UK's Immigration Conundrum

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Immigration as a whole, and within its fold illegal immigration, particularly through the small boats landing at the coast of Dover after crossing the English Channel, have been major topics of political discourse in the UK for quite some time now and it seems these will dominate the political debate leading to next year’s general elections. So, what are the issues involved? Does the UK see immigration itself as a problem or is it only illegal immigration? Is the problem as bad as is being made out to be? And, are the solutions being tried appropriate? Are they legal, ethical, humane or even effective? Let us have an unbiased look at all the viewpoints.

‘Migrants’, a recent book by Sam Miller, makes the point that the urge to move or to migrate is one of the most basic urges in human psychology and without this the far reaches of this planet would not have been populated. Viewed from this pre-historic perspective nobody can claim to be an original inhabitant of a particular place as all of us are essentially migrants. However, the emergence of separate linguistic/cultural civilizations in specific geographical locations and later the formation of nation-states have solidified the concepts of natives and national boundary, dividing the world between original inhabitants and outsiders. Even in this divided world voluntary migration keeps happening all the time and all countries keep accepting new immigrants as residents or citizens. Trade, education and exchange of skilled labour are strong forces behind all countries accepting new immigrants.

Of late, however, the forces of exclusion have raised their head once again with countries putting up walls, physical as well as procedural, to deny entry to immigrants. Brexit, in the context of the UK, represents this thinking. There were specific periods in the post-war history of the UK when the country not only allowed but actively sought and encouraged immigration to fill the voids in its labour force. Perhaps as a reaction to that or as a fear of losing its established way of life to a cacophony of immigrant cultures, the UK is exhibiting a general aversion to immigration. Even towards legal immigration it exhibits a state of mind that borders on confusion – it doesn’t really know what it wants. While trade and economic needs tend to push it towards acceptance of legal immigration, visions of cultural homogeneity spur it towards rejecting it. Outsiders are left scratching their heads in bewilderment at Suella Braverman, herself an immigrant, vowing to reduce legal immigration to just a few thousands, by putting up further procedural walls, even when the UK’s labour market, already under pressure because of an ageing population, is crying out for more skilled and higher talent immigration to fill a huge gap. Today no national government is immune from having extreme right-wing rhetoric spewing members but surely the world expects a more mature response from the Home Secretary of the UK, one of the truly mature democracies in the world.

Another example one can give of this confusion and not knowing what the UK immigration really wants is the callous treatment meted out to tourists from non-European destinations at the Heathrow airport.?On the one hand, the UK wants to sell London as the culture/art/food/fashion/history/finance capital of the world (which it is!), it wants the foot-falls in its shops and malls and museums to rival and exceed those in Paris and New York, and also wants to earn huge revenues from high visa fees.?And yet, when these tourists land at the Heathrow they are faced with long queues, that move at a snail’s pace, at immigration counters because very few counters are manned. ?How can there be disconnect between the number of tourist visas you give and the number of immigration counters you decide to man at the airport? I do not think that this can be described as just mismanagement at the airport. This seems to be a totally confused way of saying – yes, we do want your money but actually we just want the money, not you!

While confusion best describes the UK’s attitude to legal immigration, it is illegal immigration, which presents a far more difficult challenge to commentators because all the alternative views seem true. The different perspectives on this issue are described below.

The UK government obviously wants to put an end to all illegal immigration. It wants to stop all small boats launching from the coast of France. It wants to legislate a new law on illegal migration which will facilitate declaring the prospective asylum claims of all such persons as ipso facto void, and deporting them immediately either to their home country, if it qualifies as a safe country, or to a third safe country, like Rwanda, with which the UK has an agreement to deport such persons. Viewed from any nation’s perspective, what is wrong in it? It is the right of any country to stop people arriving illegally on its shores. It is also the right of any country to refuse to grant asylum to anyone and to deport him back. There are three arguments being advanced from the nationalist perspective. First, that the rise in illegal immigration is putting an ever burgeoning economic pressure on the UK with the cost of housing the immigrants along with welfare payments exceeding a million pounds per day. An economy already fighting low growth, high inflation, high interest & mortgage rates, and finding it increasingly difficult to fund its public services like the NHS, can scarcely justify increasing funding to support illegal immigrants. This is the optics that informs the popular opposition to illegal migration. Second, the government claims that all such illegal immigrants are not victims of persecution, war or sectarian violence in their home countries and many are criminals running away from prosecution. A large percentage of such immigrants is made up of economic migrants wanting to escape detection to go on to work illegally in the UK’s shadow economy. Many failed asylum seekers also disappear and merge in the shadow economy. ?The government also avers that such migration is the handiwork of people’s smugglers and traffickers who are taking advantage of the loopholes in the UK’s liberal asylum system. The third argument is that these illegal immigrants who base their asylum applications on enforcement of human rights have been emboldened and unfairly helped by an activist European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. The UK is one of the original signatories to the European Convention of Human Rights and one of the principal founding members of the European Court of Human Rights but the court has been expanding the remit of these rights beyond what was intended in the original convention. For instance, Article 8 which guarantees the right to private and family life was intended to protect citizens from an obtrusive, totalitarian state. The ECHR, however, has widened the interpretation of Article 8 into a right of personal autonomy, bringing extradition, immigration and deportation within it. Basing its interpretation on this extended framework the ECHR has reversed denial of asylum and also stopped deportation flights. This, the UK government says, is an infringement of its own rights as a sovereign nation. ?In the age of Brexit this argument strikes a particularly resonant chord but even without Brexit in the background the sovereignty argument is a strong one. The UK government has also introduced a ‘Bill of Rights’ in the Parliament to replace the Human Rights Act, 1998 and the extreme right-wingers are even proposing to leave the ECHR though that looks highly unlikely.

If you are running a government in any country then possibly you wouldn’t be able to disagree with any of the arguments above. Critics, however, have pointed out flaws in these arguments and in the position adopted by the UK government.

First and foremost, according to the critics, the UK’s?attitude of existing in ‘splendid isolation’, formed as much by history as by its geography, is totally out of tune with the times and current geopolitical realities. Increased global migration is a reality and no country can remain unaffected by it. Global migration today is increasing because of a number of factors affecting human living conditions. War, ethnic strife, sectarian violence and persecution by autocratic regimes have always been major factors and these do not show any signs of decreasing. Poverty, hunger and inequality have also always existed but now these have become independent reasons of migration helped by easier means of global mobility. Climate change and over population in many countries have also become factors helping increase in global migration. Estimates showing the state of global migration reveal the total number of persons living outside the country of their birth to be around 175 million in the year 2000. By 2020 this figure had exceeded 280 million. In a recent article in The Times, Trevor Phillips argues that you can’t reduce migration by treating it as a policing issue – you might be able to stop some boats for a while but will not be able to stop the tide of migration because the reasons of migration represent a much stronger force. According to Trevor Phillips, most governments now focus less on the impossible task of locking the doors and more on bringing order to the flow. How you bring order to the flow is a completely different subject but the point is that the UK government is treating this problem merely as a policing issue, to be handled as yet another crime/law & order issue by the Home Department, and this approach is most likely to end in failure. The critics argue, and rightly so, that the UK does not have a cogent and coherent immigration policy. It only has a policy of policing its borders which masquerades as a policy on immigration. Granted that policing aspects will always be associated with immigration issues but they should exist only as an attendant process and not as the main policy instrument.

A second perspective of criticism comes from critics who insist that this is not as big an issue or problem as is being made out to be by the government and national media. The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) figures show that at the end of 2021, 89.3 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.?Out of these 27.1 million are refugees under the UNHCR’s and UNRWA’s (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) mandates. Figures reveal that 83% of such refugees have been hosted by low and middle-income countries while only 17% have been hosted by high income countries. The UK is clearly not carrying a disproportionate burden of refugees on its shoulders. Moreover, If we look at the number of asylum applications across the EU and the UK combined, we find that per head of population the UK ranks 18th. The problem that the UK faces is neither bigger than that faced by other European countries nor disproportionately bigger in the global context. This is neither meant to justify the problem nor to deny its existence but only to point out that it does not constitute an existential threat to the UK.

A third perspective of criticism looks at the damage that the UK’s stand does to the ideological underpinnings of its rights based society. Fundamental rights or human rights, as we know them today, owe their existence in no small measure to liberal British political thought. In fact the history and development of democracy in England right from the Magna Carta, through the 1689 Bill of Rights, to the present times is coterminous and intertwined with the gradual evolution of human rights. It is not surprising that the UK is one of the original signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights and one of the principal founders of the European Court of Human Rights. The UK is also one of the original signatories to the UN Refugee Convention of 1951 and its 1967 Protocol. The Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention are intricately connected because the rights of refugees are basically their human rights. The core principle of the Refugee Convention is ‘Non-Refoulement’ which forbids countries from returning people to territories where their life or freedom could be threatened. In addition, while Article 31 speaks about the ‘right not to be punished for irregular entry into the territory of a contracting state’, Article 32 speaks about the ‘right not to be expelled except under certain strictly defined conditions’. It is obvious even to lay observers that the proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’ is in direct conflict with the rights conferred by Articles 31 and 32 of the Refugee Convention. Critics also do not accept Rwanda as a safe third country, citing the concerns expressed by international human rights agencies on unlawful imprisonments, custodial deaths and torture, extra-judicial killings and deaths of protesters and refugees at the hands of Rwanda police. These concerns cast serious doubt on the ability of the Rwanda government to safeguard the life and liberty of the migrants deported there. The proposed deportations would, therefore, be in direct contravention of the ‘Non-Refoulement’ principle, a universally accepted principle of international law. The critics point out that apart from weakening its own commitment to upholding human rights the proposed legislation will be tantamount to the UK retracting from its commitments under international conventions, laying itself open to the charge of not upholding international law.

In addition to the commitments under the ECHR and the UN refugee Convention, the UK’s own Modern Slavery Act, 1981, casts a duty on the state to protect the victims of modern slavery - human trafficking, forced labour and debt bondage. The government’s own acceptance that illegal migration is the handiwork of smugglers and traffickers is, therefore, at odds with penalising the illegal migrants who could well be the victims of modern slavery and puts the proposed Illegal Migration Bill in a possible conflict with and contravention of the Modern Slavery Act, 1918.

Since the proposed Illegal Migration Bill has virtually tied itself up in knots by being in potential conflict with the European Convention on Human Rights, the UN Refugee Convention, 1951 and the Modern Slavery Act, 1918, serious doubts have been cast on its actual effectiveness. It promises to prove to be both a nightmare and a delight for lawyers, depending on which side they will be arguing from. An example of one such ‘tying itself up in knots’ will be the legal inability of the UK government to return channel migrants to their home countries. The reason is that under the UN Refugee Convention, an asylum seeker can be returned to his home country only if/after his claim has been rejected and since the proposed UK law bars all such migrants from making a claim itself, it also prevents the government from returning him to his home country, unless such a country is in the UK list of ‘safe countries’. All such migrants will have to be removed, provided the deportation clears all legal challenges, to a third country like Rwanda. Whether Rwanda can accommodate all these migrants is also doubtful.

This is a very complex subject and the UK is not the only country struggling to understand and come to grips with it. Forces of history are never clearly visible immediately and it takes time before the understanding sinks in. History also tells us that the first step in the process of understanding is acceptance. I believe most countries are still struggling to accept the inevitability and irreversibility of migration. Sociologists and political scientists feel that much like economic globalisation, migration also represents a force whose time has come. Given the complexities, it will be a while, however, before the final word on the subject will be spoken.