Britain and the EU are making a deadly hash of tackling irregular migration
Comprehensive solutions are hard to devise, but illegal and inhumane measures are not the way forward
In July 1938, delegates from the UK, the US and 30 other countries met in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains to consider how to help German and Austrian Jews seeking safety abroad from Nazi persecution. The conference ended in failure. No country — except, for unusual reasons of its own, the Dominican Republic — was willing to take in large numbers of Jewish refugees. Four months later, Kristallnacht erupted — a murderous Nazi rampage against Jews and their property.
From this shameful episode of European history there are lessons to be drawn, but they are not exactly those suggested by Gary Lineker, the television presenter and former England football captain. In likening the British government’s language on migrants to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Lineker drew a superficial and historically inaccurate analogy. The real lesson of that “low dishonest decade”, as WH Auden described the era in a poem written in 1939, is that the best way for democracies to forge humane, legal and workable refugee and migrant policies lies in international co-operation.
On all counts, the British government’s latest initiative to curb migration in small boats across the Channel from mainland Europe promises to fall miserably short. The UK is doing no better than the EU, which reported 330,000 irregular border crossings last year, the highest since 2016 and well above the almost 46,000 recorded as having arrived on the south coast of England.
The British measures are inhumane because they include a provision for the rapid removal of almost all migrants arriving on small boats, overriding their right to apply in the UK for asylum. The proposed legislation blurs the vital distinction between economic migrants from Albania, a poor but democratic country where persecution is not the issue, and refugees from war-ravaged or repressive states such as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
As for the legality of the measures, even the government acknowledges that they hover on the edge of international law. Home secretary Suella Braverman said in a letter to MPs on Tuesday that there was a “more than 50 per cent” possibility that they would breach the UK’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Finally, the initiative seems unlikely to work. At its heart is a pledge to return irregular migrants either to where they came from, or to a “safe” third country. But it is fanciful in the extreme to imagine that the UK will be able to send unwelcome Afghans back to Afghanistan or Syrians to Syria.
Nor is there much prospect of a bilateral returns deal with France. British prime minister Rishi Sunak and French president Emmanuel Macron met on Friday to outline new steps aimed at curbing cross-Channel migration. However, Paris takes the view that any deal will need to be negotiated between the UK and the EU as a whole.
The conclusion — and here critics like Lineker have a fair point — is that the government is dressing up its initiative in deliberately harsh language for the purpose of recovering political ground ahead of the next general election. Opinion surveys indicate that the small boats issue is the second most important concern of voters who gave the Conservative party its thumping majority in the 2019 election.
Having accepted numerous refugees from Hong Kong and Ukraine last year, and having allowed legal net immigration to rise to record post-Brexit levels, the government can reasonably claim that it is hardly pulling up the drawbridge. Rather, the problem is that Boris Johnson, the former premier, failed to secure a post-Brexit migrant returns arrangement in his 2019 deal with the EU. This leaves Sunak’s government floundering with few international partners, bar the dubious and as yet untested example of deportations to Rwanda, as it struggles to manage Channel crossings.
It is small consolation to the Conservative government that the EU is making an equally dismal hash of its policies. From 2014 to the present day, more than 26,000 people have died in the Mediterranean, making it the world’s most deadly sea for irregular crossings.
Efforts to distribute refugees and migrants fairly among the EU’s 27 states have largely failed, placing a heavy and unequal burden upon countries such as Greece, Italy and Malta, where most arrive initially. In an effort to stem the flow of people, the EU’s border control agency Frontex has covered up and even encouraged illegal “pushbacks” of asylum-seekers, according to investigators at Olaf, the bloc’s anti-fraud office.
The British government is therefore not alone in its troubles. However, both the UK and the EU would do well to reflect that no satisfactory response to irregular migration is to be found in measures that break international law and abuse human rights.