Albanians Should Be Barred From Claiming Asylum in UK: Minister

Minister of State Robert Jenrick leaves a Cabinet Meeting at 10 Downing Street in London, on Nov. 1, 2022. Leon Neal/Getty Images

Albanians should be barred from claiming asylum in the UK as they are coming from a “demonstrably safe” country, the UK’s immigration minister has said.

The government is under intense pressure from Conservative MPs to get to grips with the issue of human traffickers using small boats to ferry illegal immigrants across the English Channel into the UK.

Albanians account for over a third of the 33,000 illegal immigrants who reached the UK this way in the first nine months of this year.

Last week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak held his first talks with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in which they agreed to close “loopholes” preventing the rapid return of failed asylum seekers.

Detainees inside the Manston short-term holding centre for illegal immigrants wave to members of the media outside, near Ramsgate, Kent, southeast England, on Nov. 3, 2022. Daniel Leal /AFP via Getty Images

In an interview with GB News, Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick said Albanian citizens should be “excluded from the right to claim asylum.”

“Albania is a demonstrably safe country. It is very hard to see how an Albanian should be able to successfully claim asylum here in the UK,” he said.

“We have a returns agreement, which was signed a year ago, and a thousand Albanians have gone back already. We are looking at what we can do there,” he said, adding that the government is also pursuing diplomatic channels.

Jenrick warned that illegal migration was likely to be an issue for “many years to come” and said ministers agreed that overall levels of people entering the country were too high.

“We can’t have a million people entering the country in a single year and net migration of half a million—it’s just not sustainable,” he said.

Illegal immigrants who crossed the English Channel from France give V signs on UK Border Force boat Valiant as they arrive in the port of Dover, England, on June 14, 2022. Chris Eades /Getty Images

Gang Crime

The UK’s National Crime Agency said on Nov. 15 that Albanian gangs are bringing illegal immigrants across the English Channel, coaching them on what to say to the UK Border Force, and then putting them to work on cannabis farms.

Ged McCann, a senior NCA intelligence manager, told journalists that Albanian gangs were working with Iraqi Kurd human-trafficking syndicates and were “effectively bringing in the labour force for the cannabis grows.”

He said Albanians had wrested control of the cannabis farm industry from Vietnamese gangs and he said many of the illegal immigrants who were put to work in the cannabis farms were in “debt bondage” to criminal gangs.

Steve Brocklesby, an NCA intelligence manager, said there was “blatant manipulation” of the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), which was introduced to help victims of trafficking and modern slavery.

In October, Dan O’Mahoney, the Home Office’s clandestine threat commander, said many Albanian illegal immigrants were “gaming the system” by using the NRM.

O’Mahoney said they “will typically put them in a hotel for a couple of days, and then they’ll disappear, work illegally in the UK for maybe six months, maybe a year, send the money home, and then they’ll go back to Albania.”

Brocklesby said: “Albanian OCGs [organised crime groups] in the UK, their main objective when they make money is to get it out of the country as soon as possible. So, they will smuggle it out of the UK into Albania in whatever form it comes. The estimates are that hundreds of millions of pounds UK sterling is leaving the UK and ending up in Albania, where it then gets semi-legitimised either into the banking system or to pay for construction work.”

He said the NCA estimated there had been a 20 percent increase in criminal cash leaving the UK in the last five years.

Brocklesby added: “We can expect to see an increasing use of crypto and other less regulated investments in the UK, as well as direct investments into the UK, in the coming years.”

The NCA’s Deputy Director of Threat Leadership, Andrea Wilson, said they were involved in 70 live investigations into organised immigration crime, of which a “significant proportion” involved Albanian groups.

Missing Minors

According to the county council of Kent, almost a fifth of lone Albanian child illegal immigrants have gone missing.

Kent County Council took in 197 unaccompanied child illegal immigrants from Albania between Jan. 1 and Oct. 31 of this year and, of those, 39 are missing.

The figures were revealed following a Freedom of Information request by the BBC.

A spokesman for the council said it has been “challenging” to prevent the children from going missing.

“Since the significant rise in Albanian unaccompanied children in May 2022, we have convened multiple forums with local and national public authorities to look beyond these established protocols as children continued to arrive and go missing,” he said.

“This has helped improve professional understanding and decision-making for these children, which has contributed towards a reduction in the number of children going missing.”

Chris Summers and PA Media contributed to this report.