'Child' Migrants

Child Migrants?

 

A piece from a former colleague on how many of the 'child' migrants from Calais came to be here.

 

I had an interesting conversation recently with someone from the Home Office regarding the dispersal of the migrant camp at Calais and the importation to Britain of hundreds of ‘child’ refugees.

Although never admitted, it is obvious that a deal was struck with the French regarding dispersal of the camp. Britain’s part of the deal was to take 800 to 1000 of, so called, children from the camp; children who allegedly had family in this country and were desperate to be reunited with them.

I am told that Home Office staff were asked to run details of hundreds of would be migrants against the Home Office criteria to enter the country as child refugees. Only handfuls of migrants met the criteria as genuine  child refugees. They were asked a number of times to reduce the criteria and run the numbers again and again until sufficient met the criteria to reach the figure obviously agreed as part of the deal with France.

Normally, once a person apparently meets the criteria to enter as refugees, the Home Office carry out various checks to try and verify the age of the young person. These checks may also highlight some of the risks that these migrants might pose with regard to criminal convictions or terrorist threats. On this occasion staff were told not to carry out such checks. They were not allowed to question these migrants about their age. The only process allowed was to take fingerprints and check to see if the migrant had been previously fingerprinted. If they had and the previous details differed then this could be questioned.

Once transported to Britain the migrants were spoken to further regarding their family in this country and obviously their future. One immigration officer, aged in their late thirties, said they were obviously speaking to a man who was older than them but they could not challenge their claim to be 17 years old.

Attempts were made to speak to the relatives they claimed to be coming to join. In many cases no trace of relatives supposedly already in this country could be found. In some cases phone numbers outside of the UK were given as contacts. In those cases where they did manage to speak to alleged relatives, those relatives were not interested in homing or supporting their long lost cousin, nephew, brother, Etc. Only a handful ended up with their families.

The vast majority were shipped to reception centres all over the country to be looked after at the tax payers’ expense. As children, they had to be found foster homes, schools, colleges Etc. Men in their 20’s and 30’s about whom we knew very little, in amongst real children. The importation of these, mainly young men, without carrying out proper checks is a risk to people in this country. A risk the Government appears to be happy to take with us.

Social Services have subsequently aged assessed many of these migrant ‘children’ to try and protect real children in this country and to stop wasting money placing the migrants in schools, foster homes Etc. The majority of them have been aged assessed as over 18. Despite having arrived in this country under a complete deception, none of them will be removed. We will simply encourage others to carry out the same deception in the future.