Successful deportations of bogus asylum seekers have fallen to an all-time low, according to reports, as think tank Migration Watch UK estimates an illegal migrant population in excess of 1.1 million.

New figures reported by the Daily Mail show the number of rejected asylum applicants actually removed from the country has plummeted by around two-thirds since 2010, when the Conservative Party came to power under former Prime Minister David Cameron.

Officially, the backlog of migrants judged ‘subject to removal action’ stood at 26,000 at the end of 2016 – but the authorities successfully expelled only a little over a tenth of this number during the course of the year.

The news comes as the security situation across Europe appears to be deteriorating, with rejected asylum seekers who were left at large in Germany and Sweden being accused of carrying out mass-casualty terror attacks in Berlin and Stockholm.

Migration Watch UK chairman Lord Green of Deddington, who advocates a policy of balanced migration, claims the authorities only deport 50 per cent of those migrants who have their asylum applications rejected.

“Clearly there has not been enough focus on this problem and not enough resources dedicated to it,” he declared.

“As long as anyone who claims asylum has a 75 per cent chance of staying in the UK, legally or otherwise, there will continue to be queues in Calais,” he added, referring to the city on the French coast which was formerly the site of the crime-ridden Jungle camp, and to which migrants are now said to be returning in their hundreds.

“Public confidence in the whole asylum system will be severely undermined.”

Henry Bolton OBE, former head of the Borders Unit at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), had told Breitbart London that the European Union’s Dublin III regulations play a substantial role in Britain’s seeming inability to deport illegal migrants.

Bolton explained that these rules prevent the Home Office from removing migrants who arrive in the UK via safe countries within the EU – such as France – as a matter of course.

Instead, the UK must determine the first EU member-state the migrant entered and deport him or her to there – a task which can prove impossible if the individual in question has no traceable documents and refuses to divulge the information voluntarily.

Dublin III, therefore, represents a not insignificant obstacle for the authorities. For example, only 14 out of several thousand illegal migrants who arrived from France were sent back across the Channel in 2014.