‘It underscores why you need a deterrent.” So claimed Rishi Sunak in response to the Channel tragedy last week that led to the deaths of five migrants off the coast of France, hours after the “Safety of Rwanda Bill”, Sunak’s “deterrent”, passed its final parliamentary hurdle.
“Deterrence” has become the magic word to ease through every immigration policy, however cynical, cruel or unworkable. There is only one problem. When it comes to immigration, deterrence does not deter. “The available evidence suggests that the deterrent effect of asylum policies tends to be small,” observes Oxford University’s Migration Observatory. However tough they may seem, concluded a study from the development thinktank ODI, “deterrent policies… have virtually no effect on people’s behaviour”. Those seeking to cross the Channel “have already travelled thousands of miles and spent thousands of pounds getting to that point”; they are “unlikely to drastically rethink their ‘migration project’, regardless of how strict the UK’s border controls become”.
Even the Home Office acknowledges this. An internal report, commissioned in 2020 to understand why migrants cross the Channel, was sceptical of deterrent schemes given that “many asylum seekers have little to no understanding of current asylum policies”. In any case, those willing to risk death in perilous journeys through deserts and across seas, are likely to see deportation to Rwanda as just another obstacle to surmount.
Britain, Australia, the EU and UN bodies such as the International Organization for Migration have all spent millions of pounds, dollars and euros on “information campaigns” in migrants’ home countries to ensure people know the details of their deterrence policies. Their impact has been almost zero. As one survey concluded, the schemes “only serve to give… leaders the feeling that they are acting to prevent the tragedies that result from their own policies”.
Even the case constantly referenced by the British government as proving the value of offshore processing – Australia’s “Stop the Boats” campaign – is not as it is often presented. In 2012, the Labor government under Julia Gillard, having previously dismantled a similar scheme four years earlier, re-established offshore processing with asylum seekers arriving on boats transferred to detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where they faced degrading, inhumane treatment.
The new policy had little impact. In 2013, the first full year of offshore processing under the new law, 300 boats arrived carrying 20,587 asylum seekers, the largest number of arrivals ever recorded. From 2014, under “Operation Sovereign Borders”, the new conservative-led coalition government under Tony Abbott changed tack. No new migrants were sent to Manus and Nauru. Instead, the government began a policy of “turnback” – Australian warships intercepting and forcing boats back to their ports of origin.
These turnbacks often endangered lives. Returning asylum seekers to the very place from which they had fled potentially delivered them into imprisonment and torture. Australia refuses to release details for “security reasons” but there is considerable evidence of turned back boats having to be rescued by other countries. Both offshore processing and boat turnbacks are riven with moral and practical perils. Whatever success Australia has had in “stopping the boats”, however, does not derive from deporting people to third countries. As a detailed comparison of British and Australian policies concludes, “it is concerning that the myth of offshore processing as an effective ‘deterrent’ against boat arrivals prevails in the UK”. The real lesson of Australia is the opposite of what the government claims – that “offshore processing does not work in practice as a ‘deterrent’”.
There are certainly those, such as former Conservative deputy party chairman, now Reform UK MP, Lee Anderson, who would adopt Australia’s “turnback” policy. Interviewed on Talk TV by Julia Hartley-Brewer, Ben Habib, Reform co-deputy leader, even seemed to suggest that migrants should be left to drown, though he later claimed that was not what he meant. So far, even this desperate Sunak government has not descended into deploying warships against rubber dinghies.
Not only does deterrence not deter, but it creates the very conditions it is supposed to deter. Migrants began using small boats to cross the Channel only in 2018. Why? Because all other routes had been closed down.
There are no legal paths by which asylum seekers can claim refuge in Britain. As the then immigration minister Robert Jenrick put it in response to a parliamentary question: “There is no provision within our immigration rules for someone to be allowed to travel to the UK to claim asylum or temporary refuge or make a claim for asylum or protection from abroad.” At the same time, security was strengthened on routes previously taken by irregular migrants, such as ferries and the Channel tunnel. It was only at this point that people began taking to small boats. For all the wringing of hands over Channel deaths, it is the government’s own policies that have pushed people into flimsy boats.
In her interview with Habib, Hartley-Brewer (hardly a bleeding-heart liberal) described the suggestion that migrants could be left to drown, as “uncivilised”. “Why is that uncivilised, Julia?”, Habib wanted to know.
Not so long ago, most people would probably have described as “uncivilised” the forcible deportation of anyone who arrived in Britain without proper papers to a country to which none of them had ever been, or wanted to go, while dismissing without considering any facts their claims for asylum in this country. Today, mainstream politicians and commentators seriously ask critics of the Rwanda scheme “Why is that uncivilised?”. When, on BBC Question Time, a government minister appears confused as to whether Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo are different countries, one can perhaps understand the depth of ignorance, and not just on moral issues.
One reason the moral dial has shifted so much is the belief that there is no alternative. Yet, as critics of the deportation scheme have constantly pointed out, the starting point for a realistic approach must be the creation of proper legal routes for asylum seekers. Providing sufficient resources to clear an artificially created asylum backlog is vital, too.
The immigration debate has become so warped, though, that opening safe, legal routes is seen by many as the equivalent of an “open border”, while mass deportation is viewed, in Sunak’s words, as “compassionate”. There is nothing compassionate or constructive about the performative cruelty that now stands for immigration policy.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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