The wealthy nations can’t stop immigration by force or tricks
Britain’s Conservative government hopes to drive a stake through the post-World War II consensus that persecuted people around the world must be granted the right to asylum.
Under a bill that passed Parliament in April, asylum seekers who arrive in Britain by irregular means will be summarily sent to Rwanda. Officials in Kigali will assess their claim and, if granted, offer asylum in the Central African country.
Keeping them out
Britain’s tactic isn’t an outlier. Around the world, rich countries facing huge numbers of desperate people flocking to their borders are experimenting with extreme measures to keep them out.
From 2012 to 2014, Australia transferred asylum seekers arriving by boat to Nauru and Papua New Guinea, before changing tactics to intercept boats at sea and return them to their points of departure.
In Europe, Italy struck a deal wherein Albania would host migrant processing centers (though they would be staffed by Italian officials, and migrants granted asylum would be settled in Italy). Denmark passed legislation in 2021 allowing it to transfer asylum seekers outside Europe, with the goal, said Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, of achieving “zero asylum seekers.”
President Biden is exploring alternative means to keep migrants out. Last year, he arranged for Mexico to accept 30,000 expelled migrants per month from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba. Most recently, he has threatened to “shut down” the border to migrants who enter the country illegally to seek asylum.
These roadblocks have been built to deter unprecedented flows of people seeking safe refuges around the world. The United States received 1.8 million asylum seekers in 2022, compared with 19,000 a decade earlier. Asylum seekers in Britain jumped nearly ninefold, to 167,000.
Worldwide, the numbers mushroomed from 950,000 in 2012 to more than 6 million by June of last year. This is on top of more than 35 million people recognized as refugees by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, as well as over 5 million Venezuelans who, though not counted as asylum seekers, have fled their country and are mostly scattered across Latin America.
The 1951 United Nations convention on the status of refugees, which enshrined the right to protection from repression and persecution in the aftermath of World War II, wasn’t designed for this. It didn’t contemplate people fleeing failed states, states largely controlled by brutal criminal organizations, or climate change.
New barriers won’t work
It didn’t anticipate the internet, which has helped migrants navigate journeys that would have been impossible a quartercentury ago.
The last overhaul of U.S. immigration law came about in 1990, before the advent of the web — long before TikTok videos explained how best to navigate the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama and Google Translate helped Chinese migrants as they crossed Mexico.
Still, erecting new barriers to block asylum seekers cannot be a solution. Low- and middle-income countries today are host to more than three-fourths of the world’s refugees. The new barriers in the rich world are contributing to the swell of desperate people in places that have less capacity to incorporate the displaced into their societies and economies.
In theory, there are available solutions. In Europe, as in the Americas, regional agreements to share the burden of migration seem indispensable to take the pressure off single countries.
In a way, Britain brought its asylum crisis upon itself when it left the European Union, losing the ability to coordinate asylum policies with other member states. These days, it is going to be extra tough for it to convince France to stop dinghies on its side of the English Channel.
But the odds for enlightened policymaking are dim. Last month, the European Union took another shot at burden sharing, requiring all members to chip in in some form. It is unclear whether this agreement will do any better than earlier attempts, all of which have crumpled.
The rise of authoritarian populists brandishing xenophobic slogans suggests most coordination efforts will buckle next time large numbers of asylum seekers try to move across European borders.
It is true that, for asylum to remain a viable option for those fleeing violence and repression, it must be limited to that objective. Asylum must not become an all-purpose entryway for anyone seeking a better life. It makes sense for affluent haven countries to tighten procedures in some way to guarantee asylum serves its purpose. But these restrictions will not be effective if they are too draconian.
More protection
International covenants to protect the persecuted should be broadened to take account of the new forms of violence and repression driving people from their homes, including those stemming from state failure and criminality. Climate change also calls for broadening avenues for migrants fleeing deprivation.
No set of barriers, however formidable, will reduce people’s determination to migrate. The affluent havens should instead acknowledge the many endowments that migrants bring to their host economies.
For the sake of their own prosperity, the rich, aging, depopulating countries of the West wracked by xenophobic populism must make peace with the fact that they need migrants much more than they think.