The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Jenrick: Too many migrants to integrate
Party faces ‘red-hot fury’ from voters over Rwanda legislation, former minister warns
INTEGRATING migrants into society is “impossible” at current levels of immigration, Robert Jenrick says today in his first comments since he resigned.
The former immigration minister, who quit this week over the Prime Minister’s Rwanda Bill, says the Tories will face the “red-hot fury of voters at the ballot box” unless they do more to bring down historically high levels of immigration.
Writing exclusively in The Daily Telegraph, Mr Jenrick sets out his blueprint for tackling legal and illegal migration as he accuses the Prime Minister of failing to keep his word “to do whatever it takes” to stop the boats.
He warns that Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Bill does not go far enough and will result in only some symbolic half-filled deportation flights owing to an incessant “merry-go-round” of legal challenges caused by the failure to block appeals by individual migrants.
Mr Jenrick resigned on Wednesday after he lost battles to strengthen the Bill and push through his full package of reforms to reduce record net migration. His critique of the emergency legislation will provide ammunition for Right-wing MPs who are threatening to revolt ahead of the Bill’s second reading in the Commons on Tuesday.
In his article, Mr Jenrick warns that successive governments have failed to pay sufficient attention to legal migration even though it puts more pressure on community cohesion, public services and housing than illegal migration.
“GP services and hospitals do not grow on trees. Integration is impossible if you let in over 1.2 million new people as we have done over the last two years,” he says. “There is no better example of the failed Westminster consensus over the last 30 years than allowing historically unprecedented levels of immigration, resulting in disastrous consequences for the country and at every stage ignoring the express wishes of voters.
“Centre-Right parties across Europe have a choice: begin to deliver on the mainstream concerns of ordinary people when it comes to immigration, or face their red-hot fury at the ballot box.”
He warns that the five-point plan announced this week to reduce net migration from its record high of 745,000 will still leave the Government a “considerable way off ” meeting its 2019 manifesto commitment to bring it down below the then level of 226,000.
Mr Sunak described the plan as delivering the biggest cut ever in net migration of 300,000, but Mr Jenrick wanted to go further with official caps on visas and an immediate overhaul of the twoyear graduate visa route to stop universities exploiting the lucrative foreign student market. “Too many universities have fallen into the migration, rather than education business, and are marketing low-grade, short courses as a back door to a life in the UK,” he says.
Mr Jenrick describes his arrival a year ago at the “beleaguered” Home Office with the UK “beyond breaking point” amid the small boats crisis.
Mr Sunak insisted on Thursday the proposed legislation was “not only the right approach, but the only approach” to get deportation flights off the ground before the next election by declaring Rwanda safe and blocking all but a “vanishingly” small number of legal challenges. He has warned that Rwanda would have pulled out if the Government had gone further in disapplying international human rights law which would have left the UK without anywhere to send deported asylum seekers.
The emergency Rwanda migration scheme was said to have only a “50 per cent at best” chance of success ahead of the next general election, according to the Government’s official legal advice.
Victoria Prentis, the attorney-general, has been advised that the legislation leaves a significant risk of the European Court in Strasbourg blocking flights.
The advice was signed off by Sir James Eadie, the UK’s most senior legal adviser on issues of national importance, who headed up the Government’s defence of the Rwanda policy in the Supreme Court this year.
One of my first visits as immigration minster was to a family in Dover. Their home had just been broken into by a small boat arrival. It was a portent of the damage illegal migration is doing to this country that would confront me every day in my position.
A day later I was summoned to the Commons to explain why hundreds of hotels were being taken over to house these illegal arrivals. There was, of course, no defence I could offer for this farcical situation, nor any immediate solution with my hands tied by primary domestic legislation and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) for these illegal arrivals to be housed. Soon after, I was working with the MP in Knowsley dealing with the aftermath of a riot in a deprived are of Merseyside, where trouble surrounding an asylum hotel had led to communal violence on the streets.
If former home secretary Sajid Javid declared a “major incident” when 250 arrivals crossed between January and November in 2018, five years on – and 114,000 illegal arrivals later – when I walked into the beleaguered Home Office it was clear that the illegal, dangerous and completely unnecessary crossings had pushed the UK beyond breaking point.
The Prime Minister was right, therefore, to promise to do whatever it takes to end this farce. And, until Wednesday, he had kept his word. While the legality of the Rwanda policy was winding through our courts, we did everything else we could, striking a deal with Albania, increasing returns of immigration offenders, and cracking down on illegal working. The result has been a 30 per cent decrease in arrivals compared with last year and the closures of asylum hotels. That is progress, but far from enough.
The bleak reality is that there is every reason to suggest the outlook is deteriorating. There was a 30 per cent increase of illegal arrivals into the borderless Schengen area this year, geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa will further stoke migratory patterns, and there remains more than 100 million individuals displaced worldwide. So long as the EU cannot police its borders, the UK will be forced to grapple with the injustice of illegal migration.
Meanwhile, the ruse the openborder enthusiasts in the Labour Party are attempting to sell the country is that you can arrest your way out of this problem. Their suggestion that an additional cross-border cell of officers can solve one of the great challenges of the 21st century would be laughable if it wasn’t such a serious matter.
To actually stop the boats requires establishing the strongest possible deterrent to those thinking about making the journey. The Rwanda policy is the only credible deterrent we can implement to achieve that effect this side of an election. Following the signing of the treaty between the UK and Rwanda that directly responds to the Supreme Court’s concerns, our ability to implement the policy now rests on the passage of effective legislation. Legislation must address the Supreme Court’s judgment that Rwanda may subsequently remove people to countries that are not safe.
And it must block off inevitable further systemic and individual legal challenges that would otherwise prevent flights from taking off.
The Prime Minister is right to say the Bill goes further than ever before. But the test for the legislation isn’t where it ranks in the many Bills the Conservative Party have introduced over the last few years. The test is: will it work? Will it end the merry-goround of legal challenges that prevent small boat arrivals being swiftly removed in sufficient numbers to create a meaningful deterrent? Having done as much as I could to strengthen the legislation I concluded, regrettably, the answer is no. It was therefore clear I could not continue, in good faith, in my position as the Bill’s minister.
By allowing individuals to make claims that their circumstances mean they cannot be sent to Rwanda, the Bill invites each small boat arrival to concoct a reason to delay their removal. The small-boat-chasing law firms will gladly assist them in this endeavour, and the smuggling gangs will quickly produce a well-tested narrative for their customers to deploy upon arrival. The Supreme Court’s judgment, which criticized Rwanda heavily – means judges will be far more receptive to their personal claims, thereby compounding the risk that individuals are taken off flights in considerable number. This is not merely my opinion. It is also the careful judgment of some of the country’s finest legal minds.
But these claims needn’t ultimately be successful to undermine the scheme. The ability for every illegal arrival to lodge a personal claim will place the courts under immense pressure. Backlogs will likely build, and cases that would at best take months to resolve will be stayed considerably longer. Injunctions will likely follow. And we will begin losing bail claims, forcing us to release people from detention. People will of course abscond and disappear into communities.
Even on an optimistic assessment, it will still take a protracted period for an individual to be removed following their illegal entry. Because of our limited detention capacity, this will severely limit our ability to detain all arrivals crossing illegally. The idea, therefore, that this Bill will guarantee all those arriving are detained and swiftly removed is for the birds. The only Bill capable of delivering that is a Bill that guarantees removal within days not months of arrival by blocking off individual challenges.
Another core concern that I have is that, despite the rhetoric suggesting otherwise, the Bill does not exclude interim rulings of the sort that grounded our first attempted Rwanda flight from the European Court of Human Rights. Again, given the loss in the Supreme Court, the likelihood of such rulings increases significantly. The new Bill replicates the provisions under the section 55 of the Illegal Migration Act, which enables ministers to use their “discretion”, but in practice I know the instances this will be used is vanishingly rare, if ever. It would be unforgivable for the Government to find itself, after two Acts of Parliament, derailed by the exact same issue that derailed that ground flights over a year ago. As leading lawyer Richard Ekins set out in a recent Policy Exchange report, the ability to issue a rule 39 indication is a power the Strasbourg court has awarded itself and was never something the UK agreed to when it signed up to the convention. The Bill must therefore, in clear statutory language, preclude rule 39 indicators from preventing removals.
Having promised to do whatever it takes to stop the boats, the goal now seems to have been reduced to delivering some symbolic, half-filled flights, taking off in the spring of next year. Clearly, for the policy to work we need individuals removed at scale, and within days of illegally stepping on to our shores. Anything less than this and the boats will keep coming.
Controlling our borders would, of course, be far more straightforward if we extricated ourselves from the web of international frameworks that have taken on near mythical status within Government. One of the advantages of our uncodified constitution is the unfettered power of our sovereign parliament to create law, and that is a power we should not be afraid to take advantage of.
Whilst Westminster consumes itself with debates on stopping the boats in the coming weeks – which accounts for less than 10 per cent of overall migration to the UK – legal migration remains at historically unprecedented levels. Yet the arguments advanced by the Government about why we must stop the boats– severe community cohesion challenges, pressure on public services and housing challenges – self-evidently apply far more strongly to legal migration, but have received a fraction of the attention. GP services and hospitals do not grow on trees. Integration is impossible if you let in over 1.2million new people as we have done over the last two years. Business investment and productivity will continue to be sluggish if companies retain their dependency on cheap foreign labour.
As a recent Centre for Policy Studies report revealed, we need to build at least 515,000 homes in England each year to keep pace with this level of net migration. These are all facts the public feel acutely in their day to day lives.
Despite the improvements announced last week to raise the minimum salary threshold and restrict the number of dependants, the Government is a considerable way off meeting its 2019 manifesto commitment to reduce net migration from 2019 levels, and to reshape our economy to a high-wage, highinvestment model.
The reforms I secured need to be implemented immediately via an emergency rules change to prevent a fire sale of visa applications and must be accompanied by further measures in the new year. For starters, the graduate route is ripe for comprehensive reform. Too many universities have fallen into the migration, rather than education, business, and are marketing low-grade, short courses as a back-door to the UK.
Post-Brexit, we have the levers at our disposal to deliver on promises politicians have successively made the British public to reduce net migration radically. The resistance we encounter is the political preference for the short-term expediency of cheap labour, an outdated orthodoxy on the economic benefits of immigration pushed by the OBR, and flawed assumptions about the cultural benefits of mass immigration peddled by people insulated from the trade-offs.
There is no better example of the failed Westminster consensus over the last 30 years than the unprecedented levels of immigration that have been forced on voters against their wish. As we are seeing in election after election across Europe, immigration will be a defining issue of 21st-century politics. The public’s patience has already snapped. Centre-Right parties across Europe have a choice: begin to deliver on the mainstream concerns of ordinary people when it comes to immigration, or face their red-hot fury at the ballot box.