The only sensible response to Shabana Mahmood’s crackdown on illegal migration is, what took you? The second is, let’s see how it works out. The third is, how about the actual problem?
The Home Secretary’s proposals are based on those adopted by Denmark, which has seen the number of illegal arrivals in the country plummet in ten years. Asylum won’t be granted to applicants permanently but will be reviewed every 30 months – always supposing that we can summon up sufficient numbers of qualified staff to review cases, let alone those necessary to detain and deport individuals whose countries are considered safe enough to return to. That’s quite a big ask for a department that can’t keep track of prisoners. Yet this programme is far more plausible than Yvette Cooper’s ineffective one-in, one-out scheme with France which went wrong within days.
Asylum seekers will no longer be able to get indefinite leave to remain and benefits after five years; it’ll be 20 if the Home Secretary has her way. And there will be restrictions on visas for countries that refuse to take back their citizens: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Namibia, to begin with. Don’t hold your breath for similar sanctions on, say, India, given that the Government has just sent a trade delegation there; by comparison, the DRC is small fry.
As other commentators have pointed out, why not use aid as leverage to force countries to take back failed asylum seekers? Nigeria for instance, received £110 million in aid (notwithstanding the government’s terrible record in addressing Islamist extremism in the north) but it took back just 6 per cent of failed asylum seekers. How about making aid conditional?
The pity is that the very words “asylum seeker” invites suspicion and hostility now rather than the sympathy we would naturally feel for the persecuted. Seriously though, of the 36,886 people who arrived by small boats this year before November, it’s a fair bet that most are not the most pitiable or the most deserving in the countries they come from; rather they are more likely to be the ones who could afford to pay the people smugglers. In a world where so very many people can claim that their countries are intolerably dangerous – the entire population of Sudan, that’s over 51 million, could probably claim asylum on the basis of the horrors of civil war – sheer numbers make the principle impossible to sustain.
The most telling element of the Home Secretary’s policy and the most sensible, is the granting of asylum on a temporary basis rather than effectively giving those who get her a “golden ticket” as she put it, to remain indefinitely. That’s a remedy for abuse and the Tories should have introduced it long ago. I wish it well, but I wonder what the likelihood is of it being implemented. I’m familiar with many refugees from the Kosovo conflict, some 25 years ago – many of whom were Albanians, pretending to be from Kosovo – and the great majority did not return when it was safe to do so. They stayed here. I wonder how many of the people who should be returned, say, to Syria (unless they’re the unfortunate Alawites) will actually volunteer for repatriation?
What the Tories did get right – and heaven knows, they got an awful lot wrong – was the Rwanda scheme, which was closed off by the present government before it could get started. Yet the prospect of not being able to submit an asylum claim from Britain at all, or to be able to remain in Britain as an illegal refugee, was a very effective deterrent. The likelihood of being shipped off to Rwanda meant that refugees were beginning to drift to Ireland before they could be put on a plane. It could have worked.
The Home Secretary has been brave in adopting the Danish formula so it may seem ungracious to say that she is dealing with something other than the real problem. And that is the enormously high levels of legal migration. Last year saw a decrease in migrant numbers and yet over a million people, or 1.2 million, are estimated to have come to the UK in 2024, a million of them from outside the EU. Granted half a million people left, but the million-plus who arrived mean huge challenges for an increasingly fragmented society. That’s just one year. So, however urgent the problem of small boat crossings, that of people coming here, at least initially legally, is far, far greater.
Still, the Home Secretary has been brave to go this far. Already, members of her party are queuing up to condemn her for a want of compassion. She shouldn’t worry. It suggests she is in fact speaking for a public that has had enough of illegal arrivals. Let’s see if she has the stomach for getting through parliament the legal changes that she’ll need to get the policy off the ground. Truth is, the more abuse she gets from her own side, the more likely the electorate is to warm to her.
