Britain must stop blaming Albanians to justify its own government’s “political failures” on crime and border security, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has said, as quoted by the BBC.

Edi Rama said that London’s rhetoric, which blames Albanian citizens for crimes and the problems the United Kingdom has at the border, ignores the facts, News.ro reports.

“Pointing the finger at Albanians (as some also infamously did when campaigning for Brexit) as the cause of Britain’s crime and border problems is easy rhetoric but ignores hard facts. It’s not healthy to repeat the same thing and expect different results (ask Einstein),” Prime Minister Edi Rama wrote on Twitter.

He also said that Albanians in Britain “work hard and pay taxes”, adding: “(Britain) must fight against criminal gangs of all nationalities and stop discriminating against Albanians to justify political failures.”

Albania’s prime minister has said he is ready to work more intensively with Great Britain on this issue, but “facts” and “mutual respect” are decisive.

The English Channel, which was crossed by a record number of Albanians

Albanians are currently the largest group of people crossing the English Channel in small boats, and their numbers have increased significantly over the past two years.

British parliamentarians were told last week that since the start of this year, 12,000 Albanians have arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel, compared to just 50 in 2020 (when borders were still closed for extended periods due to the pandemic – no).

Of these, 10,000 were men, which would represent 1 percent of Albania’s adult male population.

British Home Secretary Suella Braverman said many of these immigrants were “abusing” Britain’s modern slavery laws.

She has been criticized for using the term “invasion” to refer to the growing number of immigrants arriving on England’s south coast.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said it was a “horrible word” and that politicians should make sure their language does not “add gas to the fire of people’s concerns”.

On Monday, Suella Braveman agreed with Tory MP Lee Anderson’s suggestion that “Albanian criminals” were leaving the safe country to come to Britain. The deputy also noted that “if Albanians do not like living in Great Britain, they can only get on boats and return directly to France.”

In this context, the British government wants asylum applications from Albanian applicants to be processed more quickly.

Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick said last week that the British government was considering creating a special way to process Albanian asylum applications more quickly so that those rejected could be quickly sent back to Albania.

A problem that has been going on for four years

The reality is that currently the vast majority of those being sent back to Albania are convicted criminals who have served time in prison, people being deported under long-term agreements. They are not among the people who have crossed the English Channel in recent months and who have sought asylum or submitted claims on the grounds that they were victims of human trafficking.

Although Albania is considered a safe country by the Ministry of the Interior, if someone makes a credible claim for asylum, it must be considered. This means that these people will not be sent back until they have gone through all the stages – a process that can take years.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs has a huge backlog of 101,000 pending asylum cases. Backlogs have piled up as caseworkers take more and more time to make decisions.

This situation has worsened during four years, during which so many ministers were lost in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and none of them gave any solution. British Labor leader Keir Starmer. accused the government of losing control.

That is why experts on immigration policy and the prime minister of Albania say that the government itself caused this crisis, the BBC reports. (News.ro)