'Albanians themselves…are decent people, but the people who bring them are criminals' says David Davis

Former Brexit Secretary David Davis said the Channel migrant crisis can be solved very quickly with a change to the modern slavery laws.

He was speaking after it emerged that he wrote a letter signed by 50 MPs demanding that the Prime Minister amends legislation to allow people arriving from “safe countries” to be deported quickly.

He told GB News: “The Albanian problem is a new problem. It's grown in the last year, 12,000 really from next to nothing a year earlier. It’s a huge increase. It's overwhelming the system and the Albanians are coming from a safe country.

“We're all members of the European Convention on Human Rights. They have got less complaints against them than we have in the court, so they're a safe country.

“First off…the Swedes with a fantastic human rights record and so on have, from the beginning of 2021, said, if you come from Albania, you can't claim asylum. You're sent straight back. No, ifs or buts, you go straight back. The only qualification is some other consideration of the humanitarian situation.

“So that's half the problem. The other half of the problem is if that doesn't work, they're told by the people who bring them - and bear in mind the Albanians themselves may by perfectly decent people but the people who bring them are criminals - the people that bring them tell them to claim this, claiming that you've been trafficked.

"Well, it seems a fairly straightforward, common sense change. If we change the law on trafficking, say, if you come from a safe country, we can send you back to your own home and if you want to pursue a legal case, and you can do so from there, not from here,

"We have to stop the system from being overwhelmed.”

Speaking to Mark Longhurst on GB News he said: “One of the problems is the longer you take the more appeals you get.

“There is the harsh truth, if they're here for a couple of weeks, they'll find a British lawyer and away they go. If they're here for a couple of years, they'll meet somebody, get married, have children and then the story is over. They can stay because they have family rights.

“The quicker you do it, the better. But the best thing I can do is point you to the Swedish example. The Swedes introduced this in April, I think, of last year and they've got zero asylum approval since then. Zero, and they did it off the back of an international court, a European Court judgement, so it's based on international law.

“If we’ve got the gumption to do it with all new arrivals from a safe country, I don’t mean from Syria or Afghanistan where they might have a claim, but from a safe country, then frankly, it should knock out almost all of the 12,000 a year that we're looking at the moment.”

On the new immigration deal with the French government, he said: “That by itself won't solve it because what happens is the French police find them, they destroy the boat and they release them and they’ll come and have another go. They don't arrest them.

“I think we've got to take away the legal basis, the loopholes that are acting as a form factor for these people and that allows us then to deal properly with the other ones.”