If you've ever had the misfortune to travel through Calais on your way to eat foie gras, fine oysters or haute cuisine in the land of our distant cousins, you'll know it's an industrial shithole that even the French avoid and the British used to run and then abandoned back in the middle ages. Bleak empty factories, windswept dunes and high unemployment add to an atmosphere of hopelessness and despair and the feeling that something better must be just over the horizon.
No doubt the swarms of would be economic migrants currently huddled in tents awaiting their chance at the “British Way of Life” feel the same, but unlike us, they've passed through some of the richest and most productive countries in Europe to get there.
So why?
Now I know that many speak English and England would fast track their ability to earn a living, and I begrudge no one that, but let's do a little more analysis of who is desperate to bypass the normal controls we place on immigration in favour of simply shouting “asylum” as they crawl out of the back of a lorry on the A2.
Firstly, the UK has an enviable policy of not issuing ID cards to citizens and unlike most of Europe, we don't have to register our address with the Police. It is incredibly easy to simply vanish into the black economy and acquire yourself a new ID, along with passport, NI number and access to abundant state benefits – and vast immigrant networks exist in the UK to facilitate exactly this. If you are on the run from a little local tribal difficulty in whatever fly blown hell hole you had the misfortune to be born in, the UK will wash you of all your sins and leave you a glistening upstanding example of multiculturalism faster than you can valet a Mondeo, inside and out, innit.
Next, our open borders philosophy of the last decade has enabled vast ghettoes of non EU immigrants in our inner cities – a home from home if you like – where whatever your business was in Mogadishu or Damascus can quickly and profitably be re established and should the need arise to put it on a more formal footing, the black market InstaCitizen system will see you inundated with mortgage offers or council accommodation as fast as you can say “Batmanghelidjh”.
The French, already knowing this from their experiences with North African immigrants, are smart enough to realise that making it easy for Middle Eastern or West African migrants is not going to help France in the long run, so to apply for asylum, you'll need an address. In France. Hence no one in Calais does and the pot of gold remains just over 22 miles away across the Channel.
Now I'm a no borders, free movement Libertarian but that doesn't include allowing all and sundry to wander through my country estate pissing in my rose bushes and stealing the hens' eggs. I've spent a fair part of my life living in other people's countries but it has always been on their terms and I've always played by their rules or I have left for pastures greener. Ignoring the lush pastures of Switzerland or the foothills of Tuscany to end up in a welfare paid B&B in Dagenham sets alarm bells ringing.
We have seen the result of unlimited unskilled immigration during the Labour years and by pure coincidence, we have seen the growth of Big State/ Big Government to match it. Of course politicians wish to harvest those votes from those dependent on Big Government but they retire to thatched cottages in the Mendips, not gang ridden inner city hell holes predated on by Kebab War Mafias carving out new turf in the land of plenty.
When European pioneers set out to conquer the wilds of the new Frontier and the New Worlds, they faced the challenges head on and dug the gold of the Klondike with their bare hands. The impoverished pioneers of today, armed with a £5K ticket from a migrant smuggler are not romantic self reliant types looking to set up homesteads on the plains, they are here to exploit a welfare system that was designed to provide from cradle to grave. Free healthcare, housing, education, cash and pensions for life is fine for the people who are actually paying for it all, but as long as that lid remains off the jam jar, expect the wasps to gather – in this case, at Calais.
I can't blame them for trying, any more than I'll blame a dreadlocked squatter for climbing in through my unlocked window to sleep on my leather chesterfield whilst drinking my finest single malt but we both know he's not entitled to it or welcome to it. And more to the point, we all know he's not right to demand it. Ask Yale, who make the locks - they know the customer is always right.
There's GOLD in them thar cliffs...