Dogwash

Pick TV was originally a sort of teaser channel for Sky, showing samples of mainstream shows in the hope of enticing viewers into forking out the wonga for a satellite subscription. These days its output seems to consist entirely of repeats of fly-on-the-wall documentary series in two rather odd categories: vets and border control.

And so it was that, feeling somewhat under the weather and lacking the energy for a damned good rant on the Interweb, I found myself watching re-runs of UK Border Force — a sort of soft porn for racists, some might say.

As well as this infamous caper, the investigation of which was actually filmed as an episode of the fly-on-the-wall doco, there was the usual crop of raids on business premises, searching for illegal employees. (You can get a steady if repetitive supply of local newspaper reports of such raids on MigrationWatch's news aggregation feed.)

In each of the two UKBF episodes I watched on this occasion, the immigration officers actually recognized individual illegal workers whom they had detained during previous raids on other premises. And, to their resigned frustration, they could do nothing about it.

Let's explain the drill here. If an illegal worker is discovered during a raid — clandestine entrant, failed asylum seeker, visa overstayer, breach of visa conditions, etc — they can be detained and deported.

Well, up to a point. They can be detained and deported, quite promptly, if they have suitable travel documents. Which usually means a valid passport. If they don't have such a document, and most of them take good care to ensure that they don't, then the UKBA must approach the distant country, assuming it can be identified, to obtain replacement papers. In the meantime, the illegal is released on immigration bail, with strict instructions that he is not allowed to work and that he must report in to UKBA every two weeks. So of course the miscreant simply disappears, moves to a new address in another town, gets a new cash-in-hand job with a businessman of his own ethnic community, and is never heard from again by the authorities.

So business-as-usual has the process become that illegals don't even bother relocating out of town; they just shift their sleeping arrangements if UKBA knows where they are living and then get a new dodgy job with another local employer.

So the only effective sanction and disincentive against illegal working is the fine which can be levied on the employer if he cannot show that he took reasonable steps to confirm his iffy employee's right to work when he took him on, proving in effect that he was conned by the employee. This fine is always quoted in news reports as a satisfyingly punitive £10,000 per undocumented employee. In fact this figure is a last-resort maximum and typical amounts are £2,000 to £5,000. Which is still a substantial punishment, assuming it is actually paid. I have read news reports of businessmen succesfully pleading poverty: "I cannot pay this, Sahib. My humble curry house which I have struggled so hard to establish will simply go out of business. My numerous relatives who are overstaying their visitor's visas while they obtain free treatment on the NHS who are visiting me for a month or two from the old country will be thrown out into the street."

Even if you don't lose track of the bailed illegals, getting the replacement travel documents from their home country seems to take a remarkably long time. In the case of some fly-blown, war-torn, fourth-world dump where the passport office is run as a business or as a sinecure by one the local dictator's extended family, this might be understandable, but many of the illegals come from emerging superpowers like China and India, where lead times of three to six months are less easy to explain away.

Mind you there is the matter of incentive, of course. Many illegal workers are returning small but steady flows of remittances to their home country. The longer they can continue to work in the UK, the better. Not that such tawdry considerations would hold any sway with the bureaucracies of the respectable middle-ranking emergent BRICS economies, I hasten to add.



It's a pantomime, isn't it? The authorities ritually harass the miscreants but are unable to take effective action. The criminals, for that is what they are, smile nicely, tug their forelocks respectfully and carry on as before.

The only effective course of action is to eliminate the economic benefit from illegal employment and from the employment of illegals. Fining the employers is a good start, in theory anyway. But clearly the disincentive is not powerful enough: undocumented workers continue to be employed. Well, which would you prefer, cash-in-hand no-rules workers from the old country at a pound an hour, or employing the local population at at least £6 an hour plus NI plus bureaucracy? Tempting enough to risk some nark grassing you up to the immigration once in a while, eh?

And there is no disincentive at all for the workers. A mild finger-wagging from the UKBA, then back to work next day.

Clearly the only way to discourage undocumented illegal workers is to take them out of economic circulation. Which means detaining them until their travel papers come through.



Of course, while we are waiting for our beloved leaders to demonstrate that they actually intend to fulfill their promises to control immigration, legal and otherwise, there is something that we ordinary citizens can do. How often have you seen some blowhard banging on about how something "ought to be done" about illegal immigration, just before he cheerfully pops into his local kebab emporium to hand over a couple of quid for a sliced-schoolgirl special with extra E. Coli sauce to some resentful dusky geezer whose English vocabulary is limited to number words and obscenities? Where does Mr If-I-Had-My-Way think the owner of this shop, and the owners of the dozen more like it between here and the cab office, get their revenue to pay Abdul the Comsumptive his 50p an hour?

Just sayin', is all.