10 truths about the migrant crisis
Our Government is not in control of who enters our country, when and under what circumstances. It is a bystander. An observer.
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Am I alone in finding political discourse and media coverage of the Channel migrant crisis superficial and badly informed?
I doubt it. If a solution is to be found – and more lives lost at sea are to be avoided – we need to face a series of truths about its actual nature, its causes and the actions necessary to tackle it. So, in the spirit of aiming to improve the debate in the hope of influencing the outcome, I offer ten such truths.
Our national border is not secure. By the end of 2021, about 30,000 people will have arrived 'illegally' by crossing the English Channel in small boats. As of November, the UK Government had successfully returned six people to their place of origin. Evidently, our Government is not in control of who enters our country, when and under what circumstances. It is a bystander. An observer.
An open border breaches the principle of social democracy. To allow tens of thousands of people to arrive and to settle in the country with neither public consent nor official documentation runs contrary to the most basic democratic principles. In a democracy an important matter such as immigration must be determined democratically. Of course, if the public decided to elect a government which was committed to an open border such a policy would have legitimacy but it has not done so. Quite the opposite in fact. The public elected a party in 2019 which promised to control the border but has failed abysmally in its efforts to do so. If a nation-state is fettered by international protocols such that it is unable to protect its own frontiers – to protect its basic interests – it is not being run on social democratic terms.
The migrants are acting rationally. Anyone arriving by dinghy on the South coast to claim political asylum wins a valuable prize – a prize they are almost certain to keep. They gain immediate access to the UK's 'social wage' which entitles them to health, housing, education and other benefits, without having made contributions to the system. And they have good prospects of eventual paid employment. They enter a peaceful society with long established embedded rights such as freedom of religion and freedom of both speech and association. A land where property rights exist together with law and contracts to enforce them. They are not obliged to routinely bribe public officials and if they start a business they are not expected to pay to protection racketeers. Anyone living in a war zone or a corrupt, poverty-stricken state is acting sensibly in considering migration. The risks involved are not dissimilar to the risks our ancestors took in populating Australia and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The prize of a new life in better circumstances will always be a draw.
The flow will continue – and increase – until the offer is changed. 'Word gets around' is one of the most powerful forces in human affairs. Every successful migrant arrival makes further arrivals more likely. Family and friends get to know of the success and a trickle becomes a flood. And yet the power of the incentive to migrate illegally seems to pass over those who govern us. Instead, our governing elite has steadfastly maintained the reward of doing so. Put simply, until the incentives change stemming the flow will be impossible.
The people arriving are not the most deserving of political asylum. Those arriving via the Channel are certainly the fittest, being mostly fit young men. Well coached by human rights lawyers, their claims are based on the possible threat of persecution in their homeland. But this state of affairs begs a simple question. Of the millions of people in need, who is the most deserving of asylum in the UK? The fit young men who arrive in Kent or families with children in UN refugee camps adjacent to war zones?
Blaming the French is a ploy to distract the public. Who is responsible for the UK border? Anyone listening to Priti Patel and Boris Johnson would be forgiven for thinking it was the French Republic. In fact, the discourse seeking to blame the French is essentially blame shifting and is based on poor reasoning. The French national interest is served by moving the migrants on – which is precisely what they do. The British national interest is served by securing our border – which is exactly what we fail to do. I would urge everyone to ignore the noise which is largely played to domestic political audiences. The flow will never be stemmed from France.
The pressures will grow due to demographics and economics. Migrants wish to live in the democratic West because it is more prosperous, more peaceful (presently) and enjoys more liberty. Many arrivals from the Middle East and Afghanistan are fleeing war zones, while people from sub-Saharan Africa are mainly seeking better economic prospects. Africa has witnessed a huge population explosion which is by no means exhausted. A recent Unesco report stated that in the 100 years from 1950 to 2050 the population of Africa is anticipated to have risen from 228 million to 2.390 billion. In the post war period East Asia also experienced significant population growth. However, this was accompanied by surging economic growth which lifted the standard of living in states such as South Korea and Singapore to beyond European levels. In such circumstances there is little economic incentive to migrate and, indeed, Asian visitors to Europe frequently find poorer housing and inferior civic conditions than at home. In marked contrast, in Africa endemic corruption, poor management and political incompetence means the pattern is different. Population growth and persistent poverty have gone side by side and so the impetus to migrate will continue to increase. There is no good reason to think that the outlook will change. After over fifty years of ridding themselves of British rule, migration flows indicate that the revealed preference of many Africans is to live in Britain.
The post-war protocols on political asylum are not fit for purpose. The overriding reason why the UK Government can not deal with illegal migration is that it is bound by a series of post-war international agreements such as the 1951 Refugee Convention (and the 1967 protocol) and the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Written in the shadow of the Holocaust, these instruments gave the right to claim political asylum to anyone with a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality or membership of a social group. Any Afghan women might reasonably qualify – so half the Afghan population – as might any Chinese citizen in favour of democracy as well as any homosexual in countless states throughout the world. Put simply, billions of people would probably qualify for asylum in the UK if only they could reach our shores, which means that many, with the help of people-smuggling gangs, will do so. This is not what the post-war conventions envisaged.
Aid and economic development programmes will not stem the flow. When asked for solutions to the migrant crisis most Labour and Lib Dem politicians offer increased foreign aid and economic development programmes as a potential solution. In a tight field, this must be one of the most naive and callow positions to take in all of political discourse. The causes of warfare, global poverty and corruption are complex and deep and many are intractable. The idea that it is within our power to solve such issues – on other people's behalf – to the extent that it would stem the incentive to migrate is risible. That Keir Starmer is fond of making such innocent and unwise pronouncements makes him unfit for high office. The progressives promoting such ideas forget that such interventions have been tried to destruction, no more so in Afghanistan which, after aid donations and liberal interventions on a truly fantastic scale, has sunk back into a state of poverty, conflict and chaos.
Our leaders don't want to solve the crisis. A government wishing to secure our border and prevent the unauthorised arrival of tens of thousands of people across the Channel – unvetted, unchecked and uninvited – could do so. It would involve withdrawal from the ECHR and the 1951 Refugee convention, establishing offshore processing for all unsolicited arrivals and expediting prompt return to the country of origin. As with Australia's post-Tampa experience, the flow would cease overnight. This is SDP policy and it would enable the UK to put in place an ordered and altogether more humanitarian system – under democratic control – involving granting asylum to the most urgently deserving people, namely, carefully vetted families with children in UN refugee camps adjacent to war zones. We learnt during the Covid pandemic that when a government really wants to do something it can. In truth, our Government's inaction and its political deflections prove one thing – it doesn't want to solve the migration crisis and yet a solution must be found.
Some of you may find these truths a little bleak. You shouldn't. They're offered as a part of a path to a better policy. If a political class loses the confidence to control its national borders it may find, before too long, that the public decide to replace it.
