Immigration and the Terrorist Issue

Earlier in the year I had a bit of a Facebook spat with a student friend of my son about the whole EU immigration issue.

Basically he was labelling me a racist for saying that the EU shouldn't be letting the huge numbers of people into the EU without proper checks.

He was all for letting every single person into the country that wanted to come, irrespective of their actual status.

I countered by stating he'd be the first to bleat if even one of those unchecked and unidentified persons carried out some atrocity on British or EU soil.

And so it has come to pass. Although the Paris terrorists may have been French born, they were using the "refugee" conduit from Syria to gain unchecked access back to the EU despite them being known the authorities.

This was what I was stating back in July and August. Its a problem caused by the EU relying on almost bankrupt countries like Greece to Police our borders.

What should happen is that the receiving EU country should hold and process the people arriving in their country, so that they can be identified and their claim for asylum or whatever be confirmed as genuine. If they fail the checks then they get booted back to where they come from.

However the vast numbers of people coming into the EU means that the resources in the receiving countries have been overwhelmed, to the point people are just walking through porous borders with no checks and on through Europe with no checks either.

So far the EU seem to have done nothing to bolster or support the receiving countries in any way, other than sending a few ships to pluck unfortunates out of the water and dump them on the shores of the closest country thereby adding to the problem.

Hopefully after Paris there is an appreciation that the situation is untenable and something has to change. The signs are not good however, with the EU heads proposing an EU Coastguard service, which will do absolutely nothing to resolve the issue. All they will do is take over from where our Navy ships will leave off and continue dumping refugees on Greece or Italy's doorstep to then continue unchecked across Europe.

What needs to happen is for the EU to fund Italy, Greece Hungary and the like to build reception centres for the refugees and to bolster their border force so there is a robust and effective control of people coming through the external EU border. This is the only way to (a) protect against terrorists entering the EU unchecked and (b) to protect the concept of open internal EU borders and (c) to weed out the illegal immigrants from the genuine refugees.