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British Home Secretary Suella Braverman on Tuesday vowed to do whatever it takes to stop illegal immigration across the English Channel.

In her first major speech as home secretary, Braverman toldthe Conservative Party conference in Birmingham that she wants to cut [the] overall numbers of immigration, adding the UK shouldnt be relying wholly on low skilled foreign workers.

Invoking her own heritage as a second-generation immigrant, Braverman said her parents embraced British values and integrated into the community, which didnt meanabandoning their heritage.

The home secretary said British people are losing sight ofthe core values and the culture that made it so and have been led astray by a combination of unexamined drive towards multiculturalism as an end in itself and the corrosive aspects of identity politics.

Weve got to stop the boats crossing the Channel, Braver told the conference, referring to small boats carrying illegal immigrants who enter Britain by clandestinelycrossing the English Channel from France.

According to Home Office figures, the number of people smuggled into the UK in small boats has soared in recent years, with 28,526 people detected in 2021, compared to 8,466 in 2020, 1,843 in 2019, and 299 in 2018.

By the end of September, some 32,807 people had made the perilous journey this year.

Braverman said there are no quick fixes to the chronic problem, pledging her total and undeniable and unfettered and unconditional commitment to doing whatever it takes to tackle the issue.

The home secretary said she would work with the French to ramp up actions on the French coastline and against people-smuggling gangs; find a way to make the Rwanda scheme work; get asylum seekers out of hotels, which she said costs 5 million a day; and take back control of the UKs immigration policy from theEuropean Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

People who deliberately enter the United Kingdom illegally from a safe country should be swiftly returned to their home country or relocated to Rwanda, she said.

Bravermans predecessor Priti Patel signed a deal with Rwanda in April, allowing the UK to send illegal immigrants, including those who seek asylum, on a one-way flight to the African country.

But her first attempt to relocate people to Rwanda was frustrated by the ECHR in Strasbourg, which issued a last-minute injunction to ground the flighta decision Patel said was made in an opaque way and was politically motivated.

Braverman praised Patel and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson for making the groundbreaking deal, saying the UK needs to take back control fromthe Strasbourg court.

She also said the UKs modern slavery laws are being abused by people gaming the system, citing a 450 percent increase in modern slavery claims since 2014many of which she said are liesandanecdotes of foreign sex offenders blocking their removal by making modern slavery claims.

Braverman vowed to seek to introduce new legislation, saying, UK policy on illegal migration should not be derailed by abuse of our modern slavery laws, Labours Human Rights Act, or orders of the Strasbourg Court, and pledged todouble down on enforcement.

Braverman also said she wants Britain to cut overall numbers in immigration, in an apparent departure from the previous governments policy.

It comes after speculation that the government may loosen immigration rules for skilled immigrant workers to plug shortages in the labour market.

Braverman said theres absolutely no reason why we cant train up enough of our own HGV drivers, or butchers, or fruit pickers, adding, The way we build a high-skilled, high-wage economy is by encouraging business to invest in capital and domestic labour, not relying wholly on low skilled foreign workers.

Earlier on Tuesday, Braverman said at a fringe event of theConservative Party conference that it was her ultimate aspiration to fulfill the pledges of the Conservative governments under former Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron and reduce the number of net immigration to tens of thousands.

Im not going to commit to a number. I think we have got to definitely substantially reduce the number of students, the number of work visas, and in particular the number of dependents on those sorts of visas, she said.

Ditching the previous Conservative governments pledge to reduce immigration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands, Johnson campaigned on an Australian-style points-based immigration system in 2019.

Under the policy his government introduced, EU citizens could no longer move to the UK without visas from Jan. 1, 2021, but there was a liberalisation of immigration policies for skilled non-EU workers.

A record-high number of visas were granted in the year ending June 2022, but thesize of post-Brexit net immigration is unknown, owing to an interruption of survey data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Office for National Statisticss (ONSs) ongoing process of changing its estimation methods.

Thelatest ONS estimatesaid net immigration in the year ending June 2021 was around239,000, slightly down from the year ending June 2020 (260,000), but these estimates were based on experimental methods and are subject to uncertainty.

In her main speech, which ended in a standing ovation, Braverman said its the highest duties of [the] state to keepBritish people safe and secure borders.

She pledged to tackle violent crime, voicing her support for the police while telling the forces to get back to common-sense policing instead of pandering to identity politics.

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Lily Zhou is an Irish-based reporter focusing on UK news. Lily first joined the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times before turning her focus on the UK in 2020. Contact Lily at lily.zhou@epochtimes.com

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UK's Braverman Pledges 'Whatever It Takes' to Stop Illegal Immigration - The Epoch Times