From commenter Altai:

My uncle used to deal with asylum cases. He told me that at one point so many Sudanese would pretend to be Christian on the basis of the typical discrimination against Christians in Sudan.

Before the breakup of the country into mostly Muslim Sudan and mostly Christian South Sudan.

He could tell by visual inspection that they weren’t fully Bantu and thus likely ethnically Sudanese and unlikely to be Christian. But he couldn’t note such a thing in an assessment so he then proceeded to ask them very simple questions about Christianity that even somebody with no theological interest but from a Christian community, would know. They could never answer even simple questions. They didn’t even bother looking any of it up.

There is no individual effort in asylum seeking since the internet became widespread. That Sudanese guy my uncle spoke to hadn’t thought this Christian gambit on his own, if he had he’d have looked into it. Every step, every lie is on a printout they got from the internet. The sites tell them what they’re entitled to and even how to scam more welfare. What the welfare is in each country along with how easy it is to get asylum in each country.

But as Bret Stephens explained in the New York Times:

I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers …

Immigrants are better than us. Just because the Internet and smartphones have made immigration fraud a piece of cake doesn’t mean we should start being skeptical of immigration. If so, pretty soon we’ll start hearing that great-grandpa arriving on the Lower East Side in 1906 wasn’t as hard as pioneering the West in 1800 or being a Pilgrim in 1620, and that is unacceptable.

Altai continues:

This is the primary factor for the explosion in such behaviour since the early 2000s. The worst example were the near constant flow of South Asian ‘Syrians’ getting off the trains in Germany or maybe the 6’3 pale-skinned, light eyed Albanian ‘Syrians’ I saw walking into Sweden. Of course, most of the asylum seekers from countries at war were not in danger when they made their way to Europe in the past either, nor did they ever come home when the wars ended.

The early waves in the 90s from Somali and the Balkans may have led to the first industrial gaming of the system. Ali Hirsi once admitted that she and her family lied to gain asylum in the Netherlands. As, I expect, did Zlatan in Sweden, but hey, he turned out to be good at football so only all his relatives are violent criminals and not him too.

The constitution of the Republic of Ireland was changed because of this, removing birth-right citizenship from individuals without the right of permanent residency after thousands of pregnant Nigerian women flooded the main maternity ward after this fact was discovered and disseminated over the internet. Virtually all of the Nigerian immigration to Europe is based on blatant asylum fraud.

The Eritrean pretending to be Ethiopian is another oldie but a goodie because a Western official has no way of being able to tell them apart.

When I lived in the Uptown neighborhood in Chicago, there were lots of identical-looking Eritreans and Ethiopians. But if you tried to guess which one they were, they’d get offended that you had confused them with their mortal enemies.

[Comment at Unz.com]