The Channel migrants
When it comes to stopping the flow of migrants in small boats from France, the Home Secretary Priti Patel talks a good game, said Michael Crick in the Daily Mail. She recently vowed to prevent “100%” of such crossings. But that looked unlikely from where I stood last week on the shingle of Dungeness beach in Kent. Over just a few hours, I watched “almost 100 bedraggled migrants” – mostly young men from Syria and Afghanistan – reach the “promised land”. The authorities are struggling with the rate of new arrivals, which not long ago reached 1,185 in a single day. Numbers for 2021 are set to top 25,000, three times those of 2020. Next year they’ll surely rise further. It has become a major political problem for Boris Johnson’s government, said James Forsyth in The Spectator. Ministers seem to be “going round in circles” on the issue, without solving anything. Hence the Nationality and Borders Bill going through the Commons, which will include tough measures such as controversial “Australian-style powers” to process migrants’ claims abroad.
The offshore processing idea has “some logic” to it, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent – chiefly that ministers don’t really have any other options. The current policy of paying France to stop sea crossings isn’t working. And, post-Brexit, the UK is no longer part of the Dublin III accord that once allowed us to send asylum seekers who arrived from other EU nations back there. Offshore processing centres would help to tackle one big problem, said Henry Hill on Conservative Home: “People know that once they set foot on UK soil, they are almost certainly going to be able to stay here.” If asylum seekers are kept offshore, they can’t disappear “into the black economy”. Yet it’s unclear what nation would agree to host such a hub. The Home Office has mentioned Albania and Rwanda. Albania’s foreign minister, however, has described the story as “fake news”.
Patel gives the impression that there’s an “escalating crisis” in terms of the numbers of refugees, said The Observer. This is not true. The number of people claiming asylum in the UK in the year to June was actually 4% lower than in the previous 12 months. All that has happened is that migrants have become more visible: as arrivals by air have gone down, arrivals by sea have gone up. “Britain receives a fraction of the asylum applications of Germany and France and fewer per resident than the EU average.” The only real crisis is the fact that people are risking their lives in small boats in the “treacherous” Channel. The Government must clamp down on people smugglers. But many of the proposals in the new bill – such as offshore processing or turning back boats at sea – are mean-spirited and potentially illegal. The world needs “renewed moral leadership” on this difficult issue. But we cannot expect that from Patel, who is “leading the UK in the charge to the bottom”.