LONDON: British Home Secretary Priti Patel has incorrectly told MPs that most migrants crossing the English Channel are not asylum-seekers, after a Home Office report claimed that “almost all” of them are.
In a Home Affairs Committee session on Wednesday, Patel responded to questions on the government’s plans for tackling the Channel crisis through the provision of alternative safe routes.
Conservative MP Tim Loughton said the number of migrants reaching Britain on small boats tripled last year to more than 28,000 and asked the home secretary about the alternative routes available to them.
“We have people coming from Syria and Afghanistan, we do have the work of the Afghanistan resettlement scheme — that is a safe and legal route that has been stood up,” Patel said.
But when challenged on the routes available to asylum-seekers from countries other than Syria and Afghanistan, she said: “For economic migrants they don’t need safe and legal routes because they should be claiming asylum in many of the other countries they’re traveling through.”
Patel added: “The majority of them are people that are not claiming asylum or fleeing persecution.”
But her department’s most recent report on migrant statistics, which was released in November, said “almost all” people who arrive via the Channel on small boats claim asylum.
Two-thirds of all applications are granted at first review and half of all appeals are successful, it said.
Patel told the Commons committee that migrants crossing the Channel “should be claiming asylum in other countries,” despite this not being a requirement for any asylum-seeker under UN regulations.
She said new safe and legal routes were being created for asylum-seekers beyond Afghanistan and Syria, but did not provide any details. She added: “We don’t currently have those routes in place.”
British law requires anyone claiming asylum in Britain to be physically present in the country, limiting options for people stuck in countries they are attempting to flee and, campaigners say, forcing them to take perilous routes.
