Britain counted us. Then it filed the answer where nobody would look.

On 31 October 2022, in a Commons statement on the Manston processing centre, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman said the British people deserved to know which party was serious about stopping “the invasion on our southern coast”. (The remark is almost universally misquoted as “invasion of our southern coast”; Hansard says “on”.) In the same sitting, asked specifically about Albanians, she said that young single Albanian men were “either part of organised criminal gangs” or were coming to Britain and “partaking in criminal activity, particularly related to drugs”. She also told MPs that Albania was “not a war-torn country”, and that it was difficult to see how asylum claims from it could be legitimate.

Three weeks later, giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, she drew a line the coverage largely lost: the government valued its relationship with “the Albanian community in the United Kingdom” and continued to welcome Albanians who came legally and contributed to British society.

On 13 December 2022, Rishi Sunak devoted a Commons statement to the subject and signed two joint communiqués with Tirana the same afternoon. He announced Border Force officers embedded at Tirana airport for the first time, new caseworker guidance stating Albania was safe, a higher evidential threshold for modern-slavery claims, formal assurances from Albania on returning victims, and a 400-strong unit to clear the Albanian caseload. He promised that “thousands of Albanians will be returned home”, with weekly flights until the backlog was cleared. Theresa May, the author of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, intervened in the same statement to warn that people smuggling and human trafficking are separate crimes and should not be spoken of as one.

Here is a correction worth making, because it is repeated everywhere: Albania was not “declared a safe country” in December 2022. It has been a designated state under section 94(4) of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 since 1 April 2003. Nineteen years of safe-country designation preceded the crisis. What was new in December 2022 was the operational push; what was new in September 2023 was section 80AA, inserted by the Illegal Migration Act, which lists the states whose protection claims are inadmissible — on the statute book, though the inadmissibility provisions were never fully brought into force. Albania is the first name on that list and the only state on it outside the EU, the EEA and Switzerland. In British statute, Albania sits inside a club of which it is not yet a member.

The government’s case was not only rhetorical. Dan O’Mahoney, then Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, told the Home Affairs Committee on 26 October 2022 that the rise was “in the main due to the fact that Albanian criminal gangs have gained a foothold in the north of France”, and that intelligence showed flights leaving Albania for Belgium whose passengers went straight to the French coast. In the same session he described a quite different pattern in the same population: “They work illegally in the UK for maybe six months or a year, they send the money home, and then they go back.”

Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama replied on 2 November 2022 that Albanians in the UK “work hard and pay tax” and that Britain should fight criminal gangs of every nationality rather than discriminate against Albanians to excuse policy failures. Albanians demonstrated in London that month carrying placards reading “Braverman, you can be a criminal, we can’t”. On 17 January 2023 the Albanian government summoned the British ambassador, Alastair King-Smith, over a Home Office promotional video about detaining Albanian criminals; Reuters reported the protest note in terms of the “language of hatred”.

The Albanian ambassador in London, Qirjako Qirko, told the Home Affairs Committee on 7 December 2022 that he detected a “campaign of discrimination” and that “there are youngsters especially who are bullied at school just because they are Albanian.” Asked who Albanians in Britain were, he answered that they included “doctors, lawyers, engineers and labourers of all sorts, paying taxes”. Esme Madill, a solicitor working with young Albanian trafficking victims, told the same Committee in written evidence that the rhetoric caused the children she represented to experience discrimination and racism daily at college and when applying for jobs.

None of that is measured. Hate-crime statistics for England and Wales monitor race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity; there is no Albanian category, and Albanians are not separately identifiable in the series. Any claim of a measured rise in anti-Albanian hate crime in 2022 is unsupportable from official statistics — in either direction.

The Home Affairs Committee reported on 12 June 2023, having visited Albania in March. Its central conclusion is worth quoting in both halves, because it is regularly quoted in one. On the one hand: Albania is not the cause of the UK’s migration problems and “should not be singled out as such or scapegoated for home-grown failure” to process claims and remove people quickly. On the other, in the same paragraph: the number of Albanians crossing the Channel “unquestionably contributed to the overwhelming of the asylum system”, and particularly to the overcrowding at Manston. The Committee also found that Albania was safe and that it saw no reason for the UK routinely to accept Albanian asylum claims — while insisting there were unquestionably real trafficking cases requiring safeguards.

On why it happened, the Committee opened by saying it was not clear, and listed five candidate explanations without choosing. Its most striking piece of evidence came from Kukës, Albania’s poorest county and the one with the deepest UK family chains: a Swiss Contact survey of 1,800 households found that 35 percent of respondents wanted to migrate, and of those 59 percent wanted to go to Britain; separately, 42 percent of all respondents strongly agreed that young people in their community had no option but to leave by any means possible. The geography of Albanian emigration is a map of where earlier generations went — the north to Britain and northern Europe, the south to Greece and Italy. It is why these pages describe different countries and the same family.

Then there is the document almost nobody has read. In February 2024 the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Neal, published an inspection of asylum casework covering June to October 2023. It revealed Operation BRIDORA — the Home Office operation set up in December 2022 to clear a starting caseload of 12,543 Albanian claims. The legacy backlog had been split into three named operations: AMESA for the high-grant nationalities (14,563 claims), MAKHU for everyone else (58,252), and BRIDORA for Albanians alone. Albanians were the only single nationality given an operation of their own. Between February and May 2023, all but two decision-making units were assigned to it, and most managers told inspectors it was a bad decision that cost quality and productivity elsewhere.

The inspection found that decision-makers were told they were “no longer authorised to implement any grants for Albanians”, even where the decision had already been written. When inspectors asked managers why, they were told that a decision had been taken at ministerial level that “no more than 2% of Albanian claims should be successful.” One caseworker described the rewriting of the country guidance in a single sentence: “suddenly we are sending trafficked women back.” The country information team said it had not been directly told to amend the guidance but had found the indirect pressure hard to avoid.

The government’s published response to the Committee, in September 2023, made its counter-argument in statistical form: 84 percent of outcomes on Albanian claims in the year to March 2023 were withdrawals, against 18 percent for all other nationalities combined, and counting withdrawals in the denominator drops the Albanian grant rate for that year from 34 percent to 5 percent — against a fall from 76 to 63 percent for everyone else. There is no single Albanian grant rate. There are at least five, and which one you quote is an argument rather than a fact.

The operation’s own outcomes, between 9 January and 12 November 2023: 15,955 decisions — 9,863 withdrawals (61.8 percent), 4,549 refusals, 498 grants (3.1 percent). Nine in ten of those withdrawals were implicit: the claimant had stopped reporting or absconded. Ministers read that as claims abandoned because they were false. Dr Peter Walsh of the Migration Observatory told the Committee that the Albanian withdrawal rate was about twice the average, and that “it does not say why they are absconding” — trafficking being one of the reasons thought to be involved. The data cannot distinguish the two. And against the promise of weekly flights until the backlog was gone, 245 people from that cohort had been removed by 13 November 2023. The Home Office’s answer is a wider universe: 6,458 Albanian nationals were returned from the UK in 2023 by all routes, second only to Romania. Both numbers are correct; they count different things. Neal was dismissed as Chief Inspector on 20 February 2024, nine days before the report was published and a month before his term was due to expire.

Here is the fact that has to sit in the same section. In 2022 — the year ministers described Albanians as criminals — Albanians were the largest single group of identified potential victims of modern slavery in the United Kingdom. There were 4,613 referrals to the National Referral Mechanism, 27.2 percent of the national total, ahead of UK nationals. Albania was the most-referred non-UK nationality every year from 2018 to 2024.

Among the 2022 small-boat cohort specifically, 3,188 of 12,652 Albanian arrivals were referred to the NRM — 25.2 percent, against 12.9 percent for all nationalities (12,652 is the NRM-linked extract of the same dataset that gives 12,658 above). Albanians alone were 54.3 percent of every modern-slavery referral arising from that year’s crossings. Of those referrals that reached a conclusive-grounds decision, 516 people were found, after full investigation by the British state, to be victims of modern slavery — more than the 498 grants of leave made in the ten months the inspector examined. Only 516 of the 1,548 conclusive-grounds decisions in that cohort were positive — 33.3 percent, against an all-nationality positive rate near 89 percent in the same year — and they were taken in the months when a ministerial grant ceiling was being described to inspectors and the Albania trafficking guidance was rewritten. Whether those things are connected is not something the data can settle. Both are true.

Ministers argued that late referrals into the modern-slavery system were abuse. Dame Sara Thornton, the former Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, told the Committee that “the fact that disclosure is late does not in my view mean that it is unreliable” — while conceding, in the same session, that a slow asylum system gives people the opportunity to come and then disappear.

The referral pattern also breaks the familiar framing. Albanian men were referred into the modern-slavery system at essentially the same rate as Albanian women (25.5 percent against 23.8 percent among the 2022 boat cohort), and the Albanian NRM profile is not primarily sexual exploitation: 64.5 percent of 2022 referrals involved labour exploitation and 44.8 percent criminal exploitation. Dr Andi Hoxhaj, then of UCL and now chair of the Anglo-Albanian Association, described the mechanism to the Committee: young men from areas of extreme rural poverty offered “a free ride to the UK in exchange for employment in cannabis farming or other illegal and criminal activities” for twelve to eighteen months. The crossing is the loan; the cannabis farm is the repayment. As Esme Madill put it, someone can leave for economic reasons, fall into debt bondage, and become a trafficking victim on arrival.

The courts have had to hold both things at once. In R v BEP [2022] EWCA Crim 1881, decided four days after Braverman’s Commons statement, the Court of Appeal considered an Albanian man convicted of producing cannabis whom the Single Competent Authority had already conclusively found to be a victim of modern slavery. The Court accepted he would have had a real prospect of the statutory defence — and refused to quash the conviction, because the defence does not arise automatically from being trafficked and he had pleaded guilty on advice. An Albanian man officially recognised by the British state as a slavery victim, and lawfully a convicted cannabis producer. The case resists both of the simple stories.

Nobody teaches Albanian in a British state school as a curriculum subject, and Albanian is not available as a GCSE or an A-level anywhere in the United Kingdom. It was never withdrawn; it was never offered. The government’s position, given verbatim in a petition rejection of 16 January 2023, is that it is for schools to decide what languages to teach and for exam boards to judge whether demand is sufficient.

There was a real push. Petition 615921, “Introduce Albanian language as a GCSE and A Level”, ran from May to November 2022 and collected 1,916 signatures — short of the 10,000 needed for a government response. Two later attempts collected seven signatures each. But the 2022 petition left behind something more useful than a result: a signature map. Signatures were recorded in 330 of 650 constituencies, led by Chipping Barnet (68), Enfield Southgate (61), Hampstead & Kilburn (55), Edmonton (42) and Hendon (42) — independently reproducing the census geography, from a completely different dataset.

What exists instead is a volunteer network. The oldest is Shkolla Shqipe “Kosova”, founded on 3 October 1993 by Talat Pllana and a group of parents, which began in Westminster and Camden and now runs at Haverstock School near Chalk Farm — thirty-plus years, more than thirty teachers, no state funding, and a curriculum taken from Kosovo’s education ministry. Around it: Shpresa’s schools across five east and north London boroughs; Ardhmëria, which runs five schools in Greater London; Nënë Tereza in Edmonton; Gjurmë Iliriane in Richmond; Arbëria in Edmonton; and the Faik Konica association’s mother-tongue classes in Chelsea. A new school opened in Bexleyheath on 6 October 2024. At its opening, Albania’s Minister of State Taulant Balla claimed that “over 7,000 pupils learn Albanian in Great Britain” — a government figure with no published school list or method behind it, and the only national estimate in existence. Treat it as a claim, not a count.

Since 2018, Albania and Kosovo have run a joint diaspora curriculum and supply the textbooks. Britain’s contribution is UCL SSEES, which has offered Albanian evening courses including one aimed specifically at heritage speakers — people who grew up speaking the language at home with little formal schooling in it. The institutional history there is deep: Stuart Mann was Reader in Czech and Albanian at SSEES from 1947 to 1972 and wrote the Historical Albanian–English Dictionary (London, 1948); the Mann Collection sits in the SSEES library in Bloomsbury.

The second generation is measured sideways, through birth registrations, and it is now large. Albania entered the top ten countries of birth of non-UK-born mothers in England and Wales in 2021 and has stayed there, peaking at seventh in 2023 with 3,891 births. Across 2021 to 2025 there were 17,800 babies born to Albania-born mothers and 20,011 to Albania-born fathers. In 2023, roughly one baby in every 152 born in England and Wales had an Albania-born mother.

Put that next to the past and the scale lands: more children were born to Albanian mothers in England and Wales in five years than the entire Albania-born population of Britain in 2011. Albania alone accounts for 29 percent of every birth ONS files under “Rest of Europe” — a grouping that also contains Turkey, Ukraine, Russia and the whole of the former Yugoslavia. The ONS’s own categories conceal the story its own data contains.

There is one measured school count, and it is the strongest evidence on this page that the community is settled rather than newly arrived. In the spring of 2018 the Department for Education recorded 16,255 pupils in England’s state schools whose first language was Albanian — and only 10 percent of them had arrived after reception. That is the lowest late-arrival rate of any European language in the table: 52 percent of Romanian speakers, 47 percent of Bulgarian and 58 percent of Italian had joined an English school later. Nine in ten Albanian-speaking pupils had entered the English school system by reception age. On English proficiency the same table puts them at 38 percent fluent, ahead of Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Arabic, Portuguese and Urdu speakers.

The school figure is corroborating evidence, not an extra 16,255 people to add to the census. It includes both UK-born and foreign-born pupils, and the published table does not separate them; “arrived after reception” records when a child entered the English school system, not where that child was born. The count proves that a large Albanian-speaking generation was already in English classrooms in 2018. It cannot, by itself, say how many of them sit outside the country-of-birth total.

The DfE has not published the figure since. Its regular statistics record only whether a pupil’s first language is English, not English, or unknown — so there is no current, local-authority-level count of Albanian-speaking pupils anywhere in the public domain, and getting one would take a freedom-of-information request against the National Pupil Database.

Nobody has measured Albanian language retention in Britain either. There is a good study of it in Athens and none here; any claim about how well British-born Albanians keep the language is currently unevidenced, and this page is not going to invent one.