For years, human rights campaigners have been calling for safe routes to the UK for asylum seekers to prevent them from taking dangerous journeys across the Channel in overloaded dinghies, lining the pockets of ruthless people smugglers in the process. So, is Thursday’s announcement of the “one in one out” deal by the UK prime minister and the French president, where one asylum seeker who arrives on a small boat will be sent back to France in exchange for bringing another one to the UK legally, the answer to their prayers?
The UNHCR and the Refugee Council have cautiously welcomed the announcement, while acknowledging that full details of how the scheme will work in practice are key and not yet available. Others have been less enthusiastic, with the charity Refugee Action condemning the plan for people in life-or-death situations as similar to a nightclub door policy, while Asylum Matters has called it a “Rwanda-style gimmick”.
The scale of the pilot scheme is modest – it is likely that about 50 people a week who arrive in the UK on small boats will be returned to France, while the same number will be allowed back here. The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has refused to be drawn on exact numbers.
What will everyone else do? The UK government says it will detain those it plans to return to France, although some may not depart meekly and may legally challenge their removals. Will others who arrive here but are not to be returned have their asylum claims processed? Or will they be left in limbo, and potentially lose contact with the Home Office?
The scheme sounds fiendishly complex in terms of who will be selected. How will the 50 a week be picked? And how will inadmissibility work? The Home Office has said that some small boat arrivals will have their asylum claims deemed inadmissible and will be packed off back to France. But will other small boat arrivals have their claims deemed admissible and be processed at the same time? I put 10 such questions to the Home Office this morning. It has yet to reply.
French politicians, including Emmanuel Macron, have repeatedly blamed the UK’s lax labour laws for the increasing numbers coming to the UK – more than 21,000 so far this year, more than a 50% increase on the same period last year. But that’s not the whole story. According to research from the European parliament cited by BBC Verify in 2022, 11% of the UK’s total economy was “informal economy” – less than France’s 14% and the 17% average for 31 other European countries. If the opportunity to work illegally is the main magnet, why not go to a European country where there are greater opportunities to do this? The reality is that many of the asylum seekers who come here do so to reunite with family, because they speak the language and because they are attracted by the UK’s record of human rights and fair play.
Keir Starmer and Macron make the UK sound like a lucrative El Dorado for those who want to cheat the system by working illegally. The reality is rather different. Those who are working illegally are likely to be paid below the minimum wage in dreadful and exploitative working conditions. And if they are abused, underpaid or not paid at all by their employers, who can they seek redress from? Nobody – because they are not supposed to be here. Those who do work illegally for a pittance are often motivated to do so by debts not yet repaid to smugglers breathing down their necks and threatening their families. And the deterrent of sending an as-yet-unknown number of small boat arrivals back to France is unlikely to be enough to smash the smugglers.
The motivation and resilience of asylum seekers needs to be factored into this new plan. They are a group of desperate human beings who have already endured persecution in their home countries and difficult journeys across deserts and seas. They will try to do everything possible to survive and thrive. The threat of being sent to Rwanda did not stop the crossings even in the run-up to the first planned flight. They have already made many life-or-death calculations before reaching northern France. I’ve spoken to several asylum seekers this week: they told me that the smugglers are eternally nimble and are likely to be adapting their business model at this moment in response to Thursday’s announcement.
Yes, the “one in” part of Thursday’s announcement could be an important first step. But the messy and complex “one out” part is not necessary, and has seemingly only been included to appease the likes of Nigel Farage.
It is a highly convoluted approach, vulnerable to legal challenges. If the government is serious about solving the small boats problem it should be working with not only safe EU countries but other stable countries across the world to offer safe routes to those fleeing conflict zones, incidentally boosting all our economies by giving people the legal right to work.
Providing safe and legal routes to those fleeing conflict zones would put the people smugglers out of business and be a far more straightforward way of addressing this global problem. Instead, Starmer and co have bottled it, choosing a complicated scheme that may help a few but has as many potential holes in it as a flimsy dinghy trying to cross the Channel.
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