Immigrant child beggars as young as FOUR making £100,000 a year each for gypsy gangs in Britain

Child beggars as young as four earn up to £100,000 each for gypsy gangs, a shocking investigation has revealed. The children work in teams on London's streets, wheedling money out of tourists in snow and rain.

Some of the children make £500 a day - and hand it all over to their Romany 'minders', the BBC's Panorama programme found.

Reporter John Sweeney called it 'a 21st-century version of Oliver Twist' - the Charles Dickens novel in which villain Fagin forces a group of young children to extract cash from rich Londoners for him.

The documentary, screened last night on BBC1, followed the children - all of them gypsies from Romania - over the course of a year. A girl of about four, who the programme-makers called 'Alice', used a phone box as a toilet and scavenged for food at McDonald's as she begged on the streets.

They found the child 'experienced in begging', as she tried to coax and wheedle money from them while dressed in a white headscarf.

The children all dressed in modest clothes and wore headscarves, despite not being Muslim - targeting mosques and areas popular with rich tourists from the Gulf States.

The BBC filmed a group of young Roma women controlling several children outside Regent's Park mosque, including a four-year-old boy.

They followed the group to a house in Ilford, Essex, where a BMW X5 four-wheel drive car sat on the drive.

The programme found that police generally just take the beggars' details and let them go. They fear the people on the streets are being exploited by other members of their community.

Last year, police launched Operation Golf in an effort to crack down on the con artists running the scam. Many of the criminals were traced back to Romania, where they own numerous luxury properties and cars.

Bernie Gravett, the former Metropolitan Police Supt who led the operation, said: 'This is modern-day slavery. How does a four-year-old child consent to be exploited? 'They won't know that it's criminal to beg on the streets of the UK. They are kids.'

The joint British-Romanian police operation arrested 26 alleged child traffickers from Tandarei in the south of Romania. The accused were imprisoned for months but denied any wrongdoing and have since been released.

The case continues as two judges in Romania have sent the case back to the prosecution and in the meantime, the accused cannot leave the country.

Mr Sweeney followed 'Alice' and her minder - her mother, Denisa Mazarache - to Fetesti in southern Romania. She admitted to having begged in London, but said she had been desperate and had stopped a year ago. However, the BBC said they had filmed her begging in London just two months earlier.

Police have disrupted the gangs in Britain by targeting them for benefit fraud. Nine people, eight of them Romanian Gypsies, went to prison earlier this year for a total of 10 years for not paying £800,000 worth of benefits. Romanians are not ordinarily entitled to UK state benefits, but police told Panorama that gangs produced forged documents.

Chief Inspector Colin Carswell, who was also part of Operation Golf, said one gang put the earning potential of a single child in London at close to £100,000 a year - from begging, stealing and being used for benefit fraud.

Mr Sweeney met one of the men arrested during Operation Golf in Tandarei, a town dotted with luxury villas. The man blamed Britain for the tricksters' actions. 'The blame is with the British state, which gives them a lot of money,' he said. 'They have lots of children, seven, eight or ten children, and if they have many children they build a villa.' 'Some collect £10,000, £12,000, £13,000 a month - they have three or four or five sets of benefits.'

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Bogus Deportation Statistics Released by Obama, Say Lawmakers

President Barack Obama's Homeland Security Department officials released a report that claims Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported a record number of illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year, including an "unprecedented number of convicted illegals with criminal records."

However, a closer look at the figures reveals the report is bogus, according to the lawmaker in-charge of immigration oversight.

In the 2011 fiscal year which ended last month, ICE officials claim they deported more than 396,000 illegal immigrants nationwide -- the largest number in the agency's history, ICE officials said in a statement released yesterday. Of these, nearly 55 percent or more than 216,000 of the people deported were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors -- an 89 percent increase since FY 2008 when George W. Bush was president.

"Smart and effective immigration enforcement relies on setting priorities for removal and executing on those priorities," said ICE Director John Morton in a press statement.

However, there are some who claim the figures released by Morton -- who was the recipient of a unanimous "vote of no confidence" by his own staff, the men and women who serve as ICE agents -- are purposely misleading or out-and-out bogus.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) issued a biting statement upon reading the ICE statistics.

“The Obama administration continues to inflate its deportation numbers. The administration includes voluntary removals in its deportation statistics even though they impose no penalties on the offenders and make it easier for illegal immigrants to return to the U.S.," said Rep. Smith.

"In other words, the Obama administration is cooking the books to make it look like they are enforcing immigration laws, when in reality they are enacting amnesty through inaction," he stated.

Under the Obama administration, worksite enforcement has dropped 70%, making it easier for illegal immigrants to live and work in the U.S. And DHS recently established a working group with the specific purpose of overruling or preventing orders of removal for illegal immigrants.

Even President Obama admitted to Hispanic voters recently that his administration’s deportation numbers are ‘deceptive.’

“It’s disappointing that the Obama administration continues to put illegal immigrants before the American people. Fourteen million Americans are currently looking for work," Smith pointed out.

"Meanwhile, seven million illegal immigrants have jobs in the U.S. We could free up millions of jobs for citizens and legal immigrants if we simply enforced our immigration laws. The President’s policies just don’t add up. It’s time to elect a President that puts the American people first by enforcing our immigration laws,” Smith urged.

"All one needs to do is compare the press releases issued by ICE during the Obama years and the Bush years to see they are not focusing on enforcing the nation's immigration laws these days," a Border Patrol agent told this writer.

"During the Bush administration, the majority of press releases highlighted the capture of illegal aliens working at companies across the nation. They even nabbed illegal aliens working at high-security facilities run by the U.S. government. Today, the majority of the press releases are issued with regard to child pornography, counterfeit designer clothing and accessories, and even drug arrests," said the source, who demanded anonymity.

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