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Group issues 12-point plan calling for stricter immigration rules for care workers, students and refugees
Rishi Sunak is facing demands from “red wall” Conservative MPs to slash the number of overseas care workers, foreign students and refugees allowed into the UK in time for the next election.
The MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, who call themselves the New Conservatives, have issued a 12-point plan to cut net migration to Britain from 606,000 to 226,000 before the end of 2024.
A cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees accepted for resettlement in the UK.
Caps on future humanitarian schemes such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong schemes should the predicted 168,000 reductions not be realised.
Implementation of the provisions of the illegal migration bill, which it is claimed would lead to a reduction of at least 35,000 from LTIM.
A raise in the minimum combined income threshold to £26,200 for sponsoring a spouse and raising the minimum language requirement to B1 (intermediate level). This should lead to an estimated 20,000 reduction in LTIM, the MPs claim.
Making the migration advisory committee report on the effect of migration on housing and public services, not just the jobs market, by putting future demand on a par with labour requirements in all studies.
A 5% cap on the amount of social housing that councils can give to non-UK nationals.
Raising the immigration health surcharge to £2,700 per person a year.
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World Refugee Day was last week (June 20). Ideally I would have written this then, but I haven’t been as good on real-time commenting since Twitter fell apart. I still found it important to say something here, though.
I am not an expert on this issue. I wrote one article on religious repression and forced migration, but my co-author had the subject matter expertise. I’ve written a few letters in support of asylum seeker resettlement in Vermont, using my understanding of the Middle East and Afghanistan to justify asylum claims.
That being said, I’m getting to the point in my career where I want to actually do something, rather than study it. And I felt surprisingly emotional when viewing Timothy P. Schmalz’s “Angels Unaware” sculpture when I was in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. The sculpture, unveiled in 2019, depicts individuals from refugee crises across history and is inspired by Hebrews 13:2, which calls for hospitality to strangers.
But again, I’m not an expert, and would rather listen to and amplify experts at this point, rather than coming up with own my own clever takes. So I wanted to draw attention to this new report by the Norwegian Refugee Council, and an accompanying op-ed in the Boston Globe.
The report contains detailed information on refugees and internally displaced people around the world, highlighting the presence of often overlooked crises. It also points to the increasing severity of this crisis.
It is lighter on solutions, although one could argue bringing awareness to these crises is important enough on its own. But other reports from the group provide more concrete steps.
So I’d just encourage Duck readers to look through this report, if they haven’t already. And I’d argue that this is an issue that touches on just about every aspect of international relations: inter- and intra-state war, political repression, religious and ethnic tensions, climate change and resource limitations, international organization and aid (in) effectiveness, etc.
It’s something we will all need to address at some point.
In a democracy one might, naively, imagine that political deliberation would involve the presentation of the arguments that people think bear on the question at hand. That is, if someone is in favour of a policy they would present the arguments that they believe support it and if someone is against it they they would do the opposite. One of the surreal aspects of British parliamentary debate on refugees and asylum is that neither the government nor the opposition do anything of the kind, and nor, for that matter do the media do much to improve things.
Consider, that everybody knows that Rishi Sunak’s harsh denial of the right to claim asylum of those who arrive “illegally” is motivated by the fact that the base of the Tory party and a sizeable chunk of “red wall” voters are strongly anti-immigration and that Tory strategists are concerned about the “small boats” issue, both because they are worried that a lack of border control gives off a sign of incompetence and because they want to expose Labour as “weak” on “illegal immigration”. In the Tory press, refugees and asylum seekers are constantly demonized as freeloaders, economic migrants, and young male invaders who pose a threat both of sexual predation and terrorism. (The European far-right, including Italy’s Salvini, France’s Zemmour, and the German AfD, in praising the British policy, do so explicitly as keeping the brown hordes at bay.) Labour, on the other hand, while they have a poor record of support for refugee rights, at least stand for maintaining the current human rights framework and upholding the right to claim asylum as set out in the 1951 Convention.
So far, however, in Parliamentary discussion of the issue, the Tories have posed as the real humanitarians, concerned about the most vulnerable and desperate to stop people from undertaking dangerous journeys. Labour, on the other hand, have said little about the basic immorality of the policy and have focused on the claim that the proposed law will be ineffective and that the boats will still come. Neither Sunak nor Starmer stand up and articulate the real reasons why one proposes and the other opposes the law. In Sunak’s case one imagines the primary motivation for this conduct is a debating tactic; in Starmer’s a concern that a proper defence of human rights and the refugee framework would be electorally costly.
Somewhat paradoxically, then, it is in the unelected chamber, the House of Lords, where we are most likely to see a proper debate that approximates the democratic ideal, as the Lords, not facing election, are free to articulate the reasons they think most relevant to the policy. We can be sure, for example, that Lord Dubs,someone who escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport, will say all the things that Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper are too cowardly to.
Meanwhile the press and broadcast media do worse than nothing to explain to the democratic public what the issues are, who the refugees and asylum seekers are, what is the relevant international humanitarian law, what is the history of refugee protection, and so on. Rather, the “small boats” issue is presented as an immediate crisis that needs urgent resolution lest the asylum system and indeed the entire country be “overwhelmed”. Rare indeed is the press report that informs the public that “illegal entry” without penalty is explitly provided for in the 1951 Convention. Those who clamour most loudly for the “people” to decide on migration issues are also most concerned to mislead the public about the facts: the false and insincere debate in Parliament is mirrored by a narrative where the “concerns” of a ignorant public need to be pandered to.
In the past few days, the substance of the issue has also been pushed to the background by a secondary debate about whether the impartiality of the BBC has been compromised by Gary Lineker, a former footballer and sports presenter, who compared government discourse around asylum to Germany in the 1930s. Cue a bunch of ministers invoking Jewish family members to argue about the offensive nature of a comparison between their “humanitarian” concerns and the Nazis. Yet comparisons with the 1930s are actually very much to the point, in the following sense: many Jews fleeing the Nazis were refused asylum in countries including the UK, and many travelled through “safe countries” to try to get here. Rishi Sunak is not Hitler, but Sunak’s policies, in denying the right to claim asylum on UK soil, would, if applied in the 1930s have prevented many from finding sanctuary. One of the motivations behind the postwar refugee framework has been “never again”. But it seems never does not last forever.
[Update: under government pressure, the BBC has forced Lineker to “step back” from presenting Match of the Day.]
The UK is a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, along with a number of other international instruments providing for humanitarian protection. The Convention provides that someone who is a refugee – a status that they have on the basis of their objective circumstances, having a well-founded fear of persecution on specific grounds and being outside their country of citizenship or habitual residence – must be granted certain protections by signatory countries. The most important of these is that they not be sent back to a place where they are at risk of persecution. The weakness of the Convention is that people cannot usually secure recognition as refugees by a country unless they claim asylum on its territory. Accordingly, wealthy nations seek to make it the case that those wanting protection cannot physically or legally get onto the territory to make a claim. That way, states can both vaunt their status as human rights defenders (“we support the Convention”) and nullify its effect in practice.
Today, ostensibly as a response to the “small boats” crisis, which has seen tens of thousands of people from countries such as Afghanistan and Iran arrive in the south of England after crossing the channel, the Conservative government has announced new plans to deter refugees. Those arriving will no longer be able to claim asylum in the UK, as the government will not try to find out whether they are refugees or not, they will be detained, and then they will be removed to their country of origin or to a third country (potentially breaching the non-refoulement provision of the Convention). The plan has been to send them to Rwanda, although because of legal challenges nobody has actually been sent and, anyway, Rwanda lacks the capacity. Even the plan to detain arrivals in the UK runs up against the problem that the UK lacks the accommodation to do so. In addition, people who cross in small boats are to be denied the possibility of ever settling in the UK or of securing citizenship. So as well as being a stain on the UK’s human rights record and a measure of great cruelty, the plans appear to be practically unworkable.
The government, echoed by the Labour opposition, blames “evil smuggling gangs” as the “root cause” of the small boats crisis. But, of course, the real root cause of the crisis are the measures the UK takes to evade its obligations under the Refugee Conventions, measures that make it necessary for anyone wanting to claim asylum on the territory to enter without the authorization of the UK government. People at risk of persecution, whether Iranian women protesting against the veil, or Afghan translators who worked with the British government, are not granted regular visas to hop on a flight, nor will they be able to get to the UK by road or rail. The UK has sealed these routes, making those who want to cross turn to the boats as a solution.
This has suited the UK government because it wants to weaponize asylum for domestic political reasons. The UK now has large numbers of people who have waited for years while their claims go unprocessed, all living on a pittance (around £5 a day) and, since COVID, crowded into hotels in large numbers, thereby providing a focus for local resentment and far-right campaigning, which demonizes victims of persecution as potential terrorists and sexual predators. The regularly televised arrivals of boats on the south coast also generate a sense of perma-crisis that fuels popular concern and resentment. This too has political value, unless it makes the government look weak and out of countrol, hence the latest tightening of the screw.
Of course the government and its media supporters claim that many who come are “bogus” and that “genuine refugees” would stop in the first country they passed through that was safe. But none of this survives scrutiny. The presence of people who are not refugees on boats does not detract from the rights of those who are, and the Home Office ends up accepting that most people from a range of countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea etc) are refugees. There is no obligation under the Convention for refugees just to stop and the first “safe” country, and people may have very good reasons to choose the UK as their destination, including historic links to the UK, family connections, or speaking English. Moreover, the Convention is not just about “safety” but about providing people whose citizenship has been rendered ineffective by persecution with a means to remake their lives as members of a new political community. The UK government seeks to thwart this. A shameful day.
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