Immigration: facing the consequences

By Richard North - August 25, 2023

Buried deep in a piece on the dinghy people, written by Matthew Parris some time ago is an explanation as to why the asylum system is such a mess.

Writes Parris, “It is not bad planning or official unawareness that has given us year-long waiting lists for tribunal hearings, uncomfortable accommodation while applicants wait, and a prohibition on their getting regular employment”. It is, he says, undeclared policy that, relayed back on the grapevine to relatives, will be tales of a miserable reception, lousy food, no money and no work.

The last thing any home office, Conservative or Labour, would want those relatives to hear is that you land on the beach and are at once comfortably housed and fed, your asylum application heard (and decided in your favour) within weeks, after which you find work and can begin sending back money.

Parris has been around a while and, at times, is quite astute. And this idea of “managed chaos” has a ring of truth about it – it makes a great deal of sense. An efficient asylum processing system would simply motivate more dinghy people to make the trip across the Channel.

But his touch is less sure when he addresses the idea of the “safe and legal route”. He allows proponents to claim that such a system, which would have asylum seekers able to visit a consulate or UN agency to register their claim, would stop the boats.

The problem is, of course, that it wouldn’t stop the boats. As Pete points out, there will always be those who disregard the rules. This we saw in a recent piece in the Sunday Times which featured an Afghan translator, given the name Ali, who had worked with the British armed forces.

He had applied for this government’s Afghan citizens resettlement scheme but had been turned down and had thus decided to pay smugglers to take him to the UK – first to Bulgaria, then to Serbia and to Italy, then to France and, finally, to Britain, over the Channel.

Given his personal history as a former employee of the British Army, it is likely that – if he safely reached the UK – his asylum application would succeed. If he was returned to Afghanistan, he could claim with some justice that the Taliban would kill him.

Yet, this putative member of the Calais sailing club knows the risks. The Sunday Times tells us he spends his spare time reading international news media in English, planning his routes, talking to his family.

He has, we are told, seen that some boats sink. He knows that under the Illegal Migration Act, which received royal assent last month, he will be committing a crime by entering the UK irregularly – and may even be in line to be sent to Rwanda while his asylum claim is being processed. But he is going anyway.

Ali may have a valid asylum claim, and his hard-luck story might attract some sympathy. But the reality is that, under the protocol to the Refugee Convention, there are millions, if not hundreds of millions of people who, if they could reach these shores, might have equally haunting hard luck stories and entirely valid asylum claims.

Look, for instance, at the situation in Sudan where only the relative immobility of victims of violence, and the lack of safe (or any) escape routes, keeps them out of the asylum system and away from the dinghies.

Yet, as Pete writes, “I have never seen a leftist put forth an honest argument about dinghy migrants”. But, by contrast, they are certainly assiduous in taking every possible opportunity to put “hard luck” cases before the public.

One such example is a piece from yesterday’s Guardian which tells us that “Asylum seekers in Greece [are] ‘facing two great injustices of our time’”.

This relates to an Amnesty report which links the wildfires in the Greek border area with Turkey with that favoured device, the “safe and legal migration route” after 19 bodies had been found in the Greek border area ravaged by fire. These casualties are believed to be asylum seekers who had entered the country irregularly.

Amnesty International makes the point that, in recent days the fires have ripped through an area that had increasingly become a crossing point for thousands of refugees and migrants. Their arrival on EU soil had been “systematically” met with “forced returns at the border, denial of the right to seek asylum and violence”, it added.

As the wall of flames advanced through the forests, people had been left grappling with an impossible dilemma, said a local NGO director. “The problem is that the asylum seekers have legitimate fears of being pushed back to Turkey. That’s why they’re hiding instead of going to the nearest Greek authority”.

Thus, rather than categorise the deaths of these people as tragic consequences of their own illegal action, in crossing the border without authorisation and then seeking to evade the Greek authorities, Adriana Tidona, a migration researcher with Amnesty describes the 19 dead as “victims of two great injustices of our times”.

“On the one hand, [there is] catastrophic climate change”, Tidona says: “On the other hand, the lack of access to safe and legal routes for some people on the move, and the persistence of migration management policies predicated on racialised exclusion and deadly deterrence, including racist border violence”.

Says our local NGO director, as Greek authorities increasingly seek to deter migration by creating a “hostile” environment, asylum seekers are likely to have been pushed deeper into the forests, potentially amplifying the risks they face from the fires. “This is a clear example of the policy of fear, unfortunately”, he says.

What is completely missing from this narrative, though, is any indication that the illegal migrants themselves bear any responsibility for their own predicaments. That they have blundered into a tinder-dry forest at the height of the fire season, and hid there with no one, who might warn them or arrange their rescue, is of no consequence.

Once these people have been awarded victim status, it seems, they no longer bear any responsibility for their own action. Any misfortunes that befall them are the responsibility of someone else.

One sees this dynamic in place as the migrants cross the Channel in dangerously flimsy and entirely unseaworthy boats. And yet, when – as was inevitable – a dinghy capsizes and there are a number of dead, it is somehow the authorities’ fault.

Even, as The Times tells us, migrants are “resisting rescue” in the Channel while they are still in French waters, because they’ll be taken back to France, it is somehow still our fault.

We are told of stories of tactics where vulnerable people are being held over the side of vessels with a threat that, “We will scupper ourselves if you come near”, forcing the French into a stance where they will only “escort the vessels until such a time as they get to the UK”.

Despite this, there is no-one sensible who would argue that we should leave these people to drown, as a consequence of their own folly, but – as Pete also observes – we don’t owe these migrants anything.

These are people who have paid criminal gangs, knowing the risks and consequences, he writes, knowing they are breaking the law. We rightly jail benefit cheats. There’s no reason why the punishment for illegal immigration shouldn’t be equally severe.

Insofar as we have obligations, they should be no different to the rights we afford prisoners. They can end their detention at any time by arranging to return to their countries of origin.

As the numbers rise, and the costs of dealing with them spiral into the billions, it is time to look at the asylum system once again. If people willingly and knowingly choose to break the law, they should face the consequences. Anything else is an insult to the British people.