Former UK Immigration Minister Says Impossible to Integrate Migrants Into Society
© Matt Dunham
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MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Former UK Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick said in his first remarks after resigning that it was impossible to integrate migrants into society at the current rate of new arrivals, while blaming the government for paying too little attention to legal migration as compared to irregular migration.
On Wednesday, Jenrick quit his job citing "strong disagreements" with the government's immigration policy. The resignation came after the United Kingdom and Rwanda signed a new deal to tackle irregular migration, which is expected to see new legislation introduced in the UK parliament to allow asylum seekers to be sent to the African country. Jenrick criticized the bill for failing to address legal challenges to deportations.
"GP [general practitioner] services and hospitals do not grow on trees. Integration is impossible if you let in over 1.2 million new people as we have done over the last two years," Jenrick wrote in a comment for The Telegraph newspaper on Friday.
29 November 2023, 18:30 GMT
The UK government's policy has opened the door to unprecedented migration, leading to "disastrous consequences" for the country, Jenrick said. European parties need to start listening to voters' concerns over immigration or be prepared to feel their "red-hot fury," he added.
"The arguments advanced by the Government about why we must stop the boats – severe community cohesion challenges, pressure on public services and housing challenges – self-evidently apply far more strongly to legal migration, but have received a fraction of the attention," the ex-minister said.
The UK government treated immigration as one of its priority concerns since leaving the European Union in 2020.
In March, the UK government presented a bill that sought to relocate migrants who came to the UK illegally by boat across the English Channel to a "safe third country" like Rwanda. In late June, however, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that London's plan to deport undocumented migrants to Rwanda was unlawful, prompting the Home Office to appeal for a review of the decision with the supreme court.
