"Deportation... well, I do wonder if illegals are deported anymore...."
Don't they lose most of them on the way to the airport?

I used to work in rehabilitating ex-offenders - a guy would leave prison/detention, wearing a leg tag, his parole officer would see him off onto the train and we would be meeting him at his destination.........of course often enough he'd gotten off at another station inbetween, having dumped his tag down the loo on the train or chucked it out the window..........by the time the tagging service people got thier act together and it was officially noted.......that could be several months later.
This country couldn't run a pee up in a brewery!!

Sorry went a bit off topic there - but actually I once had a guy tell me that it was against his Human Rights to make him wear a tag "like a dog" - conveniently forgetting that the only reason why he was wearing it was that he'd been released before his sentence was complete!

Before my current job i worked at the Home office in ACD (Asylum Casework Directorate) i had to go through cases and decide whether they could be removed from the country or the case had to be sent to another part of the system (i.e. appeals or further representations etc) and sometime i might have sent a case file off to removals then 6 weeks later it comes back from removals back to me because during that 6 weeks the appilcant had sent in further representations that have to be considered. Their whole system in there is so slow that some people play on that to stay as long as possible as an illegal.

There was one guy, god knows how he managed it but he arrived here in 1989 and he was still here as an illegal, even though his case had been refused, appeal had been dismissed etc. his case came to me because i worked on a specialist team for more complex cases and his was just a case of over staying and now he had made fresh representations...again. in his supporting evidence he put down his occupation as market trader and in his bank statement it showed that he had £750,000 in the bank, that must be some busy market!
Anyway, because he had been here so long due to home office marry ups, he wasn't allowed to be removed, regardless of what his case was, because he had been here so long it would have been wrong to remove him. Because the home office is so slow and the asylum system is so overloaded with applicants more and more people will just be granted ILR (indefinite leave to remain) because the home office wont employ enough staff to do the task effectively.

What we are finding now is that the home office is quietly relaxing laws (for instance the family ILR laws) so that they can grant more people ILR and thus take some pressure off the system, but that isnt working because more people are going to come and apply. The government always seem to do things for the short term, it doesnt seem to have registered that if they doubled their asylum casework staff numbers for 5 years they could probably clear most of the backlog in 5 or 6 years, obviously that would double the staff budget for 5 years but at least its a long term solution to a very big ever increasing problem.

Everyone hates bureaucracy - except the bureaucrats!