Asylum racket hits our children in need.
March 17, 2009 by Martin Wingfield
Filed under Martin Wingfield, National News
OUR neediest children are facing further hardship because the money allocated to fund their welfare is being used up on foreign children sent to Britain by parents cynically exploiting Britain’s benefits system.
Middle-class families in some Third World countries are using Britain’s soft touch asylum policy to get their children a secondary and university education by sending them unaccompanied to Britain and forcing the British taxpayer to foot the bill.
Children are put on a plane by their parents and sent to Britain where they claim asylum. They are then housed, cared for and educated at our expense which is taking away vital and scarce resources from our own neediest children.
And Britain’s children in need are facing desperate problems.
The British Association for Adoption and Fostering estimates that there is now a shortfall of over ten thousand foster carers.
Three-quarters of local authorities have used up all their childrens’ services budgets.
Councils have been forced to “tighten eligibility further” according to the Local Government Association “so that only the most needy and vulnerable children can be helped”.
Yet included amongst those “needy and vulnerable children” are foreign youths who are neither needy nor vulnerable but who have been cynically sent to our country for their upbringing. As long ago as 2004, a quarter of all children in care in the London Borougfhs of Brent and Fulham were Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children (UASCs). In Croydon it was almost half – 330 out of 680, and in Newham 231 out of 675. In Hillingdon, the London Borough unfortunate enough to include Heathrow Airport, it is 120 out of 300.
And British taxpayers are still paying for these children five years down the line with Hillingdon Council now looking after 600 UASCs aged between 18 and 23.
The cost is also still mounting, as one local councillor pointed out “they are largely middle-class and expect to go to university” . . . and you don’t win any prizes for guessing who has to pay their tuition fees?
It is no longer the priority for our Social Services to provide for OUR young people in care. Instead their time and money is taken up dealing with problems particular to Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children including lengthy and expensive legal arguments about their status.
This is at the expense of our own vulnerable children leaving care for the first time. Unlike the UASCs they are not middle class. British children brought up in care don’t usually go on to university. Of 6000 leaving care this year, three-quarters have no educational qualifications and within two years, half will be unemployed and a quarter will be sleeping on the streets.
That’s because the resources that should have been devoted to their upbringing have been spent on the children of middle class families from the Third World who are playing the system and ripping off the British taxpayer.
Asylum seekers see Britain as the soft touch of Europe and that’s why they travel from the other side of the world to get to our shores. Now the asylum racket is directly hurting those British children in need who have already suffered enough in their lives.
It’s time to send the Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children back to their families and tell their parents to pay for their own children’s upbringing. Then, perhaps, we will be able to afford to give the most deprived of our own children the care they deserve.
Research by Steve Johnson.
Martin Wingfield also has a daily blog which can be found here.
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