One of the biggest topics on the doorstep at the general election was immigration. Whilst people, in the main, accept that some immigration is good – care and NHS workers, for example – the image of illegal migrants crossing the Channel in flimsy boats stands as a symbol of how the system is, apparently, abused.
Some of these migrants are genuinely seeking sanctuary, others gaming a system of asylum. But with this week’s deaths, the number of illegal migrants that have drowned trying to make the crossings this year comes to 45.
How to tackle these boats is a challenge to any government. The last government brought in a scheme of supporting Interpol and other international law enforcement agencies to hit the criminal gangs at multiple levels, whilst taking illegal migrants to a safe third country for processing. These two measures added up to prevention and deterrence and had some effect.
Since the election, the new government has scrapped all that to replace it with a system of supporting international law enforcement agencies to smash the gangs and is now exploring a system of processing illegal migrants in a safe third country to deter coming in the first place. Or in other words, a system that is pretty much identical to the former system.
Keir Starmer visited Italy earlier this week to see how they had cut the numbers crossing the Mediterranean from 62,000 to 25,000. To be fair, there are differences. Whilst we support the French police to patrol beaches, Italy and the EU has paid a far larger amount to Tunisia and Libya to do likewise (although human rights groups are worried about Tunisian and Libyan methods). And Italy favours Albania as a third country processing base, whilst we were using Rwanda. Interestingly, whilst we now look to Italy for inspiration, Germany looks to the UK (or did).
But the fundamental point remains. The only way to ultimately bring illegal migrants under control is to disincentivise migrants. Since the Rwanda scheme was scrapped, illegal migration has gone up, with more deaths.
The UK has a strong track record of supporting people in need – Afghans, Ukrainians, Syrians, HK BNO passport holders, and many countries across the globe supported by our development budget. Meanwhile illegal migration erodes our faith in our systems. But surely the new government can do better than scrapping a process only to replace it with a similar one with identical objectives?