The magic solution to asylum seekers

The latest wheeze from the Government (temporary prop: R. Sunak) to deal with the huge backlog of asylum claims, is to rubber-stamp them via written questionnaires:

Asylum seekers involved will be sent a 10-page questionnaire to fill out and asked to return it within an initial 20 working days.

Some campaigners criticised the plans as “clumsy" amid reports that asylum seekers will be told to fill out the form in English.

The language barrier is unlikely to be a problem, even though this system is for applicants from ‘Afghanistan, Eritrea, Libya, Syria and Yemen’ because - I guess - there will be an army of lawyers on Legal Aid who will compose the answers for them.

In any case, those applicants ‘usually have 95 per cent of their asylum claims accepted’ under the present arrangement involving face-to-face interviews.

Why do they come to us from so far away, though? Can they really be stopped?

It seems that despite what the Home Secretary Sajid Javid said on 2 January 2019 when he made a photo-op visit to Dover, international law did not then invalidate the claims of the rubber-boat people:

… there is no obligation in the Refugee Convention, either explicit or implicit, to claim asylum in the first safe country reached by a refugee.

On 28 April last year the UK’s Nationality and Borders Bill became law, aiming for tighter control, but the Law Society says:

We have significant concerns that a number of the act's measures are, or are likely to:

• - be incompatible with international law

• - damage access to justice, and

• - negatively impact on the role of lawyers in immigration cases

In particular, we're concerned that penalising refugees who arrive in the UK via irregular means is incompatible with the Refugee Convention 1951.

In the year to September 2022, only 23% of asylum applications were refused at first; historically (2004-2020), three-quarters of rejected applicants have appealed and a third of those appeals were allowed; thus, overwhelmingly, applicants tend to succeed.

But in any case, foreign asylum seekers are only a small part of immigration to the UK: 6% of the total in 2019, 17% last year. Most immigration is legal.

Overall net migration in the year to June 2022 is estimated at 504,000; in 2019 some 14% of the resident British population were born abroad.

In addition, we have recently made welcome refugees from the war in Ukraine and opened the door for up to 5 million Hong Kong citizens ‘threatened by draconian security laws.’

As to ‘illegal’ immigrants:

there are between 594,000 and 745,000 illegal immigrants in UK. In contrast a total of approximately 30,000 people came in on small boats in the calendar year 2021 and of these only approximately 10% are illegal immigrants (90% are legitimate refugees with a legal right to asylum in UK).

So the images we see in the papers so often, of hi-viz-jacketed groups arriving by boat, are almost a distraction. If the Home Secretary ever actually succeeds in stopping the rubber flotillas, it will be little more than a PR victory to impress the British punters.

The real issue is official policy on immigration. The Government’s ‘New Plan For Immigration’, issued last March, opens with fine-sounding sentiments:

The UK has a proud history of being open to the world. Global Britain will continue in that tradition.

Our society is enriched by legal immigration. We are a better country for it.

We recognise the contribution of those who have come to the UK lawfully and helped build our public services, businesses, culture and communities and we always will.

Further in, it considers the challenges of illegal immigration, including criminal people-smuggling operations and the dangers to the migrants; but also says

if left unchecked, illegal immigration puts unsustainable pressures on public services.

Yet as we have seen, the total number of illegals in Britain, accumulated over many years, may be as low as one single year’s worth of net migration. The ‘unsustainable' pressures’ can hardly be attributed to the relatively small subset of ‘irregular’ incomers.

What’s the big picture?

Do we need, can we afford, the importation of people on the current scale? What are the benefits and disadvantages, long-term as well as short?

Is it an argument about demographics?

To sustain the country’s population at its present level, we would need an average birth rate of 2.08 children per woman; at the moment it’s 1.754. Without immigration, our population would gradually shrink. Would that be a good thing?

Why do we have so few children? Would we have more if houses were not so expensive and employment more abundant and better-paid?

Is the immigration issue merely a symptom of systemic economic failures that none of our governments in recent decades have addressed?