As political speeches go, it struck familiar themes. An island nation was being overrun by dangerous criminals, taking advantage of its asylum system. Word was spreading that the country was a soft touch. And as ever, millions of ordinary folks were paying the price.

The violence is largely confined to the ghettoes, and many struggle to see why Britain’s asylum system classifies Trinidad as a warzone from which its citizens deserved sanctuary

Nigel Farage, on the stump in Clacton-on-Sea in 2024? Or Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud, perhaps, unveiling her tough new Danish-style migration policy earlier this month? No, the speaker was Keith Rowley, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean. But the island he was talking about was indeed Britain.

The UK has seen a nine-fold spike in the number of asylum claimants from Trinidad in the last decade – many of them criminals fleeing gang feuds. Britain’s response, however, has not been to weed out the bad apples, but to slap a blanket visa requirement on Trinidad’s 1.5 million people.

It is a huge inconvenience for the country’s law-abiding majority, a lot of whom have relatives in Britain, and who could previously visit without prior paperwork. Now they must pay £115 for a visa application and wait three weeks for it to be processed. Small wonder, then, that when the new visa regime was imposed in March last year, the reaction was fury. In a speech denouncing it, Rowley demanded to know why Britain wasn’t simply tightening up its asylum laws instead.

‘Once you land in British territory, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done, all you do is say you are asking for refugee status, and that you have come to them for aid and succour,’ he said.

The imposition of the visa requirement was a blow to Rowley’s ruling People’s National Movement party, which lost elections the following month amid alarm over Trinidad’s crime problems. The nation of 1.5 million suffered a record 623 murders in 2024, nearly half of them gang related. Long regarded as one of the Caribbean’s quieter, more tourist-friendly islands, Trinidad now has a murder rate higher than Jamaica’s.

The violence, though, is largely confined to the ghettoes, and many struggle to see why Britain’s asylum system classifies Trinidad as a warzone from which its citizens deserved sanctuary. Especially when some of those applying for asylum are themselves involved in the gang wars. They see Britain both as a bolthole when things get too hot back home, and as a base to build new drug-dealing networks.

I first learned about this when reporting on the island’s gang war problems last summer. Just how many Trinidadian crooks have fled to Britain is not entirely clear, but it appears to be an upwards trend.

In 2024, some 429 Trinidadians claimed asylum in Britain – nearly ten times as many as in 2015. Announcing the decision to impose a visa requirement last March, the Foreign Office blamed, ‘a significant increase in the number of unjustified asylum applications’, but did not go into specifics.

However, Fitzgerald Hines, Trinidad’s national security minister, admitted that some of the claimants were seeking to avoid ‘accountability to the law’. And the island’s national newspaper, the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, has set out the problems in detail. Last year, citing police sources, it said that a senior figure in Trinidad’s Seven Gang, who was already based in Britain, had set up a ‘covert pipeline’ for his associates to enter the UK.

‘He has been telling them exactly what to do as soon as they come off the plane from Trinidad and they arrive in the UK,’ a police source told the paper. ‘They put their hands up in the air as soon as they step off the plane and inform authorities that they are seeking asylum because of safety concerns of threats they face in Trinidad.’

The paper also cited an intelligence report sent by Trinidad’s police to their UK counterparts warning of a senior gang figure who ‘poses a serious and immediate threat to the safety and security of the United Kingdom.’ He had allegedly left Trinidad the year before, and planned to bring seven of his children whom he feared would be targets of violence.

Certainly, children are considered fair game in Trinidad’s gang wars. During my trip I met Anisa Rampersad, whose shack in a squatter camp outside Port-of-Spain was attacked by gunmen in 2023. They killed four of her five children. She admitted that a stepson had been ‘running with the wrong crowd’ but insisted the family had been the victims of mistaken identity. She told me that her surviving relatives were now trying to claim asylum themselves in the UK. It was not much comfort to know that her children’s killers might be doing the same.

‘There’s big drug lords in Trinidad who are killing people, and when it’s time to face the consequences they are claiming asylum in England, saying there’s people trying to kill them,’ she said. ‘Gang leaders who put themselves in harm’s way are running for asylum, while the people who really need it aren’t getting it.’

Some of those beating a path to the UK are suspected of serious crimes including kidnapping and murder. Alleged gangsters are said to have used safe houses in London, Milton Keynes and Reading, and even posted social media videos bragging about how they can now enjoy a life on benefits.

‘I living in England now, no way I coming back to Trinidad,’ says a man in one video, walking down a British high street. ‘I can do what I want, say what I want… Free money, free house, free hotel, free food, free security.’

Such videos have gone viral in Trinidad, and may account for why asylum claims have spiked in the last couple of years. Some Trinidadian officials suspect a few clued-up Trinidadian lawyers have advised local crooks of the loopholes.

Meanwhile, some have committed crimes in their new sanctuary in the UK. Last month, a Trinidadian asylum seeker, Akeem Lutchman-Singh was jailed for a masked raid on a Knightsbridge department store. He told the court he had been forced to carry out the raid by ‘people linked to my issues in Trinidad’.

So just how many Trinidadian criminals has Britain’s asylum system let in? Alas, the Foreign Office is somewhat coy on that. The guidance I was given was that most of the 439 asylum cases in 2024 were thought to be from ‘economic migrants’ rather than criminals. But when I asked, via a Freedom of Information request, for a more specific breakdown, I was told it would be too much work to provide. When I then asked to see the correspondence that had led to ministers making the decision, I was told that it was exempt from FOI rules because it could ‘prejudice relations’ with Trinidad.

Arguably, relations have been prejudiced already. Trinidadians now face extra expense, time and uncertainty to visit Britain, a country that many regard as a second home. A year in, what many had hoped might be just a stop-gap measure looks like it will be permanent.

‘At first they gave us the impression it might be temporary, but we get the sense now that this is done and dusted,’ one former Trinidadian minister told me, who took part in discussions with British officials on the island.

‘It complicates life for anyone who wants to visit Britain – students, sports teams, cultural groups, performers for Notting Hill Carnival. We did suggest to the Brits that the asylum system at their ends needs some attention. Why should ordinary Trinidadian travellers have to pay such a harsh price just because the system is being abused?’

The least Britain could do, Trinidadians feel, is to be candid about exactly who has been abusing the asylum system. After all, a few hundred economic migrants from Trinidad is a drop in the ocean compared to the tens of thousands coming in on small boats, so can that really be the reason?

Earlier this month, Shabana Mahmood set out new immigration rules – based on the tougher Danish model – that will scrap the right to permanent asylum and thwart those ‘who exploit the system and break our laws’. It’s meant to restore British confidence in the asylum system. She might consider trying to restore Trinidad’s confidence in it too.