This is the fourth blog on the new UK Nationality and Borders Act
Home Secretary Priti Patel is clear about one thing: making refugees who arrive in small boats illegal, unlawful or inadmissible, and making it easier to deport them, is essential in order to stop the criminal networks’ trade and “break their business model” (Policy Statement, p. 18: see link below). These measures will save refugees’ lives by deterring them from taking these illegal routes. The criminal networks not only put migrants’ lives at risk, they are also responsible for other illicit activities (she gives the examples of drug dealing, firearms trading and the spread of serious violent crime) and this leads to unsustainable pressure on public services (ibid., p. 17). Patel also believes that most migrants who arrive in small boats are not refugees. She describes them in these terms:
Because of the various ways in which people with no right to be in the UK can frustrate their removal by filing an asylum claim, the system creates perverse incentives for economic migrants to pay criminals to facilitate dangerous and illegal journeys into the UK and then claim asylum on arrival (Policy Statement, p. 17).
So the new measures that punish refugees are justifiable as far as she is concerned on these grounds too.
Her ignorance is profound. She identifies them as “economic migrants” with no history of persecution or discrimination and no need of protection. Not only does she fail to understand that economic hardship too often forms part of the persecution and discrimination experienced by refugees but she also has the highly questionable belief that most people who take long, dangerous and life-threatening journeys to claim protection do not need to do so and are not desperate people but more like casual opportunists who put their own and their children’s lives at risk for no good reason. However, when she claimed that 70% of arrivals in small boats “are not genuine asylum seekers”, data from the Home Office itself showed that nearly two-thirds of them had been judged to be genuine and given protection (The Guardian, 20 November 2021: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/20/home-office-covering-up-its-own-study-of-why-refugees-come-to-the-uk?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other).
But Patel insists that her view is correct and that people who travel in this “irregular” fashion make it more difficult for vulnerable genuine asylum seekers to get their claims heard. The solution is simple: if migrants know that they will be either sent back to where they came from, be forcibly deported to Rwanda, be sent to prison or at best be given temporary protection for a maximum of just 30 months before being deported, they will be deterred from paying criminal gangs to get them across the Channel. This will, it is claimed, destroy the criminals’ “business model”. Problem solved.
That is what Patel thinks and that is what government ministers repeated endlessly after an injunction from the European Court of Human Rights eventually forced the government to cancel the first refugee-deportation flight to Uganda on 14 June 2022.
Who is targeted by this policy?
In her Policy Statement, Patel seems at first to be targeting the criminal networks:
To protect life and ensure access to our asylum system is preserved for the most vulnerable, we must break the business model of criminal networks behind illegal immigration (Policy Statement, p.18).
She then proposes eight reforms to achieve this aim (ibid.):
- Ensure that any refugee who has, on their journey to the UK, passed through a safe country but didn’t apply there for asylum is put into the “inadmissible” box so that their asylum claim will not be considered in the UK.
- Rapidly remove these “inadmissible” people back to that “safe” country or another “safe” country. (NB: a mutual agreement between the UK and that country is required before this can happen and the only country to sign such an agreement so far is Rwanda.)
- Introduce temporary protection status (for no more than 30 months).
- Build more reception centres (otherwise known as detention centres or removal centres).
- Introduce “offshoring” of the asylum process, allowing asylum claims to be decided abroad. This process will be conducted not by UK officials but by officials of the country concerned (currently Rwanda), who will also be responsible for either settling the refugees in that country or deporting them to another.
- Reduce to 12 months the threshold prison sentence after which convicted prisoners may have their refugee status revoked. We will need to consider this question later, but for now we should note that it seems to have nothing to do with newly arrived refugees in small boats.
- Change the UK’s interpretation of the words “well-founded fear of persecution” in the Refugee Convention (Art. 1) to make it more difficult to prove.
- Make the age-assessment process “robust” (Patel gives the impression that “robust” means “more accurate” but we will need to question this in a later blog as it relates to children currently being wrongly assessed as adults).
Unfortunately, just one glance at this list makes it clear that the proposals don’t target criminal networks at all — they target and punish their victims. You will be punished for not claiming asylum in another country, punished by being put in a detention centre (refugees accurately describe these places as prisons), punished by being sent to Rwanda, punished with only temporary protection even if you’re recognised as a refugee. There is, however, no sign so far of punishment for criminal networks.
Next blog: Deterrence and punishment (2)
Patel, P. (March 2021), New Plan for Immigration: Policy Statement
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