Immigration mess

ONE critical report on the UK Border Agency’s management failings would be unfortunate. The fact that two such exposés have now been published within a week is an altogether more serious proposition – and raises serious questions about this organisation’s competence.

Days after John Vine, the organisation’s independent chief inspector, revealed that intelligence was being used inconsistently in the detection of illegal immigration, it now emerges that many of the difficulties are systemic.

This is the only conclusion that can be derived from today’s Parliamentary report which exposes the inadequacy of the controls that are supposed to make it impossible for the Government’s migration cap to be circumvented.

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It is clear, for example, that IT workers from outside the EU are exploiting loopholes in the current protocol – even though there are computer specialists and graduates here who cannot obtain work. This is re-enforced by the fact that the employers of just one in five prospective migrants are visited by Border Agency staff – and that many of the quango’s records are incomplete.

At face value, these failings appear to stem from poor management – a trait familiar to all those who have followed the Rural Payments Agency’s travails. Taxpayers have every right to expect these bodies to end their inefficiencies.

Yet the UK Border Agency’s difficulties are far more profound. Immigration remains a divisive policy and past failings have exacerbated the polarised views of extremists.

However, it is even more difficult to have a rational debate when the body tasked with upholding the law is bedevilled by poor management – and a lack of joined-up thinking across Whitehall. In short, the Agency’s work needs to be regularly reviewed, and the necessary action taken, before immigration policy becomes even more discredited, and public opinion even more entrenched.

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