Saturday 19 January 2008

The Immigration Shambles!

Only three days after I talked about 'Common Purpose' and its effect on the Civil Service a story appeared today in the Daily Mail which did not surprise me one jot. An asylum seeker had been employed by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal for almost a year. The judge who jailed him could not understand how this could happen! Well I can tell him - it happens because nobody gives a tuppenny damn. If you are prepared to work for the Civil Service for the pittance that the government pays then you are welcome.

Security checks Ha! Enhanced security checks Ha! Ha! Look the whole immigration racket is such a shambles that if I were to tell you just the bits that I saw you wouldn't believe it. Everyone in the system is making money apart from the poor clerks at the bottom of the whole pile of dung.

This guy's case has been hanging around since 2002! That is now six years and let me tell you that this is nothing new or even extraordinary. The Home Office has been sitting on hundreds of thousands of files going back ten years or more. They have lost countless thousands and until 2000 when a back office opened and actually did quite a good tidying up exercise which included establishing a data base the whole system was unmanaged.

Dr John Reid famously declared that the Home Office was 'unfit for purpose' but only the people who have to deal with the Home Office knows just how 'unfit for purpose' it is. The adjudicators at the top of the pile are earning huge sums much of it down to their ability to adjourn cases at the drop of a hat. Two of them in the last year got into the newspapers for having an affair which involved an asylum seeker who they had employed. Upright reliable citizens eh? The Home Office representatives are famous for their incompetence and their lack of preparation prior to a case. The representatives who support the asylum seekers will do almost anything to delay the case and it did not surprise me when it was reported that they had supplied this particular asylum seeker who was working for the Leicester office with a fake passport.

The interpreters make fortunes out of the system particularly if they have knowledge of obscure African tribal dialects. It isn't sufficient these days to just speak Sudanese for example because the rep will insist that his particular client can only understand the dialect spoken by the people of Southern Darfur from the village of Abdurafan on the border of Chad. OK I exaggerate a tad but how they get around Britain with this limited ability to communicate beats me!

And now this individual floated around the Leicester office for a year and they wonder why his case never got to court. Ha! I could blog all day and still not cover the incompetence endemic in the Immigration system.

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