ALIEN INFLUX

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23170, 17 October 1938, Page 8

ALIEN INFLUX

CONCERN IN ENGLAND JEWB FROM GERMANY* - . ■ - fflmSKt i PREVENTION OF SMUGGLING £FEOM a SPECIAL COBBESPOSDEXTI LONDON, Sept. 17 •pngliah people are becoming mor* and more perturbed at the apparent ease with which aliens, often undesirable characters, are being smuggled int<* England. Where do these refugees land?, Scotland Xard believe that a large proportion of smuggled men and women arrested this year stepped ashore in the neighbourhood of Aldrington Basin, 4 tiny Sussex harbour described by one investigator as "practically an open door" to foreign fugitives. Aldrington Basin is two and a-half miles long. Tip that narrow stretch pass a« average of 32 steamers a week from France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. The two and a-half miles of land •' through which they pass is not yet closed in any way. There are no dock gates, no watching keepers. There are some wharves, with stacks of timber and huge pile* of bricks between which a man can step straight ashore and disappear. The Belgian Captain Tittleiohn declared this week: —"I have had u> post special notices in my ship warning the < crew against accepting offers for smuggling refugee Jews from Antwerp. There is an organisation working there which gets them out of Germany and then finds them a passage in a ship.> The organisation offers a seaman about £5 to stow away a man and help hira ashore. That is all the seamen" get. But the refugee pays to the organisation anything up to £SO for smuggling him ' all the way from Germany to England." On the lonely stretches of beaches near Aldrington Basin, police are now. patrolling in couples all night.