BORIS JOHNSON is to unveil his plan for an amnesty for illegal immigrants on TV tonight.


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“They could make a contribution to society,” says the London Mayor in an interview with the BBC’s Panorama programme, which airs at 8:30pm this evening.

“We should regularise their status or offer them the chance of regularising their status.”

Johnson knows the amnesty idea is a “hard political argument to win”, given both Labour and his own Tory party opposition, so he’s commissioned a study of illegal immigration patterns to give his idea some statistical beef.

That research, conducted by the London School of Economics, suggests there are some 500,000 illegals living in London, a huge number which makes the two main parties’ plans for mass deportation non-sensical, as well as cruel: at the current rate it would take 34 years and £9B to kick the unwanted out, calculates the LSE.

Johnson’s bravery on the immigration issue is tempered a bit by his insistence that those given citizenship would have to meet “some very tough criteria”, including having a certain amount of cash in the bank, passing some creepy-sounding “commitment to society” test and proof of at least five years’ residence.

Predictably, the plan drew the fire of Phil Woolas, the government’s Immigration Minister who said: “The proposal for an amnesty starts with a conversation in London and ends up with dead bodies in the back of lorries in northern France.”

Woolas’s reasoning is that an amnesty would give the green light to people-traffickers, but it is under his own party’s watch that dead bodies have been found in lorries and in fact, immigration and emigration, legal and illegal, tend to go up and down with the economy; for instance, the recent downturn has seen a sharp decline in immigration.