The battle of the borders
When the Home Secretary Priti Patel unveiled Britain’s new asylum policy, she promised a “faster and fairer” system with “safe, legal routes” for asylum seekers, said Robert Wright and Victor Mallet in the Financial Times. Her plan – dubbed the biggest overhaul of the immigration system in decades – ushers in a two-tier system that discriminates for the first time against those who reach the UK by illegal means. One major aim is to reduce numbers crossing the English Channel in small boats: 8,420 people claimed asylum in this way last year. People traffickers will face maximum life sentences, and migrants arriving from a safe third country, such as France, will in theory immediately be returned. Patel also said she would “keep the option open” of sending asylum seekers abroad for processing.
If she can shut down trafficking routes and open legal ones for asylum seekers, that would be a substantial and “humane” reform, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. If people know they can pay a smuggler to get them in, it switches on “a magnet”. Right now, our asylum policy is all wrong: we take “fewer refugees than is commonly imagined” – about 20,000 people were given asylum in 2019 – and “have a record of treating them badly”. If the public felt the system was fair and working well, it would most likely be “more generous”. That’s a big if, said The Guardian. As they stand, Patel’s plans look “unworkable”. She gave no detail about the legal routes by which the Government would accept refugees (it accepted less than 500 of the 3,000 initially envisaged for the recent scheme for child refugees, before scrapping it). No third countries have yet agreed to accept our rejected asylum seekers. “Brexit ended the agreement which allowed the UK to return those who travelled here via the EU to the bloc; given current relations, it is hard to see that changing.” What Patel’s plans reflect is not an “asylum crisis”, but “a crisis of empathy”, said Hassan Akkad in The Independent. I fled “war and torture” in Syria; reaching the UK involved hiding in lorries and “a terrifying boat crossing”. I was granted asylum, but now people like me will only be granted temporary refugee status, making their removal easier. Yet how could I have come any other way? Repressive regimes such as Syria’s don’t set up routes allowing dissidents to escape.
The asylum debate represents a collision of “two world views”, said Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times. For “many on the Left”, the whole system of immigration controls is innately discriminatory, even “wicked”. Yet public opinion is, in fact, far closer to Patel’s side. Labour “mocked suggestions” that the Government might move asylum processing to Ascension Island, a volcanic rock in the Atlantic; but “voters backed it”. And criticisms of her policy were “long on indignant rhetoric” but short on solutions to the system’s well-established problems. It is, admittedly, a separate question whether Patel can make her policy work. But the “battle of the borders is only just beginning”.