THE United States Department of State is contemplating offering asylum to British Jews, so Robert Garson, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, has told the Daily Telegraph.
Jews, he said, face increasing anti-Semitism in Britain, the UK is ‘no longer a safe place for Jews’ and the country holds no future for them, citing as evidence the Islamist attack on a Manchester synagogue and the widespread anti-Semitism evident in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
At the same time, according to Garson, Sir Keir Starmer and the Crown Prosecution Service are ‘turning a blind eye’ to anti-Semitism in the streets of Britain and failing to enforce laws against protesters who glorify violence against Jews.
Garson is no disinterested bystander. He is a British Jew, born in Manchester, who emigrated to America in 2008. Last May, Trump appointed him to the Board of the US Holocaust Memorial Council while Garson himself endorsed Trump’s choice of Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun as the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.
This position was created ‘to elevate America’s response to rising Jew-hatred globally and domestically, and to serve as a clear, unwavering representative of Jewish interests and safety’, he said in a LinkedIn post.
Although neither the State Department nor the White House has commented on Garson’s claim, it is totally consistent with Trump’s American interest-driven rhetoric and policies, practical as well as humanitarian, on immigration.
It is evident in Garson’s framing of the value of British Jews to American society as a ‘highly educated, English-speaking community’, with a low propensity to crime and with ‘none of the burdens associated with other refugees’.
Garson’s words come amid an accelerating rate of emigration of the younger of Britain’s more educated, skilled, law-abiding, English-speaking residents. This is a worrying exodus of the able young and, as Alp Mehmet points out, is the reason for the fall in net immigration. Yet ‘the gaps they leave are filled by less able incomers who are less committed to Britain’. In other words Britain’s most valuable citizens are being replaced by net drains on Britain’s economy in a downward spiral.
This is not a prospect Trump plans for the US. Coming into office in 2017, he suspended immigration from countries with a propensity to terrorism. Returning to office in 2025, he did the same. Last August the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) updated internal policy to allow officers to consider whether an applicant’s beliefs or statements are ‘anti-American’ when adjudicating green cards and visas. Just this month, Trump doubled down on stopping asylum for nationalities that tend to welfare dependency and welfare fraud (such as the Somalis of Minnesota).
Trump clearly sympathises with Jews and Israel. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, who has worked for Trump as a diplomat, is Jewish. Trump moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, brokered the Abraham Accords and imposed an executive order combating anti-Semitism on college campuses.
This all stands in stark contrast with Sir Keir Starmer. It is true that Starmer distanced the Labour Party from Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism and that he claims to be prosecuting anti-Semitism and resourcing security for synagogues.
But unlike Trump’s administration he has not moved to ban the Muslim Brotherhood. The Government still consults the unrepresentative Muslim Council of Britain (supported by only 2 to 4 per cent of Britain’s Muslims) and as Garson intimates, the Government and authorities continue to protect anti-Semites.
Protests in Britain about the war between Hamas and Israel continue to feature chants in favour of terrorism, intifada, Palestinian expansion ‘from the river to the sea’ and the killing and rape of Jews.
The Metropolitan Police ignored such anti-Semitic marchers, yet arrested a bystander for being ‘openly Jewish’ (which they later admitted was wrong). They continue to privilege one side: this month Metropolitan Police officers stood by while pro-Palestine activists harassed an Israeli restaurant.
Starmer should be ashamed that the US State Department’s annual country report on human rights concluded that Britain’s human rights had ‘worsened’ in 2024, and particularly for Jews. The British government is partly to blame.
At the time that the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) reported 35 per cent of British Jews feel unsafe in the UK, compared with 9 per cent two years earlier, two Jews were killed during Jihad Al-Shamie’s attack on a synagogue in Manchester. Within hours of the attack, protesters were back on the streets of London, Leeds, Manchester, Bristol and other cities – not in protest against the attack, but in protest against Israel’s detention of Greta Thunberg and fellow activists on a flotilla headed for Gaza.
Rather than using the powers he already has to crack down on anti-Semitic protesters, Starmer exploits anti-Semitism to justify more two-tier policing.
Garson is as concerned about demographics as he is with Islamist capture of Britain’s institutions, warning of impending ‘Sharia-compliant areas’ if Islamist influences aren’t checked. Many believe we already have such in Tower Hamlets, Dewsbury and Birmingham, to name but three.
As to the Islamist ‘influences’ he cites, they are rife throughout the UK’s universities too, in a toxic combination with left-wing bias, such that the UAE ruled that Britain’s campuses are too Islamist for Emirati students.
The same virulent influence is present in the teachers’ National Education Union which recently colluded with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign to organise teachers to cancel a visit to a Bristol school by local MP Damien Egan, who is vice-chairman of Labour Friends of Israel.
Meanwhile, in both primary and secondary education, the Government ignores left-wing partisanship, and weaponises the Prevent counter-terrorism programme to punish teachers for showing videos of Trump supporters or saying that Britain is a Christian country.
For Garson, a new prime minister alone wouldn’t be sufficient. He told the Telegraph: ‘When I look at what is going on with Jews in Britain, and when I look at the changing demographics, I don’t believe . . . that there is a future for Jews in the United Kingdom.’
His clarion call isn’t just for British Jews. As he warns, hatred doesn’t stop at Jews. Hatred undermines the whole of society. What he has indicated is how asylum can be used to ‘pull’ the sorts of emigrants to America that it prefers. He is talking about not just educated, law-abiding, English-speaking Jews, but critics of wokeism, free speech advocates, Brexiteers and free marketeers. Indeed the Trump administration has already considered offering asylum for censored and cancelled Britons.
Such US-interested targeted asylum would make America’s average immigrant look wealthier, more educated, more skilled, more law-abiding, more English-speaking and more freedom-loving – while Britain shifts further in the opposite direction.
