§ MR. BYLES (Salford, S.)I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether, having regard to the fact that it is costing the country nearly £1,000 a month to exclude sixty or seventy foreigners who desire to land on our shores, and that experience has shown that the working of the Aliens Act brings such meagre and incommensurate results, obtained by administration which necessarily causes irritation and annoyance, the Government will now recommend that the Act be repealed or modified.
§ MR. GLADSTONEMy hon. friend must remember that the results of the Act are not to be measured only by the small number of aliens turned back at the English ports, but also by the number of those aliens who pass through as trans-migrants instead of remaining in England, and of those alien criminals who are sent out of the country, the cost of whose expulsion is included in the figures I gave last Wednesday in answer to my hon. friend the Member for the Tower Hamlets.