Offshore processing is a short term fix at best
By Pete North - November 20, 2021
David Davis (he of Brexit) says “It is clear that asylum offshoring would be both a moral and economic failure. I have tabled an amendment to the Nationality and Borders Bill to remove these proposals”.
Using some highly questionable data, he asserts that “Directly applying the cost of the Australian offshoring system to the 23,500 migrants who have crossed the Channel this year alone would leave the British taxpayer with an estimated £32.4 billion bill. That is 23 times higher than our current system”.
He goes on to say “Research from the University of New South Wales found the Australian system cost approximately £4.3 billion since July 2013. For the cost of £4.3 billion, the Refugee Council of Australia reports that 3,127 asylum seekers were offshored to Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Costing approximately £1.38 million for each person detained offshore. On top of high costs, the cruelty of the Australian system is clear. Of the 2,116 reports of assaults, sexual abuse, and self-harm attempts, over half involve children. However, children only made up about 18% of those in detention on Nauru.”.
First off the mark, I wouldn’t be in a rush to believe an Australian NGO which, much like our own opposes any control on immigration. On the face of it, it’s not exactly value for money and we’re talking about some fairly small numbers whereas we’re looking at a workload exceeding twenty thousand people. There are obviously economies of scale, but the first job is finding somewhere that will take a large enough number to make a difference. This is a problem that runs year on year and the numbers are only going upwards.
There is then the more pertinent question of whether it would work. The theory is that it would act as a deterrent, on the assumption that if people knew that crossing the channel meant a flight out to a refugee camp elsewhere in the word indefinitely, they won’t attempt the crossing. If it works then it is arguably worth the money. One suspects, though, that they will keep coming. This is a war of attrition, with a view to saturating our defences in conjunction with human rights activists and the media.
That’s the thing that’s not generally understood about this. As much as migrants individually game the system, there are forces at work, not least Iran, using migrants to destabilise Europe, and will keep sending them. Soon enough offshore detention will be overwhelmed. We could have numbers creeping up to half a million which isn’t morally or financially sustainable. Arguably funds can be diverted from the aid and defence budgets since it qualifies as both.
The short of it is that this is a permanent problem, to which there is no single solution and we are reaching the limits of what can be accomplished unilaterally. Offshore processing would never be out of the media and activist lawyers will have a cottage industry attempting to hobble it.
The problem for politicians, though, is that though they’ll say what they won’t support, they’re not so keen on saying what they will. They lack a single clue as to what we actually should do, leaving them open to the inference that we should simply keep taking more migrants. There are those who argue that it’s cheaper than offshore processing to simply regularise them and give them social housing. That, though, undermines the very basis of immigration rules and introduces a preference for illegal immigrants. We get more of the migrants we don’t want and less of the ones we do. There is a principle to be upheld and principles are not cheap.
Moreover, granting the full spectrum of rights and benefits to dinghy arrivals is not politically sustainable. It’s a sure fire way to resurrect a far right and is an election loser for any incumbent party. Especially when illegal immigrants periodically blow themselves up. So that isn’t a solution either. It has serious implications for law and order. German, having taken in a million Syrians, has had a wave of antisemitism and attacks on synagogues, a rape epidemic and only a third are able to support themselves financially. It could yet destabilise German politics.
Ultimately, if we want to stop migrants arriving from France, it is in our interests to ensure they never get as far as France and must work with our European allies to strengthen their borders. This is a politically contentious issue across the EU, and though we have left, their problems are still, to a point, our problem.
Still though, it is worth repeating that the dinghy arrivals are only a bit part of the problem. The numbers are not insignificant, but there is plenty we could and should do to remove visa overstayers, of which there are around a million. Regular enforcement of workplace safety, noise rules, and the basic good governance that councils should be doing as a matter of course is by far the best way to detect illegal immigration and exploitation. Similarly enforcement of HMO and housing rules attacks the problem from another angle. Councils are presently disincentivised from evictions being that the have a statutory obligation to rehome anyone they do evict. We must remove that obligation for non-citizens.
One point I take from the refugee advocates on Twitter is that the asylum system is chronically under resourced, leading to claims taking years. They argue the new borders bill will only increase delays, but it seems not to matter either way since the Home Office is failing to deport anyone. Unless the Tories get a grip the system will continue to fail.
It is also remarked that cuts to our foreign aid budget will exacerbate the problem. Superficially it seems like a credible argument, but it assumes our aid endeavours across a vast spectrum of activities alone have or could prevent migration. Arguably a multilateral effort could do this, but the UK acting alone is unlikely to make a difference, not least when the and industrial complex is made of of British university educated drones with gender pronouns in their biographies who would rather pay for lessons in conceptual art for Pakistani lesbians than dredge a port or fix a road. Until we fix the political culture of aid and trade then we’re unlikely to get results.
The problem is that government is looking for a once and for all fix when the solution comes in the form of effective and properly funded agencies including local government, and a foreign, aid and trade policy with immigration as a a central strategic concern. That’s going to require some joined up thinking and for the government to take on the various blobs who haven’t been able to unplug from the Brussels mindset and still think these policy areas should serve UN sustainable development goals rather than the immediate national interest. It’s more than just a “war on woke”. The entire culture of our public institutions, including the universities that feed them, has been corrupted by far left American ideologies. We need to de-graduatise the civil service and get normal people running the machinery of government again.
The broken asylum system and the Dover invasion is symptomatic of an entire government apparatus suffering from an intellectual and moral collapse, deprived of intelligent leadership and expected to perform miracles by imbecilic politicians who fail to grasp the complexity of the issues and couldn’t be less interested. Like much else that’s falling apart, nothing will be solved unless we fix our politics.