It’s not the Home Office who control our refugee ‘children’ but people traffickers
That the Parsons Green terrorist was allegedly able to build a bomb at his foster parents' kitchen table just proves that immigration checks are in crisis
I WAS interviewing ten foster parents in West London for a report on children in care.
Foster parents are in great demand, so I was startled to discover that only one of the sets of parents was looking after the sort of vulnerable children you imagine to be in the care system.
The others were looking after unaccompanied asylum-seeker children.
They made an alarming claim: Three of these seemed to be adults passing themselves off as boys.
“The first thing they ask for is a razor,” said one foster parent.
“Our concerns are just fobbed off,” said another.
A counter-extremism expert told me: “There is nothing in the system to stop a 26-year-old ISIS fighter coming here, stating he is 17 and claiming asylum.”
Anyone forced to flee his or her country with a well-founded fear of persecution can claim asylum.
An orphan under 18 has special rights. They receive the same benefits as a child taken into care.
This includes help with funding for university education and a place up the top of the housing list.
No one would begrudge a genuine child refugee these privileges. The problem is the system is open to abuse, and the latest terrorist attack in Parsons Green raises further questions.
Ahmed Hassan is an 18-year-old unaccompanied asylum seeker who allegedly built the bomb in his foster parents’ kitchen.
It is time, surely, to question our asylum system for refugee children. Yet raise concerns and you risk being labelled racist and heartless.
The problem is sorting myth from fact. The first myth is that these are vulnerable children.
The reality is only eight per cent of unaccompanied minors who arrived in the UK in 2015 were under 14. This is according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.
More than half were aged 16 to 17. Some 91 per cent were male.
Save The Children admits that “many come across as being self-reliant and not in need of support”, though “vulnerable and in need of reassurance and care”.
Another myth is that refugees somehow find their own way to the UK. The truth is none arrive in this country without the help of a people trafficker.
This means it is the people traffickers who dictate who comes here. Refugees who cannot afford to pay never make it.
If we really want to help the vulnerable, we should be taking children directly from refugee camps.
As one UK airport immigration officer, with 20 years’ experience of dealing with refugee children, explained to me:
“Ninety per cent of them are not orphans. Their coming here is very well worked out.
“Their families have paid the people traffickers to bring them here.
"The intention is for the families to follow shortly after. These are cash-rich young people.”
For the most part, in his opinion, “they are not fleeing for their lives”. In other words, they are economic migrants and therefore not entitled to asylum.
The traffickers themselves instruct them to lie about their nationality and age and destroy all identity documents.
The third myth is that every child refugee is speaking the truth. Actually, we have no way of knowing.
The lack of documentation means the most basic facts about a young person cannot be checked.
The immigration officer explained: “For years we have had adult Pakistani males arriving, maintaining they are Afghan teenagers.
"They tell me they are 13 or 14 but they are clearly over 20, well developed and with good facial hair.”
In 2015 the second-largest number of claimants came from Afghanistan.
The co-operation between traffickers and extremists is an alarming threat to our national security, points out Rosalind Ereira, of campaign group Solidarity with Refugees.
Some migrants sign up to support IS in exchange for their travel — the money paid by others to the smugglers “helps fund IS activities”.
The immigration officer is frustrated because he knows by sight many of the “facilitators” or people traffickers.
These are often young men on benefits who appear mysteriously able to travel ten times a year to Dubai and Africa.
But the traffickers have British or EU passports.
He says: “I have no power to stop a British citizen for longer than five minutes. I can do nothing without the traffickers’ permission — and they know it.”
Despite the security threat, few in authority appear willing to tackle the problem.
When a Conservative MP suggested checking the age of young asylum seekers with dental tests or hand X-rays to measure bone density, he was accused of “vilifying” refugees.
When Norway insisted on a dental examination of arriving refugee children, they discovered nine out of ten were, in fact, over 18.
Paul Chadwick of Croydon Borough Council warned a House of Lords committee last year of sexual exploitation in schools “by adults claiming to be children and placed in a school”.
A worker in a residential home in Kent said that half the children there are unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
She estimates more than half were in their twenties. “They can be quite frightening at times,” she said.
“They are aggressive and have an attitude problem. Many have no respect for women because of their culture. No one is giving consideration to the risks they pose.”
There is another issue. Our most vulnerable children are in competition with these asylum-seeking young people for a limited number of foster parents, a limited number of places in care homes and, above all, a limited amount of money.
The investment made by their families means most of the young migrants are, as the heads of various social services confirmed, “very motivated, see it as an opportunity and do very well.
"They are largely middle-class, male and expect to go to university,” said one.
What a contrast to the care leavers I interviewed. At the age of ten, Trevon came home to find his crack-addict mother hanging dead in the kitchen.
The lives of these kids are desperate. But Lily Allen does not cry for them on camera and it is almost impossible to get them the help they need.
It is time to overhaul a system that is corrupt, dangerous and fails to help the most deserving. But don’t hold your breath that anything will change, despite a vulnerable child allegedly trying to blow us up.
The immigration officer summed up the general frustration: “You try to apply the rules only to be hauled up from on high and told to ‘deal with it’. We are heading into desperate times.”
- ©Harriet Sergeant/Spectator. A longer version of this article appears in the current issue of The Spectator.
