Immigration? It’s a funny old game ...

AS FOOTBALL’S transfer window slammed shut last night, Manchester United were still not certain when one of their expensive new signings will be allowed to pull on the famous red jersey.

Don’t panic, you haven’t wandered on to the back page by mistake. This isn’t a story about the madness of the human cattle market which pitches its tents at Premier League grounds every September. It’s about the insanity of Britain’s dysfunctional immigration system.

United agreed to pay Sporting Lisbon £16 million two weeks ago to secure the services of the Argentine defender Marcos Rojo. However, he has not played in any of the club’s opening fixtures because he is experiencing difficulties gaining a work permit.

Reports over the weekend said background checks had discovered that Rojo had been questioned by police following an altercation with a neighbour in Argentina back in 2004.

Although he was never charged, immigration officials want to interview him about the incident, which could be grounds for refusing him a visa.

In other news, the number of foreigners settling in Britain last year was 560,000. Over the same period, the Government issued 420,000 new National Insurance numbers to immigrants from within the European Union.

How many of them were subjected to background checks? Precisely none, other than a quick glance at their EU passports.

In the past 15 years, more than three million migrants (that the Government admits to) have come here, either to work or to claim asylum.

We have rolled out the red carpet for people we know absolutely nothing about. This country has become a safe haven for Islamist terrorists and fundamentalist preachers of hate, who want to destroy our way of life.

WE HAVE paid tens of millions of pounds to legal aid lawyers to argue the right of foreign murderers, rapists, torturers, jihadists and warlords to remain here.

Even when they commit crimes in this country, the courts are unwilling to deport them.

Many of them are living in subsidised council accommodation and are receiving a panoply of generous welfare payments, including child benefits for children who don’t even live here.

Recently, Roma gypsies from Eastern Europe have set up makeshift camps in our cities, most visibly at Marble Arch in London, where they specialise in shoplifting and aggressive begging.

On the rare occasions they are sent home, they’re back in five minutes. Our borders have become a revolving door. Making my way home from Spurs on Sunday, I spotted three cars with Estonian number- plates parked on a traffic island near a busy roundabout.

The doors were flung open and the occupants, who were scruffily dressed and must have numbered around a dozen, were enjoying a picnic. Coincidentally, I had just been listening to the story about Marcos Rojo’s visa difficulties on the radio.

I couldn’t help wondering what background checks had been carried out on these new arrivals brewing up in the middle of a suburban street. Lorry drivers were warned yesterday to avoid Calais, where knife- wielding young men from Africa and the Middle East are massing en-route to Britain. They will almost certainly get through.

Last month, a container-load of Afghans arrived at Tilbury, in Essex, having been smuggled here by criminal gangs. As they boarded a coach to the immigration centre at Croydon, television film showed each of them being handed a hi-viz jacket. You couldn’t make it up. Welcome to Britain. Hi-viz jackets must be worn at all times.

The health and safety of our illegal immigrants is our number one priority, not stopping them coming here in the first place.

More than a decade ago, the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police told me he estimated there could be as many as 250,000 foreign nationals living below the radar in London alone.

YOU can probably multiply that by three or four now. And still they keep coming. Consider that figure of 560,000 migrants settling here last year. That’s more than the population of Manchester, in a single year, under a Conservative-led Government which talked about cutting the numbers to the ‘tens of thousands’.

Is it any wonder that immigration now consistently tops the polls of voters’ concerns and people are flocking to Ukip? Of course, most of the migrants come here to take lowskilled jobs which bone-idle British ‘workers’ refuse to do, because they’d rather lounge around drinking all day on the dole. But how much do we know about the hundreds of thousands of people arriving every year? Practically nothing.

Yet people with valuable skills we do need from outside the EU are forced to jump through hoops or simply refused entry.

Britain may not actually be crying out for another foreign footballer, but Marcos Rojo is a case in point. He is coming here to work, not sponge off the State.

I’m only guessing, but I shouldn’t be surprised if Manchester United are paying him around £100,000 a week in wages, maybe more. He’s a full international who featured in this summer’s World Cup, so has a considerable market value.

Rojo won’t be a burden on British taxpayers. Quite the opposite. He’ll be paying somewhere in the region of £45,000 a week in tax and he’ll live in a house owned by the club.

Unlike some of the foreign charmers we are happy to allow in to Britain, he doesn’t exactly pose a clear and present danger to anyone — except, perhaps, to opposing centre forwards.

So why are immigration officials holding up his work permit over a scuffle he had with a neighbour in Argentina ten years ago? Answer: because they can. Marcos Rojo would have received a warmer welcome if he’d come here in the back of a container lorry.