Trump’s Warning of ‘Invasion’ by Illegal Immigrants Strikes Sensitive Nerve in Britain

LONDON — President Trump has touched one of the most sensitive nerves in British politics with his scathing criticism of Britain’s failure to curb wide-open illegal immigration.Mr. Trump’s warning of the disastrous impact of non-stop English Channel crossings by illegal immigrants, mainly from Africa and the Middle East, coincided with the arrival last week of hundreds of men, women and children on English beaches after making it on rubber rafts from France. Front-page photographs showed people wearing life jackets lined up on beaches under the eyes of French policemen who shrugged and said they had neither the power nor the authority to stop them from leaving on the sometimes perilous journey to beaches at least 30 miles away.Four would-be migrants reportedly drowned last week trying to get across. “The criminal gangs organizing the crossings are also growing more violent,” the Times reported. “Border Force insiders said an automatic firearm was found in one of the migrant camps.”“Dinghy flotilla in channel as French admit waving migrants through and 1,000 arrive in a day,” the British tabloid the Sun headlined. “How’s that plan going, PM,” the paper asked Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who had said that the government’s plan for halting illegal immigration was “working.”The library of the House of Commons reports that around 44,000 people “were detected” arriving illegally in the past year, most of them by boat. “This is around three times the number detected in any year between 2018 and 2020,” the report said, though slightly fewer than the 46,000 illegal immigrants recorded in 2022.While the numbers are far smaller than those often mentioned by British foes of immigration, they provided the basis for interviews that Mr. Trump has given to British networks, including Sky News and GB News.“Your country is being killed,” was Mr. Trump’s message to GB News. Illegal immigrants are “invading Europe,” he told the independent network, which has been critical of Labour Party rule.Mr. Trump said that illegal immigration was “killing your country.” Illegal immigrants were “coming from all over the world,” he said. “They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from South America. They’re coming from different parts of Asia.” It was “an invasion,” he said, “and the UK is a prime suspect.”Mr. Trump expressed his views just as the British press reported a fresh flood of illegal immigrants from France. The Daily Mail reported “hundreds of migrants headed for Britain.” The Mail said one French officer had said he had “orders not to intervene” while “gendarmes stood by,” watching as more than 100 migrants “gathered in shallow waters before struggling aboard one overloaded inflatable bound for the UK.”A Daily Mail reporter on the scene described a “mammoth” inflatable vessel as a “floating deathtrap” that wound up carrying “a scarcely believable 165 migrants towards Britain’s shores.” The House of Commons report said the dinghies had once held only a few passengers but had increased in size in the past few years. Mr. Trump said that he had urged Mr. Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, to halt illegal immigration. “I know Starmer did very little about it, “ he told GB News, “and they’re coming from all over the world.” Mr. Burnham has been vague about what he will do about the problem other than promise to be “compassionate” — a word seen as indicating his policy will not differ much from that of Mr. Starmer.

Trump’s Warning of ‘Invasion’ by Illegal Immigrants Strikes Sensitive Nerve in Britain

Trump’s Warning of ‘Invasion’ by Illegal Immigrants Strikes Sensitive Nerve in Britain

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