Our borders are breached — and we’re all looking the wrong way. Most of the current debate about undocumented migration in the UK is focused on cost. Politicians talk about the price of housing arrivals in hotels. Newspapers run figures on the pressure on local services. Communities understandably worry about how schools, doctors, and housing stock will cope. These are legitimate concerns — but they’re not the most important. In fact, they risk distracting us from the real and urgent issue: the collapse of our first line of national defence.
Britain’s border security is designed on a simple principle — catch the threat before it enters the country. At airports, ferry ports, and international train stations, travellers show passports. Their identities are checked against criminal and terrorist databases. Those flagged are stopped before they can set foot in the UK. When people arrive on small boats or hidden in lorries, that process doesn’t happen. There’s no passport check. No watchlist search. Often, no documents at all. For the authorities, they are complete unknowns — ghosts on arrival.
Instead of stopping a potential threat at the border, we are forced to find it inside the country. That’s a fundamental and dangerous change in doctrine — from “border-first” to “inside-first”. In military terms, our forward defensive line has been breached, and the fight has moved inside the walls. Any soldier will tell you: when that happens, the chances of collateral damage go up, the cost in resources skyrockets, and the risk to civilians rises sharply.
Stopping a suspect at Heathrow takes minutes. Identifying and locating them once they’ve vanished into a city of millions can take months — or never happen at all. Every hour between arrival and identification is an opportunity for anyone with malicious intent to plan, move, and act.
And make no mistake, hostile actors notice weaknesses. Terrorist networks, organised crime groups, and foreign intelligence agencies actively look for routes that avoid scrutiny. Why risk passing through a highly monitored airport when you can arrive undetected on a dark beach in Kent?
The problem isn’t hypothetical. MI5 and the police already operate at full-stretch monitoring known threats. Now, they must also spend time and manpower on the unknown — working backwards to discover identities, track movements, and build profiles. Every officer diverted to chase a ghost is one less watching an active suspect.
A secure border is more than a physical checkpoint; it’s a message. It says: “We control who enters.” The current situation sends the opposite signal: “If you can get here, you can get in.” That message spreads — not only among the desperate, but among the dangerous.
This undermines deterrence. It encourages more attempts. And the more irregular arrivals we have, the harder it becomes to distinguish genuine asylum seekers from those seeking to evade justice or carry out harm.
Yes, housing migrants costs money. Yes, local services are under strain. But those issues, while important, are secondary to the question of security. If the first we know about a dangerous individual is when they commit an offence in the UK, then we’ve already lost. The human and political cost of a single serious incident could dwarf the hotel bills we currently argue about.
It’s as if we’re staring at the water damage on the carpet and ignoring the fact the front door has been kicked in. The answer is to re-establish the border as the first and primary line of defence. That means:
The point is not to shut the door on those in genuine need — but to make sure we know exactly who is coming through it. That’s how security works.
Britain’s intelligence and security services are among the best in the world. But they work best when they can see the threat coming. Right now, a portion of arrivals are coming in unseen, and that forces us to fight blind. In today’s security climate — with state actors probing for weaknesses and terror networks active in Europe — that is a gamble we cannot afford.
The conversation about cost will continue. But while we argue about hotel bills and council budgets, the real bill could come due in blood, not money. And if that happens, it will be because we were all looking the wrong way while the gate stood open.
