Europe is looking at Conservative ideas to tackle migration, just as Labour has rejected them

Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

Isn’t it refreshing? The grownups back in the room? A quiet competence restored, a civilised pro-European dignity in office. That’s what we were told 115 days ago. Britain reintegrated into a European orbit.

Yet, to read the press-release of the October European Council meeting is to read what was once unimaginable (and in contemporary, pro-European Britain, seems to remain so): a treatise on migration control advocating unprecedented measures.

On Poland’s recent asylum shut-down, a measure intended to eliminate Russia’s weaponisation of illegal immigration and that is supported by all but 14 per cent of the Polish population, the European Council provided a clear endorsement expressing its “solidarity with Poland”.

(Trudno powiedziec: ‘Hard to say’; Tak, z calego swiata: ‘Yes, people from anywhere’; Tak, ale tylko z krajow sasiednich, np. Ukrainy i Bialorusi: ‘Yes, but only people from Ukraine and Belarus’; Nie: ‘No’.)

That same paragraph endorsed strengthening Europe’s borders with “all available means” – opening the door to direct European funding for building even more of the Trumpish border walls that have cropped up already in Finland, Bulgaria, the Baltics, Greece, and Poland.

‘Pushbacks’ are clearly on the agenda now, too – a policy Amnesty International described as a “greenlight for violence”. For the last half-decade Frontex, Europe’s common border corps, have been quietly supporting Greek efforts on this, now though with Finland having legalised pushbacks and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen endorsing them saying “we should all more Finnish”, pushbacks are likely to become the new European normal.

These are measures that, in practice, amount to the Europe-wide death of non-refoulement, the international ‘legal’ principle that seeks to prevent the deportation of people to places where their freedom may be threatened (and by extension, the deportation of people who have not been processed).

For those that don’t remember, it is also the same principle that was weaponised by the UNHCR to have the UK Supreme Court declare the Rwanda plan illegal.

(And I say weaponised here given their evidence of Rwanda’s non compliance with non-refoulement – a 100 per cent rejection rate for Syrians and Yemenis – was based on a sample size of two, both of whom were given an expedited residency process. That and their failure to mention that the UNHCR had itself relocated some 2,000 Libyans to Rwanda – a measure that by its own standard ought to be illegal.)

The definition of a safe country of origin – that is the definition that restricts where people may be deported to, and that under current EU law requires a state to meet what is in practice an impossibly high standard of no deportations to a country that does not have a “democratic system”, – looks set to be revised, too, given the average length of a safe country of origin list contains on average just 15 non-EU countries (with the United States, given the death penalty, being often excluded).

Forget the Safety of Rwanda Act, the Conservative law that in declaring Rwanda safe sought to circumvent non-refoulement and the ECHR, now European states like Denmark, Italy, and Austria are demanding a Safety of Syria Act. Even the Germans, who we were so often told ‘do it better’ , have relaunched deportations to Afghanistan.

Rwanda is rearing its head in other ways, too, in the form of the nebulous concept of return hubs, some sort of banal-bureaucratisation of the same offshore processing concept that had underpinned Rwanda.

Why does all this matter for the UK?

It matters because in creating a regime of lopsided toughness, with Britain abolishing parts of its enforcement regime whilst Europeans strengthen theirs, Britain risks being left as the victim of classic migratory displacement – the position Ireland was left to enjoy in the months leading up the Rwanda Act.

A unilateral failure here risks turning the UK into Europe’s backdoor (or at least its doormat) with uneven regulatory-tightening and uneven enforcement leaving Germany’s 700,000 illegal immigrants or France’s 300,000 with a strong incentive to move to the non-enforcing state, us.

Britain’s big advantage, though, is that the UK’s particular enforcement challenge compared to Europe – its lax labour regulation, particularly in the gig economy – is, unlike a 2000km border with Russia, an entirely socially-constructed one, and one that can be relatively easily fixed.

Conservative amendments to Labour’s new Employment Rights Bill, though they are likely to be defeated, would be a good place to start in articulating how to fix it and in doing so, end the no-visa no-skill economy.

Requiring the end of current gig-economy policies, whereby each registered worker is the one responsible for checking whether the person they are having substitute (read: renting their account to) is legally allowed to work, would be a good start.

Going further and banning gig-economy substitution through altering the heavily-exploited definition of self-employment would help, too – Labour could vote these amendments down, but in doing so they are positioning themselves for big businesses exploiting their illegal immigrant workforce, and against employment protection.

Coupled with provisions providing for clear enforcement – a mandate that for each login, a phone-based face scan matching the ID take-place – the biggest pull-sector could be shut down overnight.

In government the gig-economy could even be a resource for creating informed migration enforcement: any preliminary browse of Deliveroo-driver Facebook groups provides a treasure trove of documentation concerning who is working illegally and who is aiding it.

These are policies that enjoy immense support: 82 per cent in one 2018 poll supported requiring the disclosure of right-to-work documentation when taking a job, and it’s hard not to see why when they are essential in enforcing fair-play and de-normalising the erosion of basic worker protections.

Outside of the gig economy, a system of European asylum-decision recognition could be put in place by the UK, recognising that if a different European state with (as FBPE has been keen on reminding people) civilised laws has rejected an asylum application, that their application be rejected automatically here, too. Blair-style bans on claimants rationalising from unfalsifiable statements could similarly help.

A smart administration then would take on von der Leyen’s challenge to be more Finnish by dismantling the worst excesses of the gig economy and working with Europe on its new projects (helping to fund for example von der Leyen’s plan to treble the size of Europe’s border force) yet at present the Starmer government seems content to do nothing.

There are two scenarios, then: one where displacement sees numbers continue to escalate thanks to lopsided enforcement, and another where numbers come down and Yvette Cooper is dispatched to every TV studio in the country to insist that they were successful in ‘smashing the gangs’ (whatever that means).

The truth in that latter scenario, then, is that Labour, by pure luck, benefitted from the rest of Europe doing the Conservative policies Labour repealed – the next Conservative leader will need to remind them of just that.