Britain's Immigration Minister Beverley Hughes insisted on Tuesday she would not be forced to quit by allegations her department secretly fast-tracked applications from immigrants to clear backlogs in the system.
Hughes and Tony Blair's government have been plunged into a row over immigration after a senior diplomat in Romania blew the whistle on what he says are seriously lax controls which even allow migrants to come to Britain with forged papers.
The diplomat -- the British Consul in Romania James Cameron -- has been suspended from his post.
"My conscience is clear. I have done absolutely nothing wrong," Hughes told the Daily Mirror newspaper. "Had I done anything wrong ... I would resign."
Keith Best, chief executive of the independent Immigration Advisory Service, accused Hughes and her colleagues of "losing control" of the immigration department, which he said was being drowned in a flood of new legislation.
"They [ministers] have concentrated far too much on masses of new legislation," he told BBC radio. "And when you concentrate all that time on blaming lawyers, asylum applicants and immigrants rather than looking at your own department of course you take your eye off the ball."
Opposition Conservatives on Monday revealed an e-mail they had received from Cameron in Romania saying migrants were being let into Britain despite having forged papers.
The diplomat also said immigration officials lacked the language skills to spot fakes and described the processing of applicants from Romania and Bulgaria as "organized crime and UK immigration policy at its worst."
The row comes on the heels of a government inquiry into how checks came to be waived at an immigration center inSheffield in order to clear a backlog there.
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