A argument popular with critics of the Government’s Rwanda policy – even more popular, perhaps, than deeply ill-judged comparisons with the Holocaust – is that ministers should instead be creating “safe and legal routes” for people wishing to claim asylum in the UK to do so.
It is the stringency of the rules, according to this reasoning, which has created the Channel crisis. Start searching trucks and cars too rigorously at Calais, and people will get on the boats. Create a safe means for everyone to get here, and traffickers’ business model evaporates. Problem solved.
The internal logic of this argument coheres; it is much the same as that for legalising drugs. But like that argument, it works only if you think the ills of the process are the whole, or at least the bulk, of the problem. (If you think people taking drugs is the greater evil, it’s no solution.)
Many activists and lawyers in the asylum space, and a noisy and performative cohort of more-or-less open-borders liberals, seem to hold, at least implicitly, that ills-of-the-process analysis.
But for the Government – and, to judge by the polling, for the British people – those evils are downstream of a bigger issue. The problem is not merely how people are coming, but that they are coming, or attempting to come, in such numbers and such composition as they are and indeed would like to.
This problem is not solved by letting everyone in, to put it very mildly, and any honest assessment of “safe and legal routes” as an alternative to Rwanda or any other strict enforcement regime has to address that.
In theory, creating a safe-and-legal alternative for would-be asylum seekers in France has its upsides.
First, it might obviously reduce the number of attempted crossings. Second, it could solve our difficulties deporting failed applicants; they would be in France. We’d need to pay the French for the necessary asylum estate, of course, but MPs would probably be happier for that to be built in France than here; we could presumably pay for it out of the Home Office’s hotel budget.
Yet the people able to access this route would be the same group – disproportionately young and male – who can run the gauntlet to get to France in the first place. The prospect of an easier time lodging a claim may also induce more to make the trip, enriching the traffickers at other points on the route even if they take a (likely temporary) hit on their cross-Channel services.
(Matthew Syed is excellent on how successive governments across the West have outsourced the harsh reality of restricting migrant flows to unsavoury regimes. As with fossil fuels, it appears not to count if the spadework is done elsewhere.)
Worse, there would be nothing preventing someone whose claim had been rejected from boarding a boat, tossing their passport overboard, and taking their chances.
Should they make it to the UK, the Government might have a very hard time deporting them. They would have to be put up somewhere whilst the Home Office tried to process their claim, prove their identity, and persuade their home country to take them back – often tricky if they don’t have their passport.
(One argument for the Rwanda policy put to me by a Home Office civil servant is that the prospect of ending up there would incentivise people to keep hold of their passports; if they do, it would be much easier to deport them from the UK. The success of the policy is not, in this view, necessarily measured by how many people actually get put on a plane.)
In the meantime they can abscond into the black economy (easier than it might be, as we don’t have ID cards), or even engage in conduct that opens them up to the risk of persecution at home and thus makes them impossible to deport, as one convicted rapist appears to have done.
What do you do about these cases? “Safe and legal routes” doesn’t actually tell you, although depending on your assessment of the person saying it you may be able to guess.
Alternatively, one might argue that anchoring this system in France is merely patching the problem. What about a more ambitious solution: allowing people to apply for asylum at British embassies in their country of origin?
This idea is too not without its advantages. It could actually divert people away from the current migration routes and the traffickers that service them; those being assessed would be in whatever country they applied from rather than here; it would be more accessible to women, children, and those less able to travel.
(It does not, of course, address the problem of people who fail and decide to try and get here anyway. No version of “safe and legal routes” does that, short of letting everyone in.)
Yet it would present fresh difficulties. For instance – and dispute Suella Braverman’s specific figure if you wish – it is beyond question that there are many, many times more people theoretically eligible for asylum in this country than it could take, let alone that the public are prepared to take.
That means we’d need a system for working out which legitimate applicants to accept – and to reject. First-come, first-served? A points-based asylum system? Or, as now, some sort of fudge where we pretend that’s not what we’re doing? Enjoy the discourse on that one.
It would also mean asking the Home Office to process vastly more applications than it does at present.
And it already struggles! The new Illegal Migration Bill is, in part, about trying to reduce the many sources of friction which make it so difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to process current cases. Vastly increasing the caseload would mean lots of extra spending on the asylum system, even more dramatic streamlining, or both. Probably both.
The current asylum system brings many evils in its train. At the root of many of these are the tensions between Western nations’ theoretical obligations under international law inherited from a different age on the one hand, and the reality of modern migration pressures, and the political will of those nations, on the other.
Resolving those would involve a lot of difficult decisions. So too, as we see, does not resolving them. But they cannot be magicked away merely by incanting “safe and legal routes” – not even by speaking aloud the “for everyone” implicit in the spell.