Last weekend, at least 67 people drowned when a wooden boat carrying about 150 people ran into trouble on rocks off the coast of Calabria, Italy. There were 20 children, including a newborn baby, among the dead. It is an appalling reminder of the risks some people are willing to take to flee desperate circumstances – often including conflict and torture – in their home countries.
This movement of people across borders is age old and governments have never been able to fully control it despite developments in border enforcement and technology. It is driven primarily by patterns of conflict and economic deprivation and will increasingly be shaped by the climate crisis. It is a relatively small issue for the west: because the majority of refugees prefer to stay close to their home country to maximise their chances of returning, three-quarters of the world’s refugees live in low- and middle-income countries and seven in 10 in countries that neighbour their country of origin.
Yet Europe has shirked its legal and ethical responsibilities to the world’s refugees. And perhaps nowhere is this more true than in Britain. The numbers of people crossing the Channel in dangerous boats to seek asylum in the UK have increased significantly in recent years: from 9,000 in 2020 to 46,000 last year. But the number of asylum applications relative to population size in the UK remains well below the average for the EU at nine asylum applications for every 100,000 people. The UK offered asylum or protection to 15,700 people in the year ending June 2022; which amounts to just 24 people per parliamentary constituency.
The number of people crossing the Channel should therefore be understood primarily in terms of the risks to their own safety rather than as any existential risk to the UK. But so much of the government’s rhetoric in recent years has sought to brand them as bogus or illegitimate; Priti Patel when home secretary wrongly claimed that 70% of people coming to the UK in small boats are not genuine asylum seekers. In fact, the Refugee Council has estimated that based on the nationality data of people arriving on small boats, at least 60% would be granted asylum.
The government’s approach has been to focus on policies that might discourage people from making the crossing, either by making it more dangerous still or through deporting asylum seekers to have their claims processed offshore thousands of miles away. Last year, it announced it had struck a financial deal for a five-year trial to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, where they will be expected to claim asylum instead. This week the prime minister and home secretary will announce new legislation to enshrine this scheme. It is perhaps the ultimate evasion of a country’s moral responsibility to refugees: paying another country to make it their problem instead.
There is little reason to believe this cruel plan will achieve anything other than making the government look tough at the expense of vulnerable refugees with legitimate claims to asylum. The UK’s own international ambassador for human rights has criticised Rwanda’s human rights records. About 3,000 Rwandan citizens a year themselves successfully claim asylum in other countries. Civil servants have admitted that when payments to Rwanda are factored in, the UK will certainly not save anything relative to the cost of processing people’s asylum claims in the UK – in fact, the cost of detention then deportation is likely to make the cost per asylum seeker significantly more expensive than simply dealing with their claim in the UK.
The Rwanda policy is also subject to legal wrangles in the UK. The UN Refugee Agency has argued that the scheme is incompatible with “the letter and spirit” of the 1951 Refugee Convention, to which the UK is a signatory. The high court last December conversely published a judgment that the scheme is lawful, but the individuals involved have been given permission to appeal and it is likely to take months, if not years, for this to work its way through the courts. Even if the scheme is ultimately found to be lawful, asylum experts say it is unlikely that more than a few hundred asylum seekers would be deported every year. Rwanda itself has said it would take 200 asylum seekers a year in the first five years, and the Home Office has a terrible track record of deporting people whose asylum claims have been rejected; just 113 in 2021. Little surprise, then, that the verdict of the permanent secretary at the Home Office last April was that “evidence of a deterrent effect is highly uncertain” and does not provide “assurance over value for money”.
The biggest issues in the asylum system remain the huge delays it takes to process people’s claims – a staggering 83% of asylum applications made since 2018 are still awaiting a decision – and the fact that sometimes highly skilled asylum seekers are forced to subsist on state handouts of less than £6.50 a day for the years they spend in limbo, instead of being allowed to work and pay taxes. That is where the government should be focusing its efforts instead of dreaming up unethical schemes that are highly unlikely to significantly reduce the number of people applying for asylum here in the UK.
