Labour is incapable of fixing the migrant crisis

Spectator

2 days ago

The news that over 50,000 migrants have arrived on small boats since Labour took office last year is of no surprise. If things don't change soon another 50,000 are sure to follow and then another. The causes of the Channel migrant crisis are quite clear. Yet public frustration is at fever pitch partly because none of our political elites – red, blue or turquoise – have any idea how to solve the problem.
Both establishment parties reacted to the migrant crisis in the same way – not with substantial change but with slogans and ineffective schemes. Just as the Rwanda plan was, essentially, a publicity stunt, so is Keir Starmer's 'Smash the Gangs' catchphrase. Virtually all of the countermeasures Labour offered voters at the 2024 general election already being done by the Home Office, UK Border Force, Border Security Command and the National Crime Agency. The badly drafted, unsecure and unscalable 'one in one out' treaty with France is quite risible. Meanwhile, Reform UK's 'push back the boats' proposals would not survive the first major boat sinking – and quite righty.
Channel asylum migrants are acting rationally. For as little as 5,000 euros they are buying the prospect of gaining permanent access to the British 'social wage' which entitles them to health, housing, education and other benefits, without having made any contributions to the system. And through later family reunion routes, their loved ones are likely to join them in a peaceful western jurisdiction with long established embedded rights such as freedom of religion and freedom of both speech and association. The prize is huge. Why wouldn't anyone living in a war zone or a simply corrupt, poverty-stricken state want to come here? Those who claim that the illegal migrants' principal partner is not the smuggling gangs but, rather, the British government are not entirely wrong. Labour – like the Tories before them – are making the world's poor an offer they can't and won't refuse. So the flow continues.
While the benefits of this type of migration are obvious to the asylum seeker, the costs to the recipient state have, until recently, been rather opaque. Thankfully, right across Europe this is changing. In a 2023 paper called 'Borderless Welfare State' Jan van de Beek and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam calculated the net cost to the Dutch State's public finances by migration category. It found that asylum migration from Africa cost an astonishing 625,000 euros per person on average. Van de Beek's team rated labour migration as more productive than asylum migration in all categories. Even the UK's own Office for Budget Responsibility has belatedly discovered that a 'low wage migrant worker' wave is hugely fiscally negative. At some stage it will occur to the ruling elite of a country currently borrowing billions to pay interest on its national debt that we can't afford this. The cost to social trust and solidarity are rather more difficult to calculate but very substantial.
Solving the crisis requires two things. First, Britain needs to part from the international legal architecture which supports the present outdated system. Namely, the 1951 Refugee Convention (and the 1967 protocol) and the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights. Secondly, all unsolicited arrivals must be intercepted, transported and secured in an offshore detention facility within a British Overseas Territory – such as Ascension Island or South Georgia – and then returned to their country of origin or a third country. As the Australians have already proved, the flow would cease. Overnight.
Can Labour deliver? I doubt it. The means to solve the crisis outlined above are, politically, well beyond the parameters of what Labour could ever implement. Labour's frontbench is comprised of post-national progressive politicians whose concern is global welfare rather than the particular interests of British citizens. Such misguided attitudes are baked into their mentality and shambolic episodes like the Chagos giveaway prove it. Labour's backbenchers are no better – they are unable to agree even a modest reform of the disability welfare system without widespread revolt. The idea that they would contemplate withdrawal from the post-war legal asylum system is for the birds. It will not happen. Which is why, from the country's point of view, the Labour government is now an absolute impediment to border security.
The migrant flow will continue and grow across the world until the generous offer made by western states is closed down. The public is gasping for help on this – but they won't find it in Downing Street.