Patrick Christys: We need to toughen up and tighten our borders – if we don’t, it’s nothing short of a massive act of national self-harm

A convicted human trafficker is being deported from the UK for a third time in less than two years.

Let that sink in…a convicted human trafficker is being deported from the UK for the third time in less than two years.

So a man who trades in peoples lives, which is probably the worst kind of human being there is, has managed to come to Britain, be kicked out, come back to Britain, be kicked out, and then come back again.

Does anyone want to take a bet with me about how long it will be before he’s back again? A few weeks?

But as if his current job as a human trafficker wasn’t bad enough, it does actually get a lot worse.

Albanian Hazir Lala has a criminal record as long as your arm. In April 2016 he was convicted of multiple driving offences and the possession of false ID documents. He was disqualified from driving for 15 months and jailed for six months. He was arrested again in the UK on 4 September 2019 for organised immigration crime offences committed in Belgium. He was extradited to Belgium in early 2020 where he was convicted of human trafficking and participating in a criminal organisation. Lala was given a five-year prison sentence, which was partially suspended. He was also ordered to pay a fine of €102,000. He was arrested again under the Immigration Acton 20 February last year for overstaying. Another deportation order was signed on 7 April 2020 and he was removed and sent back to Albania on 19 August 2020.

We are, as a nation, well and truly there for the taking aren’t we? This guy has made a mockery of our border security, in fact he’s made a living recently out of exploiting how pathetic our border security is. Hazir Lala is the prime example of the fact that we urgently need to up our game when it comes to our borders. It’s the epitome of the national security argument.

By definition it’s very hard to calculate exactly how many illegal immigrants there are in the UK, but estimates put it at between 800,000 and 1.5 million. How many of these people have a criminal past like Hazir Lala? How many of these people work in illegal industries? How many of these people, would you argue, are good for Britain? And this is also why language is so important.

Classing every single person who comes over the Channel as an asylum seeker is both factually incorrect and also actively damaging. Because it shuts down debate about whether or not some of these people pose a threat to national security.

Classing every single illegal immigrant as some kind refugee fleeing war is, again, factually incorrect and shuts down a very necessary discussion on our national security.

These arguments are all to often put forward by people living in well-to-do areas like Kingston-Upon-Thames who, frankly, would never bump into someone like Hazir Lala, let alone live next door to him.

The time will come when we have so many of these people in this country that it does eventually start to affect the lives of the very privileged, and that’s when, finally, we’ll see some action on this.

But I don’t want to wait until then – there will be thousands of Hazir Lala’s in Britain right now, we don’t need any more.

We need to toughen up and tighten our borders immediately – if we don’t do that, then it’s nothing short of a massive act of national self harm.