Review: ‘Children of the Great Migration’, Panorama, BBC1

This evening, the BBC decided to launch an attempt to tug at the heartstrings and to win yet more support for unrestricted mass immigration into the EU in general, and the UK in particular. Its advance publicity for the programme read:

They cross six thousand miles of desert and sea to reach Europe, children travelling alone, on the world's most dangerous migration route. Some of them are as young as seven.

The timing of the documentary has been prompted by the upcoming ‘migration season’ in the Mediterranean, ‘in what threatens to be its most deadly year yet, [for] Europe has cut the number of rescue boats.’ This, intoned the presenter, represented ‘an unfolding tragedy of horrific proportions.’ The capsizing of two of four dinghies carrying hundreds of African immigrants this winter was cited, in which at least 400 died, part of a recent phenomenon that illustrates that people smugglers are attempting to find a way to extend their operations into the depth of winter. A new tactic pioneered this winter employed a seemingly abandoned, crewless cargo ship, the Ezadeen, into which 450 Syrian immigrants were packed, yielding the people smugglers at least £2 million in profits.

What is also alarming is the fact that ‘it’s also shaping up as a record year of arrivals too.’ Last year, it was stated that the Italian Navy’s now discontinued operation ‘Mare Nostrum’ save the lives of more than 160,000 such immigrants. Now though, it has been scrapped, with a new EU Frontex operation providing a scaled-back patrol closer to EU maritime borders. The presenter wondered how this would cope with rescuing the prospective record number of immigrants, whilst this viewer wondered why it was not defending the coastline of Europe, and returning these migrants to their ports of origin.

Panorama also examined one of the major sources for much of the human efflux from Africa: Eritrea. The Sudanese authorities appeared to be eager to help the documentary makers publicise this problem, as hundreds of thousands of Eritrean emigrants have taken up residence, at least temporarily, on Sudanese soil close to the border with their country of origin. Vast refugee camps have sprung up, and the people traffickers have engaged in bloody exchanges with the Sudanese police, killing and wounding many of their number. Whether it is that the Sudanese are neither willing nor able to police their border with Eritrea is not clear, but the border – in their direction at least – is highly porous.

Although Eritrea’s population is a relatively modest six million, it was described as a ‘source of refugees on an astonishing scale’, with many of these departing being teenagers fleeing conscription in a ‘Marxist-inspired totalitarian state’, with a ‘crippled economy’, political detentions and torture. Conscripts, apparently, become transformed into forced labour in state agriculture and industry.

The largest of the camps in eastern Sudan houses circa 35,000 Eritreans and is overseen by the UNHCR together with the Sudanese authorities. In all, there are reckoned to be some 110,000 Eritreans temporarily resident in eastern Sudan, the majority of them wishing to head to Europe; many, including a number of interviewees, to the UK.

To get all the way to Europe can cost $5,000, with the first leg of the trip taking emigrants across the Sahara, and then from Libya across the Mediterranean, typically to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Cameron’s gung-ho and geopolitically myopic intervention in Libya, which contributed to the overthrow of Qaddhafi and created a state of lawlessness in which both people-smuggling and Islamism can thrive, means that an ever-increasing number of people are setting off from the shores of Libya and heading for Europe. It is but 180 miles from the Libyan port of Zuwara to Lampedusa. From there, the immigrants head to Sicily, thence onwards to other European countries, often the UK.

The proportion of children is growing, and they are often unaccompanied for word has fed back to Africa that Europe will never turn children away and will look after them. The African cuckoo knows that the European reed warbler will look after its young at the expense of its own.

Yes, those who come seek to escape from poverty, vile and often oppressive living conditions. Yes, many of them are subject to repulsive abuse at the hands of people-traffickers. However, we cannot provide a lifeboat for the entire World. If we continue to accept this ever-increasing human tide, we will sink. We will go under. Our society will be swamped, fracture and eventually collapse. This is unsustainable, and cannot go on. What should be done? How can this human tide be staunched and turned back? 

Panorama Review: 'Britain’s Secret Health Tourists'

Panorama’s latest undercover investigation took as its theme the abuse of the NHS by “health tourists” and illegal immigrants, setting three undercover reporters the task of seeing if they could gain access to treatment via using assumed identities. Although it helped to highlight significant flaws in the existing system and unearthed a murky underworld where access to the NHS is illegally purchased from unscrupulous middlemen, it left a number of questions untouched, but given the limited length of the programme and the depth of the investigation, it can perhaps be forgiven for not having addressed still more facets of this problem.

It is only natural that anyone in long-term pain or suffering from illness should go in search of a cure or treatment should the opportunity to do so afford itself. In a world in which global transport and communications have revolutionised the ability of people to travel between countries and continents, and border controls in the UK have been scaled back, there exists a natural temptation for citizens of other states where there is inadequate healthcare to come to the UK to take advantage of the NHS. These are “health tourists” in the strict sense of the term, but there is also the issue of the large number of illegal immigrants resident in the country who also use the NHS.

Guidance relating to who is and who is not eligible to NHS treatment is opaque and complex, and whereas the instinctual reaction of those working in the medical profession is to offer treatment to those in need, the reality is that we are already denying our own citizens medical care and treatment because we do not possess the necessary funds to offer this, so how in effect can we justify providing treatment to “health tourists” and others who are not eligible to receive these services? It is manifestly unjust that our citizens, who have contributed via National Insurance and taxation to the NHS, should effectively be denied treatment because those who have contributed nothing are abusing the system. Such abuse is in fact helping to erode public support for this aspect of the welfare state, as well as reducing the ability of the NHS to deliver the services that we deserve.

However, it should be noted that hard statistics relating to the costs incurred are hard to come by, and although they are significant, they are thought to be relatively small in terms of the overall annual NHS budget. In 2012 for example, the NHS budget is estimated to be some £104 billion, yet one estimate provided in the Daily Mail in a story on “health tourism” that it ran in June this year, suggested that the treatment of “those from outside the EU who have lived in the country for less than a year” amounted to £200 million, or approximately 0.2% of the total budget. Still, this is a useful sum of money that could pay for a lot of treatments, and time spent treating somebody who is not entitled to treatment, is more time spent on a waiting list for someone who is.

One of the reasons why this phenomenon has grown to be such a problem was alluded to in a comment made by Panorama presenter Declan Lawn in the introduction to the programme when he described Britain as “one of the most multicultural societies on Earth.” Presumably, many personnel within the NHS must be justly concerned that they may be accused of ‘racism’ if they demand proof of identity from certain patients. Moreover, the programme made clear how confusing NHS guidance on who was entitled to register with a GP, although the situation with respect to who should receive treatment in hospitals was rather clearer; that said, use of the qualifying term “ordinarily resident” combined with government guidance of over 100 pages in length make the process of who meets the criteria difficult.

One undercover reporter pretended to be a Nigerian health tourist with “restless leg syndrome” and managed to gain initial registration with a GP for a fee of £300 charged by a fixer (also of African origin), whereas another undercover reporter took on the assumed identity of an illegal immigrant from Kosovo with a bad back, who managed to obtain an NHS card for a fee of £200, and so it went on. The documentary made it clear that for those with the money and the right contacts it is perfectly possible to obtain an NHS card and thereby gain access to free treatment. Quite how widespread this is, we cannot know, but evidently some unscrupulous people are profiting from this situation and the system is open to abuse.

A Migration Watch spokesman made the point that Attlee and Bevan had intended to set up a National Health Service, not an International Health Service. Some campaigners however, think that the NHS should treat everyone. As mentioned earlier though, we simply do not possess the resources to treat our own people, let alone “health tourists” and others who are not eligible.

Clearly, there are some illegal immigrants who are in a desperate situation through no fault of their own, i.e. those who have been brought into the country in conditions of near slavery such as those who have been trafficked for sexual exploitation. It would be callous indeed to deny them emergency treatment, and ultimately the solution to the abuse of the NHS lies with a robust approach to immigration that will enable us to continue to provide the universal healthcare to all of our citizens that they deserve. Without gaining effective control of our borders, how can we hope to provide meaningful healthcare for our citizens? The standards and scope of treatment within the NHS ought to be improving year upon year, not getting worse, but we can only ensure the former if we possess the funds with which to achieve this. Tackling illegal “health tourism” and putting in place effective border controls can help us to ensure that the scarce funds available are allocated to the best effect. In the interim, until such controls are put in place (assuming that a party willing to institute such changes to our border regime is ever elected), targeting those who facilitate the abuse of the NHS ought to be looked at more seriously with a view to reducing its prevalence.