British Prime Minister David Cameron has urged the public to report to authorities anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant, while simultaneously pledging to reduce the numbers of migrants arriving in the UK.
With grim economic prospects and a potential surge in voter support for parties to the right of his own Conservatives, Mr Cameron has pledged action on "badly controlled immigration."
"Levels of immigration can return to where they were in the 1980s and the 1990s, a time when immigration was not a front-rank political issue. I believe that that will mean net migration to this country will be in the order of tens of thousands each year, not the hundreds of thousands every year that we've seen over the last decade", Mr Cameron said in a speech to the Institute for Government in London.
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'"For our part in government, we are creating a new national crime agency with a dedicated border policing command which will have responsibility for safeguarding the security of our border."
"But I want everyone in the country to help … including by reporting suspected illegal immigrants to our Border Agency through the Crimestoppers phoneline or through the Border Agency website. Together, we will reclaim our borders and send illegal immigrants home."
Mr Cameron said the debate on immigration in the UK "often swings between extremes."
"It is right that we should attract the brightest and the best to Britain. We genuinely need foreign investors and entrepreneurs to come here", he said.
But he went on to offer initiatives ranging from proposals for a form of cash bond for families of migrants to making forced marriage a criminal offence, a tradition Mr Cameron noted was different to an arranged marriage that has the consent of both parties.
He also mooted upping the requirements of the citizenship test.
"There's a whole chapter in the citizenship handbook on British history but, incredibly, there is no question on British history in the actual test. So we are going to revise the whole test and put British history and culture at the heart of it."
Net migration to the UK last year rose to 243,000 in the year to September 2010, its highest level in five years, the Guardian reported.Read the speech in full here
