Saunders: Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda scheme is a global lesson in policy stupidity

2024/05/13 Leave a comment

Valid critique, and not helping the Conservatives much in the polls:

…Mr. Sunak’s scheme is faring even worse. Without having managed to deport a single migrant, his government has already paid $412-million to the government of Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who has an appalling human-rights record. Britain’s National Audit Office recently estimated that it will cost more than $900-million to deport the first 300 people – more than $3-million per migrant – though it seems unlikely that as many as 300 will ever be deported.

This vast cost, extraordinary inefficiency, policy pointlessness, unnecessary cruelty and general stupidity could all have been avoided if Mr. Sunak just paid attention to the very rational decision-making processes that guide those migrants. As experts have repeatedly pointed out, Channel crossings would all but disappear if it were easily possible to apply for British humanitarian and labour visas and family-reunification admissions en route, in Europe and elsewhere, creating safe legal paths for applicants.

That would increase his country’s refugee intake by a small, manageable margin (and would require some old-style deportations of those rejected), but it would all but end deadly illegal migration and its political consequences, at far lower cost. This would allow a politician to say “I ended this terrible problem” – something no number of flights to the middle of Africa will accomplish.

Source: Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda scheme is a global lesson in policy stupidity

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Colby Cosh: Multiculturalism takes some well-deserved criticism

2023/09/30 Leave a comment

As noted earlier, largely a repeat of 2011 criticisms in UK, France and Germany. Not a particularly insightful column and noteworthy that UK PM Sunak has already walked away from Braverman’s speech:

The concept of multiculturalism, whether you like it or not, is of acknowledged Canadian origin. So perhaps we should all flinch a little when it is grumblingly condemned by European leaders — an increasingly common phenomenon that may have reached a new pinnacle on Tuesday.

Suella Braverman, the United Kingdom’s Conservative home secretary, appeared at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute to deliver a resounding critique of the postwar framework for refugee protection and of the “misguided” and “toxic” multiculturalism doctrine that has bent it out of shape.

Braverman’s speech is meeting with an orgy of denunciation among British liberals and celebrities. On the other hand, the inevitable fate of the speech is to be laughed off by anti-immigration critics who have heard British and European politicians warn for decades that humanitarianism cannot be a suicide pact for Old World nation-states — without ever doing anything much themselves to change migration policy.

In Braverman’s account, European countries devised the United Nations Refugee Convention largely to sort out the continent’s own affairs in the aftermath of the Second World War. Refugees are defined in the text as those with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted,” but the treaty is now interpreted so as to permit ill-disguised economic migration, to encourage unlawful and risky crossings of seas and borders, and to facilitate prolonged shopping by migrants among desirable destination countries.

The result, for better or worse, is that refugee protections are now potentially available to nigh on a billion people, creating a “promissory note that the West cannot fulfill.” (Or, as French President Emmanuel Macron put it a few days ago, “We (Europeans) cannot accommodate all the misery in the world.”) Braverman enumerates four critiques of a period in which “there has been more migration to the U.K. and Europe … than in all the time that went before.”

The first is the conservative “civic” argument: integration of newcomers to a nation-state is desirable, but it takes time, and is bound to take even more time in places where a ruling philosophy of multiculturalism discourages complete assimilation and homogenizing patriotism. (This is a critique likely to land on deaf ears in Canada, where multiculturalism is popularly regarded as successful — but, then, Canada isn’t really a classic nation-state, and it doesn’t exist within walking or sailing distance of hundreds of millions of much poorer people.)

Braverman adds the “practical” argument that state services and housing markets can’t adapt quickly to mass uncontrolled immigration by asylum-seekers; the “national security” argument that some asylum-seekers are threats to public order, the public treasury and public safety; and the “democratic” argument that domestic voters almost everywhere in the West strongly favour, but rarely receive, tight control of national borders.

I’m not sure whether this enumerated list is the best way for Europeans to think about their immigration problems, but Braverman’s four points all deserve to be considered, even here in the original fastness of multiculturalism.

It’s certainly not a coincidence that the list format seems designed for future political campaigning: the U.K. Conservatives are still headed for an epic electoral disaster, and Braverman is obviously lining herself up to be a potential successor to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

In any event, the critics seem determined to ignore the actual content of Braverman’s argument in favour of unsubtle ad hominem, asking how a half-Tamil, half-Goan child of (thoroughly legal 1960s) immigrants can possibly harbour such terrible views. The awkward implication is that only pur laine Brits are entitled to critique British immigration policy — or, in practice, that nobody at all is.

Source: Colby Cosh: Multiculturalism takes some well-deserved criticism

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‘Stop the boats’: Sunak’s anti-asylum slogan echoes Australia’s harsh policy

2023/03/10 Leave a comment

Of note and a cautionary tale of simplistic slogans vs complex realities:

“Stop the boats.” The white-on-red slogan on Rishi Sunak’s podium on Tuesday was – word for word – the slogan used by Tony Abbott to win the Australian prime ministership a decade ago.

To Australian audiences, so much of the rhetoric emerging from the UK over its small boats policy is reminiscent of two decades of a toxic domestic debate.

A succession of Australian prime ministers have led the rhetorical charge against asylum seekers, insisting that their arrival is an issue of “national security” and “border protection”. They are “illegals”, “queue jumpers” and “terrorists”, Australians have been told, while people-smugglers are the “scum of the earth”.

That hostile and militarised language has held a potent place in the Australian political debate for 20 years. And the language is the fundamental basis of the policies that flow from it: of deterrence and forcible turnbacks, of “offshoring” and indefinite detention.

The rhetoric not only allows governments to create for asylum seekers a “hostile environment”, it compels it from them. This too has been copied in the UK straight from the Australian playbook.

Even many of the characters are the same. Alexander Downer, Australia’s former high commissioner to the UK, argued in the Daily Mail on Tuesday in support of immediate deportation and a lifetime ban from Britain for “anyone caught trying to enter Britain by a dangerous ‘irregular route’, such as a Channel crossing in a small boat”.

Downer was a foreign minister in the conservative government of John Howard that first implemented the “Pacific solution” of warehousing refugees on foreign islands.

The Tory strategist Sir Lynton Crosby was the federal director of Howard’s conservative Liberal party, overseeing his four successful election campaigns.

And Crosby’s protege Isaac Levido, later an adviser to Boris Johnson, was deputy campaign director for the Liberal party’s 2019 election campaign, bolstering the premiership of Scott Morrison, who came to prominence as the architect of the adamantine Operation Sovereign Borders, and who famously adorned his prime ministerial office with a trophy of a boat engraved “I stopped these”.

Source: ‘Stop the boats’: Sunak’s anti-asylum slogan echoes Australia’s harsh policy

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UK: Rishi Sunak faces Tory backlash over record immigration figures

2022/11/26 Leave a comment

Of note:

Rishi Sunak faces backlash from Conservative MPs after new figures showed net migration to the UK soaring to a record high, with 504,000 more people arriving in the country than departing over the past year.

“Unprecedented” global events including the lifting of Covid lockdowns, war in Ukraine and the Chinese security clampdown in Hong Kong sent immigration figures soaring.

At 1.1 million, the total number of arrivals in the 12 months to June was the highest since statistics were first gathered in 1964 and far outweighed the 560,000 departures, despite the fact that for the first time since 1991 more EU nationals left the UK than arrived.

Even after allowing for humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians and Afghans, the figures gave additional weight to the observation that Brexit has not reduced overall migration, as many supporters of the Leave campaign hoped.

Instead, the figures suggest that the result of EU withdrawal has been to alter patterns of migration to the UK, with departing Europeans replaced by nationals of countries like India, Nigeria and China who dominate the tables of work and study visas.

More than 20 Conservative MPs are believed to have signed a letter to Mr Sunak demanding action to bring overall migration numbers down.

Organised by Sir John Hayes – the chair of the Common Sense Group of traditionalist Tories and a close ally of home secretary Suella Braverman – the letter calls on ministers to get a tighter grip on the system for work and study visas, as well as clamping down on unauthorised Channel crossings by boat.

Home Office figures showed an 87 per cent increase to 381,459 in the number of work visas issued over a 12-month period, while visas to study rose by 38 per cent to 597,827. Both figures were more than double pre-Brexit levels.

Sir John said the influx of migrants was placing pressure on the UK’s environment, housing and infrastructure and “displacing” homegrown workers from jobs and training.

“The home secretary has been very open and honest and straightforward about the need for robust action to take control of our borders in relation to small boats,” he told The Independent. “There is a similar job to be done to retake control of visas, which I think are out of control now.”

The scale of immigration flew in the face of a promise in the 2019 Conservative election manifesto – endorsed by Mr Sunak since his arrival at 10 Downing Street – to get overall numbers down, said Hayes.

Responding to the ONS figures on Thursday, Ms Braverman said the record number of people arriving in the UK was “thanks to the generosity of the British people” towards Ukrainians, Afghans and Hong Kong holders of BNO (British national overseas) passports.

“The public rightly expect us to control our borders and we remain committed to reducing migration over time in line with our manifesto commitment,” said the home secretary, who in October told the Conservative conference her personal ambition was to reduce net migration below 100,000.

“My priority remains tackling the rise in dangerous and illegal crossings and stopping the abuse of our system.”

Downing Street said Mr Sunak remained committed to reducing net migration but has not set “a specific timeframe” for achieving the goal. The prime minister’s official spokesman blamed “some unprecedented and unique circumstances” for the record figures.

ONS deputy director Jay Lindop said that a significant driver in the figures was migration from non-EU countries by students, who are no longer forced to work remotely by Covid lockdowns.

An estimated 277,000 arrived in the UK over the past year, an increase from 143,000 in the year before.

The numbers also revealed a growing backlog in dealing with asylum claims, with 117,400 awaiting an initial decision, of whom almost 80,000 have been waiting more than six months.

Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said the statistics revealed “serious problems with Conservative mismanagement of the immigration and asylum systems where they have completely failed to get a grip”.

Ministers have failed to tackle the criminal gangs organising Channel crossings and have managed to process the claims of only 2 per cent of the people arriving in small boats over the course of the last year, she said.

“Work visas have also substantially increased as a result of major skills shortages in the UK – yet the Conservatives are not taking any serious action to address skills shortages here at home,” said Ms Cooper.

Maria Stephens, head of campaigns at charity Refugee Action, said that the “snowballing delays in processing asylum claims are destroying lives”.

And Amnesty International called for a “complete overhaul” of the asylum and immigration system, saying that the government should provide safe routes for people seeking to come to Britain.

The organisation’s refugee and migrant rights director, Steve Valdez-Symonds, said: “These figures show the UK’s system for processing asylum claims remains in complete disarray.”

But leading Tory Brexiteer Peter Bone defended the government’s record, telling The Independent: “The fact that we are taking in people from Hong Kong, from Afghanistan and especially from Ukraine is the right thing to do.

“The point is that we are controlling our borders and we are making the decisions, not the EU. Imagine what the figures would have been if we still had free movement of people. That is what Brexit was about – it was never about having no immigration.”

“Student numbers may be rising, but most of them will go back to their home countries. The government’s priority must be stopping the illegal migration by boat across the Channel.”

Source: Rishi Sunak faces Tory backlash over record immigration figures

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