The latest migration lie is the most dangerous of them all

This article was first published in The Telegraph.

A grim milestone is about to be reached. Today, tomorrow, one day this week, another boat will cross the English Channel and the official number of illegal crossings since 2018 will hit 200,000. That is almost three times the number of regular soldiers in the British Army. The Office for National Statistics classifies an urban area of 200,000 or more as a city. It’s equivalent to the populations of Norwich or Reading. Of that number, in eight years, a mere 8,000 have been deported.

Since they began eight years ago, the small-boat crossings have grown from a trickle into a stream. The routes are entrenched, with criminal networks across Europe facilitating illegal crossings and a supply chain stretching all the way to China. Ending the crossings has frustrated the efforts of five prime ministers from two different parties, with the ambitious Rwanda Plan shut down by the democratically unaccountable judges of the European Court of Human Rights.

Not only is that costing billions, as these illegal migrants have to be housed and fed, but it has also led to an explosion in illegal working and, all too frequently, horrific crimes, like the dreadful abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton by an Afghan asylum seeker. He had only arrived four months before on a small boat and claimed that the girl initiated a sexual encounter with him, even though he filmed the attack. If any other government policy regularly led to rapes and sexual assaults then it would rightly be shut down.

Efforts at reforming the asylum system have consistently failed, with international law being the main blocker. That’s why we, at the Prosperity Institute, published a draft bill, laying out how to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and repeal the Human Rights Act 1998, which are the main impediments to stopping the boats and deporting those with no right to be here. A government of any party could implement it, if they chose to do so.

Assuming that this does come to pass – and both Reform UK and the Conservatives are now committed to leaving the Convention – then the fundamental issue becomes one of logistics. Reform has recently attracted controversy for its plan to build migrant detention centres in areas that vote Green, to punish them for supporting open borders. The plans, if successful, would lead to most, if not all, of the 200,000 who arrived illegally being deported. To achieve that, they are planning detention capacity for 24,000 and five charter flights a day. If a plane cannot fly, then an RAF Voyager will be on standby to pick up the slack.

Critics have raised concerns. Freezing out the courts won’t necessarily prevent them from challenging these measures, which could cause delays even if Parliament exercises its sovereignty. To remove the numbers promised requires a tenfold increase in the detention estate and very little operational friction. In many cases those who arrive illegally destroy their identity documentation, making it hard to work out where they are from. Even when we know, their home countries may refuse to take them back.

These are not insurmountable problems, however. Visa sanctions will encourage recalcitrant countries to take back their nationals. Those whose origin cannot be identified can still be removed to a third-party country, the threat of which may be enough to encourage them to leave or seek a voluntary return, as many have done in the United States. Building more detention estate rapidly is perfectly feasible when the NHS was able to build a 4,000-bed Nightingale Hospital in just nine days.

Such a large volume of removals will upset some, as mass deportations have in the USA. It has to be remembered, however, that this is a necessity. If it were not for mass breaches of our borders, then mass deportations would not be necessary. Any politician unwilling to do so is in effect saying that they will condone illegal arrivals, as well as the costs and crime that go with that. Only a rigorous response will create a deterrent capable of ending mass attempts to enter the country illegally.

If the borders are secured, then that should not be used as an excuse to increase asylum via so-called safe and legal routes, as the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has suggested. Studies in Holland, Denmark and Finland all show that asylum seekers impose high financial costs on the taxpayer, which is an intolerable imposition when unemployment is growing and pay growth stalling.

Instead, it’s time to accept that the 20th-century asylum system is outdated in a world of cheap and easy travel. We should move towards a much more selective and democratically accountable model, such as requiring names to be submitted in an asylum bill, allowing individual cases to be debated in Parliament. Should the number of names be greater than the time available for debate, then it would show we are accepting too many. 

In emergency cases, like the Ukraine war, where the danger is geographically proximate, then temporary protection could be offered to populations without settlement rights. Without such controls, asylum will continue to be abused on a large scale.