THE BIG READ: The global asylum system is such a racket that it's time to emulate Japan and just opt out.

The massive escalation in illegal immigration, flimsy asylum claims and legal migration too risks Balkanising Britain's once cohesive society. We can't and mustn't go on like this.

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

CONTRARY to urban myth, the 1980 hit single “Turning Japanese” by The Vapors is not actually about self-abuse.

So anyone who thinks Britain could benefit from adopting a Japanese approach to various aspects of life can breathe a sigh of relief: it doesn’t necessarily make you a follower of the ways of Onan.

Amid all the clamour about the need to reform our obviously outdated and broken asylum system, to the best of my knowledge nobody has suggested turning Japanese as a way forward.

Conservative politicians backing the idea that nobody who arrives illegally should be able to claim asylum tend also to pay lip service to the idea that Britain must continue taking many thousands of asylum-seekers each year. This will, we are told, underline our reputation for generosity and sustain our “proud record” of offering sanctuary to those fleeing persecution.

Well, up to a point Lord Copper. Because there is a perfectly respectable contrary view: that the global asylum system has become almost entirely a racket to facilitate irregular migration from poor countries to better-off ones for economic reasons and that there is no reason to play that game at all.

In Britain, we have seen 100,000 people arrive via Channel boats alone in the last five years. Some 50,000 are being put up in hotel rooms at enormous expense to taxpayers. Almost all of them came from the safe country of France. At least 85 per cent are men. The volume of asylum claims, not just from Channel-hoppers but also from visa over-stayers or those arriving illegally via other routes, is going through the roof. There is an enormous backlog of cases, most of which will result in eventual permission for the applicant to live in the UK permanently. Meanwhile the capacity of the state to deport those identified as not having well-founded cases is collapsing mainly thanks to the expansionist re-interpretation by liberal judges of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Much of the UK electorate is outraged, the housing stock is becoming less and less adequate, public services are overstretched, social cohesion is going down the drain and our country seems to be Balkanising in ways that will one day fairly soon disprove beyond doubt the leftist mantra that “diversity is our strength”.

Meanwhile, Japan accorded refugee status to just 202 out of 3,772 asylum applicants in 2022 and that was by its standards an unusually high number brought about by the authorities agreeing to claims by 147 Afghanistan nationals. Most nationalities continued to record a zero per cent success rate.

Given this determined refusal by Japan to be part of the global asylum boom/racket, one would expect to be able to find multiple and high-intensity condemnations of it from such august bodies as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Not a bit of it.

The UNHCR simply records on its website that: “The government of Japan has developed procedures for determining whether people claiming asylum are refugees. For this reason, UNHCR cannot assist with determining your asylum claims in Japan.”

This is the same UNHCR that has mounted a series of condemnatory attacks on the UK’s far milder attempts to crack down on abuse of the system, including this year’s Illegal Migration Bill. Only in March the agency said it was “profoundly concerned” by measures that would “amount to an asylum ban”.

Nobody seems to be proposing that Japan is excluded from the G7 or other international gatherings to try and shame it into changing posture on asylum and nobody is comparing it to Nazi Germany even though obviously it actually was part of the Axis of evil back in the day and one would have thought still has a fair bit to live down in that regard. Perhaps the injury-prone former centre-forward of Grampus Eight of Toyota, a certain Mr Gary Lineker, will pipe up about it soon. But I’m not holding my breath.

Japan has chosen to prioritise social and cultural cohesion and remains by industrialised-country standards a high trust and low crime society. For example, it has a per capita murder rate running at just a quarter of the UK’s. And in the eyes of the rest of the free world this all seems to be just fine.

So when I think of the absolute horlicks our governing class has made of asylum processing, on top of the absolutely enormous level of legal immigration it has overseen with no express democratic mandate, I do begin to wonder whether it might be time for Britain to turn Japanese when it comes to flows of people.

Under the Tories we have seen uncapped, all-comer refugee schemes launched in respect of Hong Kong and Ukraine. There have also been substantial further schemes in respect of Syria and Afghanistan in recent years. We also run various other refugee schemes in harness with the UNHCR. And yet this never seems to be enough. The cry from Labour and many Tories too is always for more “safe and legal routes”. Nobody explains what those ineligible for such routes would be likely to do next: get in a boat and arrive here illegally, I would expect.

Or do the Left really mean that nobody should be ineligible and that a de facto right for anyone in the world who fancies it to come and live in Britain permanently should arise?

We are clearly never going to do pushbacks in the English Channel, but it is high time for an ideological pushback against all this dismantling of traditional nation state border control.

Why don’t we ask low population density Australia, New Zealand and Canada to share the load when it comes to Hong Kongers? In fact, why didn’t Boris Johnson do that before he made that reckless undertaking? When are we going even to ponder the thought that perhaps some Ukrainians should go home now that 90 per cent of their country has been proven to be impervious to Russian invasion and therefore presumably safe once more to inhabit? And might not a project to get exiled Ukrainians back and rebuilding the safe parts of their country have been easier to organise had they been entirely billeted in neighbouring countries rather than the big cities of western Europe?