Douglas Carswell

Passport to Britain? Once issued with one of these, a migrant can come into our country

Imagine that you are the government of Hungary. Or the head of a municipal authority in Italy.

Tens of thousands of migrants have just turned up in your jurisdiction over the past few weeks, and you haven't the resources to cope. At the same time, the migrants that you are struggling to feed and house don't really want to be there anyhow. Most are keen to press on north, into Germany, Scandinavia or the UK.

At first, perhaps you turn a blind eye if any of them clamber aboard a train heading north. Or maybe you issue a rail warrant to encourage them on their way.

How long before you do something more drastic and begin to issue migrants with official documentation that will allow them to travel freely across Europe?

The debate about how many asylum seekers we should accept from Syria is a side show. Last year, 636,000 people came into Britain. A mere 12,000 people were offered asylum.

The real issue is how many of the hundreds of thousands of migrants coming into Europe will get the right to come to Britain. So long as we remain in the EU, they will all eventually have the right to come.

Rather than focusing on the 5,000 migrants camped around Calais, we should be thinking about the 800,000 migrants who have just arrived in Germany. As soon as they get official status in Germany, they will have the right to come to Britain – and there is nothing David Cameron can do to prevent it.

As long as we remain in the EU, our borders are not controlled by British officials at Heathrow, Harwich or Calais. The ability to cross our borders is today in the hands of any official in any EU memberstate minded to issue a migrant with an ID card or passport.

At the moment, EU nationals can travel to Britain with just an ID card. These ID cards, with which one can enter the UK, are issued in many EU countries by local municipal authorities. What is to stop some local authorities in Italy or elsewhere issuing ID cards as a way of getting migrants to move on? 

I suspect it is only a matter of time before this happens.

From monetary policy to migration policy, the EU seems to export public policy failure from one member state to the next. We need to leave.

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