'I am an experienced asylum judge in a major British population centre - our immigration controls are broken and the country cannot cope'

I am an experienced asylum judge in a major British population centre and you must believe me when I say this: our immigration controls are broken and the country cannot cope.

Britain has a proud tradition of helping the oppressed, which is why I am pleased to have spent the past two decades reviewing the cases of people seeking a place of safety.

In my time, I have seen a number of moving and entirely deserving cases, victims of torture meted out by oppressive regimes, for example.

My rulings have helped them stay here to build new lives.

Such people still need our support today, but to describe them as a minority of those who appear before me is a tragic understatement because the truth is that the great majority of the claimants at my tribunals are not attempting to escape persecution at all. They are economic migrants, pure and simple.

Often, the stories they tell me are palpably false and in some cases absurd, and I have no hesitation turning them down.

Yet – and this is the truly frustrating part – only a tiny proportion, between five and ten per cent of the people I recommend for removal, are ever taken from these shores.

I was in no way surprised by last week’s government figures showing that thousands of false and retrospective asylum claims are clogging up the system, because I have seen this with my own eyes.

Some of these claims are lodged years after the migrant first arrived. Only when the authorities catch up with them do they find a solicitor.

I am barred from speaking without the permission of the Home Office, so today I must remain anonymous and so must the cases I have dealt with.

Yet some of the stories told to me and my fellow judges beggar belief. Take the example of the middle-aged woman from West Africa who claimed that she was escaping from a grandmother threatening her with female genital mutilation (FGM).

Now FGM is a horrific practice that is carried out on millions of young girls but never – according to my investigations – on very mature women. Especially not by their elderly grandmothers.

Another scam is worked by Chinese claimants. Many come before me saying they have joined the Falun Gong religion and therefore cannot go back to China, which has a record of persecuting the sect. Sorting out the truth in such cases is difficult.

Then there are those who claim the right to a family life, which is the last resort of the rascal in my opinion.

Only a tiny proportion, between five and ten per cent of the people I recommend for removal, are ever taken from these shores, according the an asylum judge

A colleague of mine had before him the case of a Muslim from Asia who had lived here for years with a wife and children, and then went back to his country of birth to marry three other wives, as he is allowed to do under Islamic law, and had more children.

Those later children then claimed British nationality, even though we don’t recognise polygamy in our marriage laws, and the mothers also claimed the right to come over here with the children on the basis of a right to family life. That obligation was imposed on the UK Government by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Right.

Astounding as it might seem to you or to me, they were successful on appeal.

I also know of the case of a girl from West Africa who claimed to have been abducted, raped and fallen pregnant, but then had a child only five months after the dates she gave.

Then there was the West African man who claimed to have escaped from captivity as a child soldier and walked home.

As I’m familiar with the geography of that area, I knew that the place where the army was supposed to have taken him was 3,000 miles away from his home – and the route was mostly jungle.

As for Afghan asylum seekers, most of them that come here are underage children sent on by their parents. The Government automatically gives them temporary leave to stay. Then, as soon as they reach 18 and are ordered home, they claim asylum.

The Government automatically gives unaccompanied underage Afghan children temporary leave to stay

I must say that the ones I’ve encountered – they are all boys of course – have been highly intelligent and charming. If, however, they can’t explain an unreasonable delay in making their claim, we rule against them. I sometimes wonder why we bother. The appeal process can go on for years, by which time some claimants have married a British national or had a child with one.

David Cameron said he would reduce the problem of illegals to the tens of thousands but it is little wonder that he failed to do so.

It is a straightforward lack of political will. In my view the authorities have concluded that it is simply not cost effective to enforce the law; not that they will admit it.

Nor will they tell the truth about the sheer scale of the problem in the first place.

Can Europe really sustain three million people coming to its shores every year? More than 200,000 people claimed asylum in this country in the decade up to 2014, and another 40,000 last year. The ways of entering the country are numerous and often impossible to police.

It is easy, for example, to acquire forged passports, birth and death certificates in many foreign countries.

More than 200,000 people claimed asylum in this country in the decade up to 2014, and another 40,000 last year

The fact is that mass immigration is a world phenomenon and a booming business.

One group of British judges who went abroad on a work trip were astonished to find themselves being offered false papers by a man in the street. It was done as casually as if they were touting tickets for a pop concert.

British colleges and universities take lucrative fees from foreign students. Some of them overstay their visas, only finally claiming asylum if the authorities track them down.

People without the proper papers can go below the radar for years. How do I know this?

Partly because of the cases that come before me, but also because of the evidence from the sewage industry – an excellent way of gauging how many people are really living in this country.

The discrepancy between the official figures and what is actually going down the pipes shows there are a million more people in London than are legally registered, and another half a million more outside the capital.

In a way, we should be honoured that we are a decent country and people want to come here. It is to our credit that we are not racist like some other parts of the European population.

Even so, there is a practical limit to tolerance. The British public will not put up with housing all who come here.

You can be as liberal as you like about the issue, but it has a big impact on our poorer communities where resources are scarce and there is competition for jobs and housing.

Our population is growing at the fastest rate for nearly a century, at around half a million people a year. It has been suggested this means building the equivalent of a city the size of Liverpool every year.

British colleges and universities take lucrative fees from foreign students

Those champions of freedom of immigration tend to live privileged lives away from the problems of overcrowded schools and surgeries. Their children are not going to schools where they are the only ones who speak English and the others have to have lessons that hold everyone in the class back by several years.

As it happens, I am politically liberal. But neither Left or Right are honest about the problem.

The Conservatives do not want to spend the necessary money sorting it out, while New Labour under Tony Blair helped create the mess by realising that migration, legal and illegal, is a source of cheap labour to boost the economy.

In addition, most on the Left are too fearful of being considered racist if they criticise immigration levels.

Until recently, no politician was prepared to discuss it, which is daft. Grow up!

In the long run, the answer to the immigration explosion is a fairer distribution of resources worldwide.

North African countries, for instance, need access to European markets; they need developed economies and a decent life for their citizens.

Until that happens, those false claimants we do manage to remove will continue to return.

But there are measures we can take in the short term, too. I would like to see us going back to the old system of questioning people about their claims as soon as they arrive.

That was stopped after it was decided that it was too traumatic to question people immediately.

I question the automatic right of people to live here permanently by marrying a British national or by having a child with a British national. Too many of these arrangements are short-lived.

I have never understood the logic of why EU citizens have the right to bring their entire families over here simply because they are based here to work.

A colleague of mine presided over the case of a European citizen with an African wife, who produced her marriage certificate as proof that she was entitled to stay here.

At the time the husband was actually living in America – for rather a long time as it happened, since he was doing ten years in an American jail.

We should clamp down still further on the black market in labour that allows illegals to stay below the radar.

And, of course, we need to give the Borders Agency adequate resources and real political backing so that when my fellow judges and I decide that a claim is false – and, remember, this undermines those in genuine need – our rulings are met with action.

We are lucky that Britain is an island with its own natural barrier, but at the moment immigration judges like me are presiding over an impossible situation.

It is essential that we grasp the nettle. For that, however, we must first tell the truth about the disastrous state we are in.

The author has received no payment for this article.