Immigration: complications

By Richard North - October 9, 2024

The Yorkshire Evening Post yesterday ran an article headed: “Immigrant who landed in UK on a dinghy caught tending to £63,000 Wakefield cannabis factory”.

This was Arbi Koldashi who was discovered when police raided a property at South Kirkby in Wakefield and found that he was the sole occupant of the property which had been converted into a cannabis farm, set up in what was described as the “usual fashion”, with lights, fans and transformers in the four “grow rooms”.

From the report, we learn that Koldashi, who hailed from Albania, had been in the country for two years and had entered as an illegal immigrant via a Channel dinghy. He had been at the property for a month and said he had been put to work to pay back the £10,000 he owed the traffickers who had originally brought him over.

Koldashi was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment and, in this case, had already been contacted by the Home Office which had told him he would be deported once he had been released. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but there is no certainty that he will be removed.

That this particular “gardener” should have been an Albanian comes as no surprise. Anyone who didn’t know already that the Albanians had taken over the UK’s cannabis trade could have been informed by an article in the Telegraph last month.

This told readers that Albanian drug gangs were recruiting hundreds of their compatriots who were arriving across Channel, to work for in what has become a multi-million-pound operation.

We are further told that the industrial scale of the cannabis production has been revealed by an undercover investigation into a secret channel on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, used by more than 700 Albanians to share intelligence on their cannabis operations.

Conversations between members of the group centred on the best chemicals for plant growth, the most effective way to harvest cannabis plants, the economics of securing properties for drug production and why crossbows are better than guns to defend their crops from rival gangs.

What also comes over is the lawless nature of the trade, where members of the group recount robberies where cannabis “farm” workers have had their fingers cut off and landlords have demanded five-figure shares of the profits.

We are reminded that all this stems from 2022, where there was a surge in Albanians crossing the Channel, reaching 12,685 in the year. Subsequently, action was taken by HM Government culminating in a “migration partnership” with the Albanian government, the early stages of which led to a 90 percent drop in the number of Albanians entering illegally in 2023.

The story of Albanian illegal immigration, therefore, is an interesting one – and one which contributes hugely to the unease over the mounting numbers of illegal immigrants. And that concern was magnified recently when the Home Office yielded to pressure and, for the first time, released figures on foreign-born criminals currently in UK jails.

From these figures, it turns out that Albanians are first in the rankings of 130 different nationalities serving prison time, amounting to 1,227 prisoners from 52,812 Albanian-born non-UK passport-holders resident in the UK. This amounts to a rate of 232.33 prisoners per 10,000 residents, way above the next ranking, where Kosovo citizens account for 150.23 prisoners per 100,000 residents.

The figures, though, are likely to understate the level of criminality, not least because many of the higher-level gang members have yet to be identified (much less caught), but also because an unspecified number of Albanians have been naturalised and hold UK passports. Thus, they do not show up in the official statistics.

As if this was not enough, the Albanian immigrant issue recently took on another dimension when the Telegraph reported that a deported Albanian national had sneaked back into the UK and had then invoked the ECHR in order to block attempts to remove him once again.

The criminal in question was 32-year-old Ardit Binaj, who had entered the UK illegally in a lorry in 2014 before being arrested the next year for burglary. He had been jailed for 30 months in 2016 for the break-in, alongside a six-month prison term for another burglary and 18 weeks for a separate theft.

Six months into his sentence, he had been released and then deported as part of a prisoner transfer agreement with Albania. However, within months he re-entered Britain – it is not said how – in breach of the deportation order to be with his Lithuanian girlfriend, who had leave to remain in the UK under the Government’s EU settlement scheme.

The couple subsequently had a baby and married, enabling Binaj to lodge his successful claim that an attempt by the Home Office to deport him again would breach his Article 8 ECHR rights to a family life.

Putting all this together, it hardly seems possible to argue that, on balance, the influx of Albanians into this country has greatly enriched British society, and it is entirely reasonable to ask why any of those who entered the country illegally were allowed to stay. Albania itself is not at war, and there is no question of illegal entrants claiming generic refugee status.

And it is the tardy response of the government to such influxes which has been behind might of the concern over immigration generally, where this is taken as one of the many indications that the government is not in control, and is failing in its primary duty of protecting our borders.

But, with immigration now in the headlines following the release of ONS figures which show that net migration has fuelled the fastest increase in the British population in at least 53 years – and with the issue remaining as the primary concern of the voting public – there is a particular point to be made in focusing specifically on Albanians, as I have done.

That point is a very simple one, and largely self-evident, although often overlooked, particularly by politicians and the legacy media. And that point is that, while the different threads have their commonalities, immigration is not a single issue.

The basic separator is, of course, the distinction between illegal and legal immigration – although even these have their overlaps. Legal migration, for instance, provides cover for an unknown but significant element of illegal immigration, relying on the presence of large communities of particular ethnic groups. And the ECHR is a facilitator for both.

But looking at Albanians as a sub-set of the illegal immigration issue, there are some very specific characteristics pertaining to Albanians, which set them apart from the rest. In policy terms, dealing with them comes under the broad heading of immigration control, but the precise policy responses will have their unique elements.

Similarly, there are other troublesome immigrant cohorts, whether they be Somali, Ethiopian, Afghani, Indian or Pakistani, but each of these have their own characteristics and demand specific policy responses.

Then there are the consequential issues, relating to settled immigrant communities, mainly (but not entirely) relating to integration, which may reach into second, third and even fourth generations, where the peoples concerned retain their identities as immigrants primarily because they have failed to integrate.

The policy response here, though, might not be characterised as immigration policy, except that in certain communities, some customs have the effect of “refreshing” their immigrant status. That is particularly the case with Pakistani (and Kashmiri) communities, where arranged marriages are the norm, with men returning to their homeland to marry, often to close relatives, with a profound effect on the incidence of genetic birth defects.

One other very specific aspect is the religious background of immigrants, with Muslims being particularly problematical, both in social terms and in relation to national security and the terrorist threat.

Policy responses in these contexts might relate to the banning of marriages between blood relatives, constraints on the building of mosques and Muslim faith schools, and the banning of some forms of dress in public, specifically the burqa and the niqab, as well as the different forms of kameez, especially when it comes to male attire.

Such ideas are especially topical at the moment, with the Tory leadership contest underway, where the candidates have been making their specific pitches on immigration-related issues. It is not too late, even at this stage, to point out the diversity of policy responses which are needed to deal with an issue which is as diverse as the people to which they apply.