UN accord ‘will hike illegal migrants’

FEARS have been raised the UK will lose control over immigration by pressing ahead with plans to sign a new United Nations accord.

The UN’s Global Compact for Migration is due to be signed at a conference in Morocco on December 10 but UK allies, including the US, Australia, Austria, Japan, Denmark, Poland and Hungary, are refusing to sign up to it or have expressed serious concerns.

Critics fear the Compact will blur the difference between legal and illegal immigration making it difficult for the UK to stop migrants pouring into the country.

Campaign group Migration Watch UK claimed it could lead to Britain having to accept an extra 70,000 migrants a year.

Research by the campaign group claimed the UN document suggested the best way to cut the number of illegal migrants was to increase legal immigration. It is believed there are about one million illegal migrants in the UK.

Alp Mehmet, vice chairman of the group, said: “The Compact appears to have been drafted by diplomats whose aim seems to be to

‘normalise’ mass immigration from the developing world to the West at a time when the public are clear they find the scale and pace of such flows to be unsustainable and unacceptable.”

In November 2017, the UK Government said the Compact should include a commitment that states “must maintain the right and obligation of all states to control their borders” adding it “needs to improve the ways we distinguish between refugees fleeing persecution and economic migrants” and that ‘the international community must help ensure refugees seek asylum in the first country that can offer protection”. Campaigners said the suggestions were “sensible” but they were not in the final text, nor the word “control”. A Foreign Office source confirmed the Government planned to sign the Compact and had “spoken positively about it”. He added officials believe it will enhance the right of nation states to control levels of migration.