The Telegraph reports how the ease with which Britain’s asylum system can be abused has been revealed by an undercover investigation showing the scale on which immigrants are cheating the state.
The investigation found that identity checks supposed to prevent fraud are not working. Instead, illegal immigrants can easily obtain fake identities that allow them to work or claim benefits illegally. In one instance, a reporter from the BBC Panorama programme secretly filmed an asylum seeker who was making hundreds of pounds a month renting out the three-bedroom house he has been given by his local council in Birmingham.
The undercover reporter for the BBC Panorama, Claudia Murg, found that the finger-printing system introduced in an attempt to prevent multiple applications for asylum appeared not to work. It did not pick up the fact that, shortly after her first asylum application had been rejected, she made a second in a different name – even though her fingerprints were on file under both identities.
We, at White Rose, have maintained that measures proposed by the Home Office such as fingerprinting, ID cards and other biometrics technology for recording individuals’ identity are only as effective as the ‘human infrastructure’ surrounding them. The government’s attempts to introduce ID cards are nothing more than evidence of the state’s propensity to control the lives of the ‘honest citizens’ since they are incapable of stopping those who abuse of the system.
