Astonishingly, nearly 7,000 of the 21,000 Shetlanders signed a petition demanding the family be allowed to stay because of their “well-grounded fear of persecution” if they were sent back. Faced with that dramatic demonstration of popular opinion, the Home Office back-tracked and granted the Minns the right to remain.

Not every case is so deserving, however, as another news item this week demonstrates. Sometimes, the Home Office seems straight out of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde. In contrast to the draconian treatment of Ms Sumani, the Government deliberately allows thousands of undeserving students with expired visas to vanish into the woodwork every week.

The numbers involved are huge: 309,000  students arrived in 2006, nine per cent up on 2005, but because there are no checks on who leaves Britain we haven’t a clue how many stay on illegally. As Mr Bean’s “economic miracle” is exposed as a mirage, the Home Office faces a cash crisis. It can afford to deal with only a fraction of illegal over-stayers.

Pressure on its budget is so great that Jonathan Lindley, the Border and Immig­ration Agency’s Director of Enforcement, has instructed staff not to focus on bogus students. They haven’t the staff to cope. Instead, he has told them to concentrate on foreign prisoners and failed asylum-seekers, groups who have produced especially bad headlines. Under Government pressure, immigration officials’ priorities are media-driven.

Nothing necessarily wrong with that. But the real scandal is, after 10 years of Labour, our borders are porous as a colander. The problem of illegal immigration is so great and so much taxpayers’ money is wasted elsewhere that the Home Office budget is totally inadequate to deal with the crisis now engulfing it.

When Dr John Reid became Home Secretary in 2006, he condemned it as “not fit for purpose”. Will it be any better when his successor, Jacqui Smith, leaves it?

We should deport the Government Ministers responsible for this fiasco.