An asylum system is a moral instrument or it is a racket. It cannot be both. The claim now circulating from inside the Home Office is that, in the judgment of a long-serving decision-maker who has seen thousands of cases, it is already the second of those things. "At best," he says, one claim in a hundred is genuine. Almost no part of the machine, he adds, is free of fraud or of the kind of dysfunction that might as well be fraud. That is not a statistic. It is an accusation from a man who does the work. It should be treated as such: neither waved away because it is anonymous, nor elevated into a census. The details he gives are specific enough to be checked. If they are true, the country is not running a refuge. It is running a service industry for people who have learned the scam.

The method is not improvisation. It is packaging. Iraqi Kurds arrive with the same story so often that colleagues treat it as an office joke: they were in a relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan region. Hundreds of them, apparently, and the same daughter. Pakistani men arrive as gay lovers of the same man, armed with the same letters of support and photographs from the same east London club, ten topless strangers arranged into a tableau of desire for a caseworker who is not allowed to ring anyone who might know whether the club night happened. Bangladeshis discover, with impressive timing, that they were senior officers of a party whose name changes when the government at home changes. Asked what the party stood for, they offer a slogan. Asked what they did as president or general secretary, they say they helped poor students. The documents that follow recycle the same judge, the same magistrate, the same town. A genuine refugee does not need a template. A market does.

The process is built to give the market time. First comes a short screening interview in which vagueness is cheap. Months later comes the long interview, by which point advice has been taken, evidence has been assembled, and a story that would have collapsed on day one has acquired footnotes. Delay is not a side effect. It is the product. A sick note buys more months. The official's point is blunt: if the persecution already happened, the claimant should not need a rehearsal period. Rehearsal is what you need when the persecution has to be written.

Then the incentives inside the department finish the job. Granting a claim, he says, can take half an hour. Refusing one can take hours, because every assertion must be answered, sometimes to the point of telling the applicant how to contact the police in the country he claims will kill him, and listing his constitutional rights there. The legal test is "more likely than not." Combined with a workload and a culture that calls applicants "customers," the path of least resistance is obvious. You are not, in that language, a servant of the public that must house, pay for and live beside the person you admit. You are a clerk in a shop whose stock is settlement.

None of this requires the fantasy that every asylum claim is a lie. People flee real secret police, real militias, real family murder. A serious country distinguishes them from the man who has purchased a sexuality, a political membership and a letterhead. The Home Office's own numbers already confess that the old generosity was unsustainable: the grant rate on initial decisions has fallen from 77 per cent in 2022 to 38 per cent. That drop is not proof the whistleblower is wrong. It is proof the department knows the previous standard was being gamed and is now trying, late, to look as if it noticed. Confidentiality rules still forbid officials from asking the home country whether the warrant is real. The prohibition exists for a decent reason. In a system flooded with identical forgeries, it also functions as a shield for the forger.

Pakistan and Bangladesh sit among the top nationalities claiming asylum. A large share of claims are not from people stepping off a dinghy into a first interview. They are from people who entered on work, study or visitor visas and then overstayed. That is not the profile of a midnight flight from a death squad. It is the profile of a visa used as a bridge. Small boats remain the visible insult, a dinghy from near Cherbourg, far west of the usual launch points, because the trade adapts faster than the state, but the quieter route is the student who becomes a customer of the asylum shop when the course ends.

Call this a "scam" and the reply arrives on cue: you are attacking the desperate. The opposite is true. Every false claim consumes a bed, a caseworker, a hearing, a hotel and a portion of public patience that genuine refugees need. A system that cannot say no to the package claimant will eventually lose the authority to say yes to anyone. That is how asylum dies in a democracy: not because voters become cruel, but because they stop believing the word.

What to do? Take the story at the first interview, before the industry has time to write it. Make refusal as administratively cheap as grant, or cheaper. Treat recycled documents, recycled lovers and recycled party ranks as evidence of a trade, not as 400 separate tragedies. Follow the lawyers and advisers who sell the script. Remove those whose claims collapse, on a plane, not into another round of papers. And stop calling the applicant a customer. He is asking a nation to take on a duty that, if real, is sacred, and if fake, is theft. A country that cannot tell the difference has not become kind, it has become a soft touch open for scamming.

https://archive.is/lqS4a