Albanian channel crossings are making our borders look like a joke

The wholesale abuse of the United Kingdom’s asylum system has taken a novel, absurdist twist in the last few months.

Recent years have seen thousands of young men predominantly from war-torn or extremely oppressive countries – such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria – chugged across the English Channel from the safe country of France to lodge asylum claims here.

But a new dispensation involves thousands of young men from a European country that has not seen a war for a quarter of a century and aspires to join the EU travelling through a series of other safe countries before reaching France and then crossing the Channel to claim asylum in the UK.

This is Asylum Abuse 2022: Albanian Edition. No war zone has been inhabited at any stage of the trek by any of the self-styled refugees coming from Albania. During the first six weeks of summer a leaked intelligence report estimated that almost 40 per cent of Channel migrants were from Albania, a country with a total population of less than 3 million.