Today’s papers are full of yet more unhelpful headlines for the Government, following a further round of concessions over the Illegal Migration Bill. “More than 10,000 migrants to be spared deportation to Rwanda”, thunders the Daily Telegraph.
This refers to the fact that the Government has accepted a Lords amendment to the effect that some of the provisions of the Bill, specifically the power for the Home Secretary to “apply the new powers of automatic detention and deportation to any migrant who arrived after March 7”, the date it was introduced.
Yet this defeat is perhaps not as serious as the headline makes out. Yes, the exclusion of some 10,000 people from the policy is a setback on paper. But realistically, the odds of the vast majority of them ever being sent to Rwanda were remote.
Ministers wanted the retroactive provision in order to prevent a summer surge, with people scrambling to cross the Channel before the Bill became law. Even following the climbdown, that goal has been at least partially achieved, at least to the extent that it would have been effective.
The key indicator now will be whether there is a significant increase in the number of crossings now Parliament has created this new grace period.
And whilst the Government has made some other concessions to rebels regarding children and pregnant women, they are for now holding firm on those areas of contention which have the greatest scope to foul the operation of the asylum processing system, such as modern slavery.
It is understandable why Theresa May and other potential rebels want to thwart ministers’ efforts to overturn a Lords amendment which “exempts victims of modern slavery in the UK from being deported”. But the problem is that there are no barriers to lodging such a claim, and at present anybody who does is immune from deportation.
This has the obvious effect of encouraging spurious claims, and drawing Home Office manpower and resources into investigating those. This slows the system, keeps people in this country for longer, pushes up the cost of housing them, and increases opportunities to abscond.
An exemption for (proven) victims of modern slavery is much more defensible than a blanket exemption for anybody who claims to be a victim of modern slavery – but it is the latter we currently have.
I already noted in my article on the Court of Appeal judgement that some of the Government’s setbacks on this issue have been more presentational than substantive.
But presentation matters, and there is only so much this sort of contextualising can do. Headlines about 10,000 people being exempt will feed through to voters and contribute to the impression that the Government is losing control of illegal crossings; fairly technical articles about the details of amendments or judgements, much less so.
It also risks raising the stakes if the IM Bill ever does become law. A drawn-out, high-profile battle over a piece of legislation understandably freights it with significance. Should it pass, after all this fuss, expectations (at least amongst voters for whom migration is a high priority) will be high; ministers will also be keen to trumpet it. Will it be able to deliver?
The Government is attempting to tackle a thorny problem, and for all the furore its critics have yet to provide a convincing alternative. As I noted in March, only for those who openly advocate for effectively unlimited admission of asylum seekers is the mantra of “safe and legal routes” an actual answer to the question of what to do about illegal entries.
Yet outside the NGOs, there are precious few who are prepared to call for this, and all it implies, for the obvious reasons both that it is wildly out of line with public opinion on the matter and that the number of people in the world who in theory qualify for asylum in Britain vastly exceeds any realistic capacity to admit and integrate them.
Thus those who place a high value on international law and institutions should be careful about arguing (despite court judgements to the contrary) that they make Rwanda or any similar scheme unworkable within their frameworks.
If it turns out those commitments make it impossible to deliver an immigration regime that commands public consent, the political debate around those commitments could change very quickly – and perhaps, as did Brexit, catch the governing class by surprise when it does.