs. Well, the gangs haven’t been smashed. But the question is, is that the bigger problem? We know the people who are coming over on small boats. The figures come through pretty much on a daily basis. They come in, they get registered, they get hotel rooms. Eventually, they all seem to get asylum. And we know month by month, year by year who’s coming. But what we don’t know is people who overstay on their visas. And this is something that it’s remarkably easy to do if you can get a visa in the first place.
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So the controls are at the early stage – can you get a visa from the embassy in whichever country you are coming from? Then you come over.You may come on a student visa, you may come on a holiday visa or a business visa, and you just don’t leave. And we don’t have any very good information on that.It used to be done on a survey basis, but our real problem is that we don’t ask people, don’t ask them, don’t check when they come in and when they leave, we stamp them in, they get a nice little stamp in their passport or they come through the E-gate, it’s all clearly registered, but when people leave, you don’t know.The way it’s calculated is by asking the airlines who has left to see if you can match up departures with arrivals and see if people have, in fact gone.Unfortunately, unless it’s been done very recently, that was last done in 2020, so we haven’t bothered really even to check who’s been leaving, and therefore people could be overstaying.And when places with illegal immigrants are raided, you find the problem is not the people on the boats but the overstays on visas, and there you have the problem that the ONS hasn’t been recording it.When we were still in the EU, they used to do it by asking people when they arrived what they were doing, and they did it as a survey and they did it nine to five, so they tended to miss the arrivals from some other parts of the world who arrived early.Now they do it by checking, by sampling, but not by checking that we make sure everybody who comes in has left and have a record.So what does the ONS have to say about this? They say that “to estimate emigration, we identify previous long term immigrants with a large departure from the UK during the reference period. “We record them as a long term emigrant. If they do not return to the UK within 12 months, or if they only return for a short term stay.”But that doesn’t really help us, because they’re not actually checking us out.
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