Let’s keep calm and remain sane over immigration – this is Ireland, not UK

British home secretary has inherited Rwanda plan that he initially ridiculed as ‘batshit’

As the political and media agenda here faced being hijacked by the UK’s “Rwanda plan”, London offered a solution last week — if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. “If the Irish Government believes the Rwanda plan is already having an effect, we can explore Ireland joining the Rwanda scheme,” a Downing Street source told The Telegraph. This was an “olive branch”, said GB News.

Was this a joke? Tánaiste Micheál Martin had earlier warned critics not to be taken in by the “right-wing Tory press”; Irish officials duly dismissed the supposed offer as “spin”, the paper reported.

But what might seem like a joke now may not be so funny in the future. Allow this problem to fester, allow opportunists to seize on it, allow it to shift the discourse here and soon the idea of shipping asylum-seekers off to central Africa might not seem so outlandish. After all, that’s what happened in the UK.

The Rwanda plan is merely the latest, if most baroque, stage in a British saga of convulsions over migration that goes back 25 years.

In 1999, as a million people fled Serbia and Kosovo and global refugee numbers hit what would be a 15-year high, the number of those seeking safety in the UK soared. There was intense political and media focus on migrants in France laying “siege” to the Channel tunnel, a narrative that the French were to blame and a lurid “Swan bake” scare story in the Sun, claiming asylum-seekers were “barbecuing the Queen’s swans”.

As Rob McNeil, of Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, told me, this period saw the origin of what would later become known (under the Conservatives) as the “hostile environment” — policies such as the dispersal of asylum-seekers, ending the right to work and limiting access to benefits, which were all introduced as a form of “aggressive” deterrence.

Asylum numbers fell in the years after; this reflected global trends, which saw deaths from conflict and refugee numbers remain low for a decade. In the UK, the story shifted to immigration more broadly. Again, the narrative was less about numbers than about behaviour. In a 2013 survey, YouGov asked people how many of the UK’s 2.3 million EU immigrants they thought were claiming the dole. Seventeen per cent, said the public; 35pc said UKIP supporters. The correct answer was just 3pc. As veteran pollster Peter Kellner summarised in a recent article for Prospect Magazine: “The fear of welfare tourism far outstripped the reality.”

This fear fuelled Brexit, but ultimately led to a paradox, as Kellner observed. Net immigration in 2015 was 330,000. Two-thirds of the public thought this was too high. Yet, post-Brexit, immigration soared even as public concern about it fell.

Net immigration is now more than double that of 2015, yet anti-immigration sentiment has fallen. Now, almost as many people are happy with the level of immigration as think it too high. How could this be? It suggests the concern was provoked not by numbers — facts — but by narrative.

Today, there is a new “siege” narrative — small boats. They started coming during Covid, partly as a result of grounded flights, partly as a result of tightened security at the Channel tunnel. The boats are more visible than stowaways, are run by criminal gangs, are dangerous and make for good copy.

Seeking a new form of deterrence, Boris Johnson’s government sought to ape the Australian model of off-shoring. Against the advice of British diplomats, a deal was done with Rwanda: the African country would take in asylum-seekers in return for cash.

The Migration Observatory has estimated the total cost of the scheme at more than half-a-billion pounds (€585m) if Rwanda takes in just 300 people — more than £1m per person — rising to almost £1.5bn for 5,000 people.

Johnson announced the deal in 2022, the day before being fined for his involvement in the Covid “Partygate” scandal. The courts blocked the scheme and Partygate, followed by a litany of scandals, ultimately forced Johnson from office. But then Rishi Sunak made “stopping the boats” one of the five priorities of his premiership.

The UK Supreme Court found Rwanda to be unsafe due to “serious and systemic defects” in its processing of asylum claims. Another reason to quibble about safety might be the shooting dead by Rwandan police of 13 refugees during protests over food rations in 2018. In response to these facts, the British government introduced the Safety of Rwanda Act. “Every decision-maker must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country,” it declares.

British home secretary James Cleverly inherited the Rwanda plan from Suella Braverman, who had described sending migrants to Rwanda as her

“dream”. Last week, as the Home Office released video of its agents picking up people for transportation to Rwanda, Cleverly called the plan “a pioneering response to the global challenge of illegal migration”. Previously, according to reports he chose not to deny, he had described the plan as “batshit”.

The Rwanda plan has, all along, been more about optics than tactics. It is less a practical response to migration than a rhetorical response to the Tory politics of migration.

Despite anecdotal evidence that new arrivals in Ireland are citing it as a reason to have left the UK, there is no deterrent effect visible yet in the data on Channel crossings — a record 711 people crossed last Wednesday.

The traffickers are not just smuggling people — they have hijacked policy. Last year, arrivals by boat made up just a third of those seeking asylum in the UK. The total number of asylum-seekers in the UK was roughly half that in France and a quarter that in Germany. Asylum-seekers made up just 7pc of all immigration to the UK.

The tents on Mount Street were the Irish equivalent of the small boats — a highly visible, but unrepresentative manifestation of a “problem”. If the visibility of tents distorts our impression of the scale of the problem, so does social media.

Four-fifths of posts on X about the recent anti-immigration protests in Newtownmountkennedy came from outside Ireland, Sky News reported, with posts by leading hatemongers Alex Jones (in the US) and Tommy Robinson (in the UK) among the most widely read.

The tents on Mount Street were the equivalent of the small boats crossing the English Channel

Either the Rwanda plan works as a deterrent, in which case there will be fewer asylum-seekers arriving in the UK, and so fewer coming across the Border to Ireland; or it doesn’t work, in which case the Rwanda plan is not — from an Irish perspective — the problem. In any case, British rhetoric will calm down following the anticipated Labour victory in the coming general election.

An anticipated 20,000 people seeking asylum here this year will be a record high, but this seems more likely to reflect trends across Europe than recent policy changes in the UK. In any case, it will be merely a fifth of the number of Ukrainian refugees, many of whom will return home as soon as the war there ends. Our population is growing; despite capacity constraints, this is fundamentally a good thing. In 2022, asylum-seekers made up barely more than 10pc of population growth.

This issue needs a far more competent response, but it doesn’t need panic, it doesn’t need political opportunism and it doesn’t need performative deterrence. Most of all, it doesn’t need plans that are batshit.