Spain's illegal migrants could soon be at our gates - they know just how generous Labour will be

The footage of migrant men flooding into the Spanish territory of Ceuta last week was shocking, but not surprising.

Over the past year, the Spanish Government has granted a general amnesty to more than half a million illegal migrants, giving them the right to stay in the country despite having broken the law by arriving in the first place.

The Spanish Supreme Court, meanwhile, has restricted the Government’s ability to remove illegal migrants from Ceuta.

And so, believing that the Spanish Government would be unwilling to remove them, an estimated 60,000 illegal migrants, almost all of them men, flooded into Ceuta, in hopes that this would provide a gateway to Europe.

Most of them have, apparently, been removed. But last week’s events must bring home a few realities for our own Government.

The first is that the demand to move to European countries, including Britain, far outstrips our ability to process, accommodate, or assimilate people.

Around the world, there are hundreds of millions of people who would rather live in Europe than in their countries of origin – but clearly, European countries cannot take them all.

This is particularly true when we consider the fact that many of those people come from societies with completely different norms and habits to those that we consider acceptable in Britain, and in Europe as a whole.

The second is that many of those people now have the means, and the will, to travel to Europe’s borders, where they will use every avenue available to them to cross.

If they can apply for a visa successfully, they might do so. But if they can’t, then many millions of people are willing to break our laws in order to reach Europe, particularly where they view European governments as a soft touch.

Once they’re in Europe, many of these migrants, legal or illegal, will travel across the continent in search of the most favourable treatment.

They will look for the countries least likely to remove them, and which provide the most generous state support.

And in doing so, many will look to Britain.

Since coming to power, Labour has scrapped rules introduced by the last Government which banned illegal migrants from ever being accepted as asylum seekers.

They now remove fewer than one in six failed asylum seekers.

Meanwhile, the Home Secretary talks about "safe and legal routes", and continues to allow hundreds of thousands of people to come to this country every year.

For an illegal migrant who has arrived in Spain or Italy, and travelled up through France, the Channel crossing to Britain looks incredibly appealing.

Those looking to come here illegally know that they’re very unlikely to be sent home, and that while they’re here, they’ll receive generous support from our Government, courtesy of the taxpayer.

If the British Government won’t take Britain’s borders seriously, why should we expect illegal migrants to do so?

Unless they get their act together, the kinds of people who made that crossing into Ceuta could soon end up on our shores.