MIGRATION WATCH UK
We heard a great deal about the one-in-one-out agreement before President Macron paid his state visit. In the event, while our prime Minister and Home Secretary have boasted that a “groundbreaking initiative is a pivotal moment in a new phase of UK-France cooperation…….” It is worth repeating here what Sir Keir Starmer said about the deal:
“I’m pleased to announce our agreement today on a groundbreaking returns pilot. For the very first time, migrants arriving via small boat…will be detained and returned to France – in short order. In exchange for every return, a different individual will be allowed to come here via a safe route, controlled and legal, subject to strict security checks and only open to those who have not tried to enter the UK illegally. This will show others trying to make the same journey that it will be in vain. And the jobs they’ve been promised in the UK will no longer exist – because of the nationwide crackdown we’re delivering on illegal working – which is on a completely unprecedented scale. The President and I have agreed that this pilot will be implemented in coming weeks. Now, I know some people will still ask – why should we take anyone in? So let me address that directly. We accept genuine asylum seekers – because it is right that we offer a haven to those in most dire need. But there is also something else here, something more practical, which is that we simply cannot solve a challenge like stopping the boats by acting alone and telling our allies that we won’t play ball. That is why today’s agreement is so important.”
To be clear, this is an agreement in principle only, which still has to be “legally verified” by Britain, France and the EU. Moreover, some EU member states have already raised objections (Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece and Cyprus – so far), fearing that those returned to France by Britain could end up back in the countries where they originally entered the EU, as was supposed to happen under the Dublin Convention arrangements, when we invariably ended up taking more migrants than we sent to other EU member states. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, here’s what Tony Smith, a former Border Force head, had to say about both the one in, one out deal and the Dublin Convention.
Also unclear is how the scheme will work in practice. We suspect the government hasn’t yet worked this out either. It seems those arriving illegally in small boats will be detained on arrival and some 50 a week will be selected for removal back to France. Meanwhile, migrants already in France will be able to apply online in France to come to the UK and if successful, will be swapped for someone who has made it to the UK – assuming France is willing to accept them. At the rate of 50 a week, we would have returned to France 2,600 of the nearly 45,000 who have crossed in the year since Keir Starmer moved into No 10 Downing St. but given we would have received the same number back, we would still have 45,000 people seeking refuge.
Will the scheme work? Will the boats stop coming? Will the gangs be put out of business? Non, non, et non! Here’s what we said in our press release on Thursday following the PM’s and President’s joint press conference:
The returns deal, as reported, is a nonsense. 50 migrants per week will be returned to France and the French will gift us 50 back, so it makes absolutely no difference to total numbers crossing the Channel. Of the 45,000 or so who have made their way here since Sir Keir Starmer took office, just 2,600 would have been returned to France, and the same number would have been sent to us. We would still be left with 45,000 to house and look after. The British people are being taken for a ride.
Chairman of Migration Watch UK, Alp Mehmet, said:
“This is a lame deal which simply helps the EU distribute asylum seekers – mostly young men – who break into the bloc. Our prime minister has either been conned or he simply doesn’t understand what’s going on. Migrants and traffickers will be heartened not deterred. The British public deserves better than this kick in the teeth.”
This agreement (in principle) with France is little more than a distraction. It will attract more migrants to France in the belief that there is a path into Britain, it will take up resources that could be put to better use, it will add to the cost of border control and ultimately the asylum system. And, as with other measures and legislation (like the pointless Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill now reaching its final parliamentary stages) that the Starmer administration has come up with, It will most likely encourage illegal immigration rather than deter it. The only way to end this crisis is to make it clear that asylum claims from all migrants crossing the Channel will be rejected automatically followed by removal to France, a safe third country or back to the migrant’s country of origin.
Signs of Hope on Gig Economy Scandal
The Independent reports that the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has ordered a crack-down on rampant illegality in the so-called “gig economy”. This followed a week of outrage at the revelation that some Channel migrants have been working illegally for companies such as Deliveroo, UberEats and JustEat while living in taxpayer-funded accommodation. We wrote about this in Newsletter 25/2025. Above board accounts can be “rented” to migrants willing to work illegally for a few hundred pounds a month. Let’s hope she means it and fingers crossed it works. Forgive us if we don’t count our chickens
Illegal migration
18 boats were escorted across the Channel this week as of Thursday evening, bringing the total number of migrants crossing this year to over 21,000
X Posts of the week
A very odd post by the Home Office announcing the launch of a new, cheaper route to British citizenship for Irish citizens, removing the requirement to speak English or pass a Life in the UK test. Unless there is a contingent of purely Gaelic-speaking Irishmen who are very keen to get British citizenship, this seems like a cynical way of making it easier for recent migrants to Ireland to come to Britain “legally.”
MWUK in the media
Our Chairman, Alp Mehmet, contributed to a GB News article on the Home Office’s bizarre new deal with Ireland to relax citizenship requirements:
“Alp Mehmet, the chairman of Migration Watch UK, told GB News: “It is a loophole that the will likely be exploited more and more as time passes.
“It is one of the consequences of the British Nationality (Irish Citizens) Act 2024 which… will ‘enable eligible Irish nationals who have made their home in the UK to fully participate in British society while maintaining their Irish citizenship’.
“Really? I wonder how many Irish nationals in Britain have had a problem participating in our society?
“Immigration to Ireland is at its highest level for 17 years.
“In the year to April 2024, there were 120,000 non-Irish immigrants, including asylum seekers. The number shows no sign of declining.
“The new rules will make it much easier for them, ultimately, to acquire British citizenship.”
Our articles of the week
Lord Peter Lilley has written a thorough and authoritative research paper for the Centre for Policy Studies on Britain’s membership of the ECHR, options for reform, and the outcomes of leaving.
David Goodhart has written an article on his Substack about the recent attempts by journalists and activists to dismiss all concerns about demographic change as racist:
“But because the vast majority of white British people have become used to living in a multi-ethnic society and are in the main comfortable with it, it does not follow that they are indifferent to becoming a minority in their own country or that “they don’t distinguish among their fellow citizens by their ethnicity or where they were born,” as Ansell claims.
This leads me onto my second reservation about the Ansell/Freedman approach. Yes, most of us, consciously or not, sign up to the Christian/post-Holocaust assumption that all people are morally equal, not just in the UK but across the world. It does not follow that we feel an equal obligation to them all or an equal connection. The vast majority of us think that all British citizens are equal before the law and should be treated fairly but we are not so naive as to believe that simply becoming a British citizen is like donning an ethnicity invisibility cloak in which all significant differences are rendered irrelevant.”
And Guy Dampier and Amar Johal have an article in the Spectator about the failure of Starmer’s migrant deal with France.
SOURCE: Migration Watch UK newsletter
See Related Article Below
Starmer’s Border Betrayal
Labour is pouring petrol on a tinderbox
MATT GOODWIN
Keir Starmer and the Labour government are playing with fire.
That’s what I thought as I watched Starmer, this week, unveil his latest “plan” for stopping the small boats and fixing Britain’s spiralling border crisis.
Standing alongside Emmanuel Macron, President of France, Starmer introduced something that will only further erode public trust and fuel public anger.
Britain, in case you haven’t noticed, is a tinderbox right now. You can literally feel it. As I said on television this week, thanks to years and years of being lied to and gaslit by politicians in Westminster, the British people are today a lot angrier, a lot more frustrated, and a lot more disillusioned than the ruling class think.
We got a sense of it in just how quickly some people took to the streets after the Southport atrocity. You can see it, too, in how people are still taking to the streets in Northern Ireland. And you can see it in a surge of public support for Reform and what this really represents —a total rejection of the establishment.
Which is why I’ve long argued that it is absolutely essential the government and the British state get their arms around this border crisis and solve it, quickly, before things get completely out-of-control.
But what has the hapless Keir Starmer done this week? He’s decided to pour yet more gasoline over this tinderbox, making the country even more unstable.
The very same man who spent years deriding Rishi Sunak’s efforts to fix the small boat crisis through the Rwanda plan as a “gimmick” has just delivered to the British people the ultimate gimmick —another trick, another sticking plaster, another reshuffling of the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
This isn’t a serious plan for fixing our borders and restoring public trust. It is an exchange programme for illegal migrants. It is an insult to the British people.
The idea is that for every one illegal migrant who enters Britain on a small boat and is returned to France, Britain will take a legitimate asylum-seeker from France.
This, Starmer and Macron say, with a straight face, will smash the business model of the people smuggling gangs, making it clear if you arrive in Britain illegally you will be sent back to France while only “legitimate” asylum-seekers who have had their case processed will be allowed to carry on to Britain.
I’m sorry but let me state what is immediately obvious to anybody who knows anything about border security.
This is nonsense.
For a start, it makes a total mockery of the social contract in this country.
Like me, the British people do not want “one in, one out”.
They want “none in, all out”.
What Keir Starmer and his equally hapless Home Secretary Yvette Cooper are trying to push us into is a world in which the large-scale transfer of asylum-seekers and illegal migrants into our country is considered somehow normal and acceptable.
Sorry, but no.
No. No. No.
I do not want to live in that kind of country and nor, I think, do the vast majority of British people.
Britain has already done its fair share, taking hundreds of thousands of refugees from Hong Kong, Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Eritrea, to name only a few.
Not to mention taking millions of legal migrants and all while grappling with the worst cost-of-living crisis since the Second World War, the highest tax burden in this country since the late 1940s, and an economy that is still as flat as a pancake.
Which is why most people in this country want a complete end to mass migration —not the introduction of an exchange scheme for illegal migrants.
Britain, remember, is already hosting an estimated 1.2 million illegal migrants, with 1 in every 13 people in London thought to be here illegally.
I don’t know about you but I want all those law-breakers out of the country before even considering a new scheme.
And the details behind Labour’s gimmick make zero sense.
While Yvette Cooper stuttered and struggled through media interviews this week, visibly unable to tell us how many illegal migrants will be sent back to France, some of the numbers that have been released in recent days are truly pathetic.
According to some estimates, this “plan” will be limited to just 50 illegal migrants a week, or 1.5 per cent of all those who arrived in Britain since the crisis began.
Just 1.5 per cent.
To put that ‘50 a week’ in context, more than 1,000 illegal migrants arrived in Britain on just one day last month. Nearly 50,000 have arrived since Labour took power.
Over the course of one year, it would mean returning 2,600 illegal migrants while watching upwards of 50,000 arrive and then, on top of all that, having to take another load of “legitimate” asylum-seekers from France.
It’s not just bonkers; it’s outrageous.
And the underlying logic doesn’t make sense, either.
If you are an illegal migrant or people smuggler, the odds are still running firmly in your favour. You try to come to Britain illegally. Maybe you make it, maybe you’re sent back to France.
Either way, if you are sent back you can apply to become a legitimate asylum-seeker and come again, or you can just take another chance on a boat.
Which is why even the French are already saying this will be a disaster, with the head of the northern region of France and the Mayor of Calais both warning, yesterday, that all this will do is create another major “pull factor” for hundreds of thousands if not millions of migrants to head to France in the hope of moving on to Britain, either illegally or through a new “legal” route.
And then, on top of all that, is the sight of the French now saying they will pick and choose who they accept back from Britain, making it clear they will refuse anybody who poses a security risk to the French (leaving them, presumably, with us).
Sorry, but is this Pick N’ Mix an illegal migrant, now? And why on earth are we even allowing the French to have such influence over our own border security?
This, too, is the very opposite of what the British people want. They want a migration policy that reflects the interests of the British people, not Emmanuel Macron.
And because nobody in Westminster has the guts to re-establish the supremacy of UK laws —including by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights—what exactly is going to stop one lawyer after another fighting the removal of migrants back to France, claiming that doing so might threaten their “rights” under Articles 3 and 8 of the ECHR? Has anybody in government actually thought this through?
All this is merely the latest example of Sell Out Starmer –a man who on everything from Chagos to the India deal, from the EU trade deal to this, has continuously sold the interests and rights of the British people down the river.
And, lastly, to top it all off we were also given the truly hideous sight of French President Macron blaming, yes, you guessed it, Brexit for this crisis.
But this argument, too, though popular in Brussels, Oxford and Cambridge, is idiocy.
The small boats crisis began long before Britain left the EU and Brexit has nothing to do with why a similar invasion has been unfolding across the EU for 15 years.
And even when Britain was a member of the EU, under the so-called Dublin convention, we hardly sent back any illegal migrants or asylum-seekers while European Courts routinely got in the way of these efforts to return migrants.
In fact, when we were in the EU we often took more migrants than we sent back, which I suspect will now happen again through Starmer’s gimmick.
And what Starmer and Macron are not telling you is that if we were still in the EU we would currently be under enormous pressure to “share the burden” by taking in yet more asylum-seekers through the EU migration and asylum pact.
They are, once again, gaslighting you, treating you like morons.
So, how would you fix it Matt?
Well, as I’ve consistently said, for years, we need to return to being a self-governing, sovereign nation with full control over our borders and laws.
That means leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR. It means reforming if not repealing and replacing Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, the HRA.
It means, once we’ve re-established the supremacy of UK law (which Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan never established), immediately detaining and deporting anybody who arrives illegally to an offshore processing centre, well away from the British people.
It means reforming the expansion and dodgy immigration tribunals here in Britain and curtailing the right of activist lawyers to launch one judicial review after another.
And it means pushing forward leaders who actually have what Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, and pretty much everybody in Westminster currently lack —the courage and guts to stand up to The Blob and overturn the status-quo, not just introduce endless gimmicks while fuelling public anger with the entire political system.
We can stop this crisis if we really wanted to. We can secure our borders if we really wanted to. We can reassert our culture, identity, and way of life if we really wanted to.
And we can stop this country from taking a turn toward something much darker and angrier if we really wanted to.
What this will require is pushing forward people who are the very opposite of those who rule over us today —pushing forward people who will do whatever it takes to fix our borders and ultimately, put the British people first. And people who can see, clearly, that if we don’t do this quickly we will soon be forced to grapple with much, much bigger problems in this country.
This article (Starmer’s Border Betrayal) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”
Featured image: x.com
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