Starmer may have Changed immigration Policy but it Won’t Stop the Boats

Starmer may have changed immigration policy but it won’t stop the boats

Professor Azeem Ibrahim OBE is a Senior Director at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine, and the author of Authoritarian Century: Omens of a Post-Liberal Order (Hurst, 2023). 

Some 13,000 illegal immigrants have cross the channel since the election, surpassing the tally at this point last year by 1,300.

Almost 63,000 migrants will be granted asylum next year, exactly as I and other experts predicted, after Labour threw away the right under the Illegal Migration Act 2023 to deport them.

Yet Sir Keir Starmer was, believe it or not, more trusted pre-election by Britons on immigration than Rishi Sunak.

To transport yourself back 100 days to that pre-election time is uncomfortable.

The Conservatives had taken far too long to recognise the loss of trust that comes with allowing long term migration of 1.2 million in the year ending June 2023. The changes, made by James Cleverley, which closed down the family route and increased the minimum salary threshold, and which eventually came into effect in Spring 2024, had too little time to show up in the data before the election.

Rwanda, which now even the EU Commissioner Ursula Von der Leyen is exploring (with the African nation replaced as an off-shore processing site by Albania), had been so frustrated by the courts and Civil Service lawyers and so ridiculed by an amateur commentariat that even the Tories appeared to be losing faith in it.

It’s only now that the scheme is axed that the scores of immigration experts supporting it are given the airtime to defend it.

Into this vacuum stepped Sir Kier, who at this point was still imbued with the fatal conceit that all of these problems could simply be solved if we had the right intentions and stopped being Tories.

He had a track record dating back two decades not just defending illegal immigrants as a barrister but politically endorsing the institutions that protect them against deportation. Both his own political position, and that of the more radical element of his party, precluded him from campaigning on any crackdown except on the smugglers themselves.

In other words, he would not do anything to disincentivise the crossings. He would only do what he could to prevent it logistically – “smash the gangs”.

Starmer always showed a lack of willingness to engage with and change the terrible incentives we are offering: cash, an expedited right to work, hotels and leniency against deportation. These are driving the demand for smuggling from France.

Yet Starmer won the argument.

Despite the warnings of dozens of experts, including my own report for the Henry Jackson Society, which collected years of evidence and cross-examined hundreds of recent interviews to ascertain Starmer’s most likely immigration plan, voters trusted Sir Keir when he said migration as “got to come down”.

Everyone knows the promise to smash the gangs.

He would introduce a Border Command which would “go after” the smugglers. But there was some actual substance beneath the surface. A commitment to reuniting families. There was also a rather good speech that spoke to the over-reliance of British business on migrant Labour, and how he intended to up-skill British workers to take those jobs instead. He (quite rightly) saw immigration as a disincentive to invest in training new workers when pre-trained foreigners could be easily brought in. There was no mention, however, of changing asylum law, increasing deportations of failed applicants, or of bringing our treatment of refugees in line with the French to remove the incentive to cross illegally.

Experts pointed out that Starmer’s Border Command was simply a rebranded version of the same initiative created a year before under the previous government. After two months, a Commander was finally appointed, the accomplished former head of the National Police Chief’s Council – Martin Hewitt. The rebrand has included £75 million, given by the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, to boost monitoring technology and intelligence collection amongst UK police forces.

That funding has been taken from the last government’s Illegal Migration Act (IMA) budget which was going to be spent on deportations.

What is also conspicuous, however, is that almost all of the new capabilities have no interaction with our ability to stop the boats whatsoever. Monitoring is very little use if we and the French have demonstrated we have no willingness to turn a boat around. The one capability that could help is “intensifying efforts in transit countries to prevent small boat equipment reaching the French coast”. If we ignore that the government is trying to sell an ‘intensified effort’ as a ‘new capability’, no detail has been provided as to how or in what way these efforts are intensifying from the status quo.

There really is no plan or detail below the top-level political messaging.

In his visit last month to Italy, the Prime Minister sought to emulate Meloni’s success in curbing illegal migration. He, and Yvette Cooper, attributed their success to technology, “upstream work” with Tunisia and speedy returns to countries of origin.

They conveniently ignore that Italy intends to bring intercepted vessels offshore to Albania for processing. They ignore that they have just defunded our ability to deport those without a right to be here, and the rather more obvious point that they are about to scrap our right to speedily deport those 63,000 who arrived illegally since the IMA. Moreover, unlike Rwanda (or Albania) her pale imitation of a plan has no capacity to deal with the large minority of would-be failed asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Eritrea and Sudan who we cannot send to their home countries but who have no right to be here.

That is why Rwanda worked.

Despite this, things could still get worse in the next 100 days.

Those reforms introduced by Cleverly which raised the minimum salary thresholds for workers and curbed family members attaching themselves to student visas could yet be undone.

Europe, from France, Ireland and Italy to Germany and Poland, is getting tough on immigration at just the moment when Starmer’s Britain has gone soft, and when migration to this continent continues at the fastest sustained rate in human history.

The conditions are aligning for net migration figures not seen since Germany in 2015, unless Starmer finds a plan, and fast.

This article (Starmer may have changed immigration policy but it won’t stop the boats) was created and published by conservative home and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Dr Azeem Ibrahim OBE

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