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We want our governments to be creative in solving intractable problems. But the new British policy of sending asylum seekers 4,000 miles away to Rwanda doesn’t count as the “innovative†answer to people-smuggling that Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel claim.
Patel has faced constant criticism over her failure to tackle the problem of migrants crossing the English Channel. She announced a “pushback†policy last year to forcibly turn back dinghies carrying migrants — the final, dangerous leg of harrowing journeys for most of them. It proved ineffective and was shot down by Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights. The deaths of 27 migrants in one tragically failed crossing last year laid bare the broader failings of the government’s policy.
So just before the long Easter weekend, Johnson announced a deal with Rwanda to eventually take tens of thousands of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Britain. Early reports spoke of a pilot plan that would target single males for deportation and suggested their asylum applications would be processed offshore. The actual program is far more draconian. Any adult asylum seeker will be forcibly deported to Rwanda, where they won’t have the right to apply for UK asylum but must try their luck with Rwanda’s system.
The furor the Rwandan plan has created seems partly by design. It helps deflect attention from the police fines being issued to Johnson and others in the government for breaking Covid lockdown restrictions. And the more noise the opposition makes about how unfairly the government is treating poor migrants, the easier it is for a rather embattled prime minister to convince voters that it has, as the Brexit slogan promised, taken back control over Britain’s borders. Clever politics doesn’t always make good policy, though. And it’s not even clear the government has gotten the politics right.
It’s not just opposition Labour Party members who are critical. Former Prime Minister Theresa May said the deal failed to meet the bar on
“legality, practicality and efficacy.†Andrew Mitchell, a Conservative lawmaker and former international development secretary, called it impractical, ineffective and expensive. Jewish leaders and the Archbishop of Canterbury have denounced the plan.
The goal, as Johnson laid out, is to disrupt the business model of the people smugglers. Time will tell, but there is no good evidence that such policies will deter some of the world’s most vulnerable people from making that short but perilous journey. As one Afghan asylum seeker who escaped via that route noted, the people smugglers will continue to be persuasive. Those who manage to cross will immediately be criminalised (since they are denied any legal route to asylum), with many forced into effectively slave labor to survive.
The initial costs to the UK taxpayer — $156 million — will be but a small down payment on a program more likely to run into the billions. At those levels, it will be hard to argue that money isn’t better spent on more humane policies for tackling the problem onshore. There will certainly be a legal challenges, too. The deportation policy, like the government’s stalled immigration bill, discriminates against asylum seekers on the basis of how they arrive in the country, while international law designates refugee status on the basis of the threat of persecution.
—Bloomberg