IMMIGRANTS

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Taxpayers are forking out millions of pounds a year in benefits to jobless foreigners who have returned to eastern Europe to live at our expense. The Department for Work and Pensions is giving about £300 a month in handouts to migrant workers who have gone home after losing their jobs here. In another glaring example of EU rules punishing British taxpayers, the migrants are allowed to claim generous handouts if they have worked in the UK for more than a year.

MPs and public spending campaigners reacted with fury to the revelations, condemning the abuse of our benefits system by EU nationals “milking the system”. In Poland alone, hundreds of migrant workers return to their homeland every week after losing their jobs during the credit crunch. Officials believe between 5,000 and 10,000 returned Poles are claiming benefits from Britain and other EU states.

One Polish official explained. “They have to be registered as unemployed in their host country and then register again when they come home. But they continue to be paid benefits as if they were still living in the country they worked in.” With latest figures showing unemployment in Poland running at 13.2%, returning Poles are finding it difficult to find a job when they get back. But slack EU laws let them claim nearly three times what they would get from Polish benefits.

In the affluent Polish city of Poznan, which has unemployment of only 3.8%, Rafal Pulkowiak and his friend Emil Bloch, have just collected their benefit payment slips from the local job centre. Both have recently returned from the UK where they worked at a Brighton funfair before losing their jobs. Emil said, “The lady in the job centre explained that we were legally entitled to continue receiving Jobseeker’s Allowance under EU laws. And to be honest, that suits me just fine.” (Source: Daily Express, Apr/11)

Illegal immigrants could be deported from France on charter flights at a huge cost to the UK taxpayer. The covert operation to fly the first group of 50 Afghans from Lille to Kabul would cost the British Government more than £1million. Further flights would send the bill soaring into the tens of millions with the “bare minimum” being paid for by the French. The plan comes six months after a similar scheme was cancelled at the last minute amid a threat of legal action by human rights charities. But by keeping
the deportation plan secret charities will not be able to object until it is too late. The Afghans, whose country is now considered safe, are among about 1,000 refugees squatting in Calais as they wait to sneak on lorries and ferries to Britain.

The Calais migrant crisis is becoming so critical the French plan to use the Army to clear them from a squalid woodland camp known as The Jungle. The plan is to use charter flights from Stansted to Kabul and Baku in Azerbaijan, touching down in Lille to pick up refugees on the way. The refugees would be rounded up in Calais and taken to Lille, where they would be held until the plane landed. Once on home soil, the deportees would be given a £500 per head resettlement fee, also courtesy of the British taxpayer. The catch is there would be nothing to stop them using it to fund another overland trek back to Calais. A source said, “This scheme involves removing immigrants from France under cover of darkness to avoid anyone complaining it is either illegal or not done properly.” (Source: Daily Star, May/09)

An illegal immigrant drink-driver who killed a boy in a crash is living rent-free in a council flat. Aaron Chisango was one and a half times over the limit when he mowed down Jamie Mason. He served just two months in jail for drink driving and having no licence or insurance. Prosecutors ruled that there was not enough evidence for causing death by dangerous driving. After jail, Chisango was sent to a detention centre while fighting a deportation order but a judge ordered him to be released on bail.

Now, he lives on state handouts in a £43-a-week flat, complete with TV, video and DVD player. Chisango arrived in Britain on a Zimbabwean passport and has been fighting deportation since 1999. Britain is banned from deporting people to Zimbabwe and Chisango has even joined the Zimbabwean opposition party in a bid to stay. A Home Office spokesman said, “We are determined to seek to remove all those who have no legal basis to remain in the UK.” (Source: The Sun, Jan/07)

Scores of illegal immigrants are using a military cemetery in Calais as a dossing spot before trying to smuggle themselves across the Channel to start a new life on handouts in Britain. The Southern Cemetery is littered with rough shacks built from crates and pallets scavanged by the 600 to 800 foreigners awaiting their chance to slip into the UK. Many of the asylum seekers are young men from Iraq and Afghanistan and some use mobile phones to keep in touch with pals already in Britain who keep them up to date on chances to exploit our generous benefits system.

Amesh, 20, from Afghanistan, said, "Most of us have applied for asylum already in other European countries but the British are soft and let you stay. We don't tell them we have already been refused but everyone here knows exactly what to say. We email our friends in Britain and they tell us to throw away our identity papers. They also tell us which outlawed groups to say we belong to so the British believe our lives are in danger and won't send us back to our home countries."

He added, "I have a friend in a B & B in Hastings and he tells me he gets fried eggs and toast and bacon and sausages every morning for breakfast and a nice hotel room with a sea view. In France we get nothing. We have to build these shacks with what we can find and steal around the port." (Source: The People, Feb/06)

A "while you wait" forgery racket which helps immigrants commit benefit frauds has been exposed by the Sunday Mirror. Phoney permits which allow East Europeans to milk our benefits system can be bought for as little as £40. The documents are put together in just one hour in a mobile forgery factory set up in the back of an old white van and delivered door-to-door. The man behind the fraud is Polish immigrant Wojtech Zajaczkowski, who boasts that he himself will be a British citizen by next year. He said, "I can give you a backdated work permit now. It will get you whatever government money you need, without any questions."

Under new rules, immigrants from the 10 new member states will not be allowed to claim full handouts in the UK for at least a year after their home countries join the EU on May 1 2004. But the Sunday Mirror discovered a booming trade in backdated work permits and phoney residency papers to get round the law. Bogus British passports and national insurance numbers are also on offer to make it easier for new EU citizens to defraud the system rather than go legitimate on Home Secretary David Blunkett's new Workers' Registration Scheme.

A big influx of citizens from the new member states, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are expected to live and work in Britain. Immigrants who can show that they have been living in the UK for four years are entitled to all social security benefits - including income support, jobseeker's allowance and disability benefit. Zajaczkowski advertises his services for work permits and visas openly in shop windows. Sunday Mirror investigators found scores of Polish and Slovak workers looking for work ahead of the May 1 deadline.

Zajaczkowski said, "I can get you a work permit, everything you need, within an hour. All you need is a passport photo and passport number. It will cost you £40. All the documents I sell go back to 2000 or 2001. You can claim benefits on this." One of our investigators handed over £40 and a passport photograph to one of Zajaczkowski's men. An hour later she received a perfect copy of a Home Office immigration document stating she had been resident in the UK since February 2000.

Zajaczkowski said, "This form is the original and easy to get. The Home Office is one big mess. It doesn't keep an electronic database on all the asylum applications. When you take this to social security you will get income support." Under the official Workers' Registration Scheme for new EU immigrants, an unemployed couple with two children would qualify for the following weekly benefits after being in the UK for at least a year...

How many people here are working a 40+ hour week for less? (Source: Sunday Mirror)

Immigration staff were ordered to stop wearing summer clothes, in case the sight of bare flesh offended newly arrived asylum seekers. Workers were told to ditch blouses, T-shirts and vests and wear winter outfits even during the summer, in a ruling which ignored the fact the people fleeing war or persecution were likely to have far more to worry about than a British official's style of dress. A woman clerk at the Migrant Helpline Office at Dover Docks, the first point of call for asylum seekers arriving from France, was sent home to change for revealing a bit of shoulder.

Personnel manager Tony Fuller sent a warning to workers at the Migrant Helpline, which has 10 offices in the South East including Ashford in Kent, Canterbury, Folkestone, Hastings and Brighton. It said: "All staff should be mindful that many cultures find the exposure of bare skin (e.g. shoulders, thighs, midriffs) offensive. To avoid this situation and the possibility of staff being sent home... all staff are requested to dress appropriately."

What happens then, if and when these asylum seekers are granted permission to stay here? Is the entire population of this country expected to 'stop wearing summer clothes' in case the sight of bare flesh offends them? Anyone wishing to settle in any other country in the world is expected to accept that country's rules and regulations, laws and customs. So why does this country insist we change our lifestyle to suit immigrants? Answers on a postcard please.................