That boat has sailed
WELL, we haven’t stopped the boats. The Rwanda Bill was supposed to deter illegal migrants. It hasn’t and it won’t. The rhetoric suggests that illegal migrants will be shipped off and Britain will be rid of them. The truth is that Rwanda isn’t yet ready to take any migrants; when it is, it will only take a few hundred and every one who does go will cost the British taxpayer £1.9 million. The Bill’s real purpose is to give the Government ammunition to claim that the opposition are ‘woke’ supporters of untrammelled immigration. It’s an election ploy.
However, no political party is prepared to face the nation with the unvarnished truth. The facts are these. Every country in Europe is faced with a migration problem and Britain has one of the least pressing. Italy, Greece and Spain are worst affected, but Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands also have huge problems. Climate change will exacerbate the issue, as more and more people live in countries where heat or sea-level rise may make life simply impossible. People will move, not to gain a better life, but to have any chance of life at all. Therefore, it’s going to get worse, not only for Britain, but for the whole of Europe.
Once people are here, there’s little we can do about it. They come without papers and, if they had them originally, they destroy them so that they can’t be sent back to whence they came. There’s the rub. Once migrants arrive in a country, there’s no way they can be set adrift. Leave alone any moral issues, put them back on the boats and every television crew in the world will be watching for the first fatalities. We simply have to face up to the fact that the problems of immigration can only be solved by stopping the flow in the first place. On that, Rishi Sunak is right. Unhappily, however, his solution won’t work, largely because it’s a short-term answer to a long-term problem. That doesn’t help him electorally, but neither does pretending that his Rwanda ploy will succeed.
Britain is attractive to migrants for two main reasons. People try to come here even when our welfare system and our NHS are less good than those of many of our neighbours. They come because, if they have a second language, it is English and because they have heard that, once you get in, you can disappear and get a job without papers. We are almost the only country in Europe without identity cards and so an illegal arrival can work in a car wash or a restaurant, on a market stall or as a cleaner, without having to present papers. Of course, employers are supposed to check, but, desperate for cheap labour, they hand out the jobs. If we are serious about immigration, we should introduce identity cards at once, insist that employers require them and order the police to target likely areas of evasion. This would also help to stop social-security fraud as claimants would need identity cards to get their money.
Once we’ve put our house in order, Britain should lead a Europe-wide programme to deliver effective measures to stop illegal immigration right across the Continent, stopping migrants long before they get here. We also need a common position on dealing with true refugees from terror. Lastly, we should all be funding programmes to help people to stay in their own home countries. The UK’S cutting of overseas aid was totally counterproductive. We need to make life tolerable at home in Africa and Asia if we want to stop the flow. Migration will only be stemmed if we stop it before it begins.
If we are serious about immigration, we should introduce identity cards at once