IT’S hard to imagine what it will feel like for any migrant from Afghanistan, Iraq or similar country to be dumped in Kigali this week if Priti Patel’s first deportation flight to Rwanda manages to clear last-ditch court hurdles and take off tomorrow.
The High Court judge, Mr Justice Swift, admitted last week that the experience will be “onerous”, while rejecting an earlier legal challenge, and it seems certain that it will be disorientating and potentially frightening and traumatising for anyone who is sent.
It’s not surprising therefore that so many, ranging from charities to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gary Lineker and, reportedly, Prince Charles, have expressed their dismay at the Home Secretary’s policy. The idea seems the opposite of what any person might wish to do if they were to meet the individual migrant on the street.
But the reality that it’s going to be horrifying for migrants who risked their lives to get here to end up in Rwanda is exactly the point of the scheme, and without it the deterrent effect that Ms Patel is hoping for won’t work.
There are no easy alternatives when it comes to trying to stop people risking their lives crossing the Channel in small boats. One partial answer would be to set up more safe routes where people could apply for asylum from afar — as Ms Patel has promised to do — but even then there would be people who are turned down who might still want to come here.
Another option suggested by one commentator at the weekend would be to let people fly in without visas so they could arrive here safely to make asylum claims. But removing those who had no right to refuge would be difficult, if not impossible, in many cases and the numbers involved would likely be vast.
Hoping that France can stop all crossings is unrealistic, so that final alternative would be to accept that some Channel crossings will continue. Migrants arriving last year on small boats totalled 28,526, which was a record, but not huge in comparison to recent UK annual net migration figures in the hundreds of thousands.
The numbers could be absorbed. But deaths in the Channel and criminal exploitation would continue too. Every choice is a hard one.
