How to tackle illegal migration

Immigration policy is a mess. For at least the past decade, it has been characterised by unrealistic targets and broken promises. Every government has promised to reduce dramatically the number of foreigners who arrive here in search of work, or justice, or hope. Every government has failed. The numbers keep going up. David Cameron promised to reduce immigration to below 100,000 a year. So did Theresa May. Boris Johnson claimed his version of Brexit would see immigration fall precipitously. None of them came close to keeping their word.

Curbing immigration, both legal and illegal, is an immensely difficult problem, so perhaps it is not surprising that successive governments have failed. What is surprising is the stupidity of many of the policies which they have claimed would succeed.

In April, Johnson announced that his solution to the growing problem of illegal immigration was that the Royal Navy would take control of monitoring migrants crossing the Channel. The Navy would intercept the boats, rescue the passengers and take them to England, where it would be determined whether they were entitled to stay.

The policy has had the opposite effect to the one intended: far from deterring people--smugglers, it encouraged them. Since it was announced there have been more, not fewer, boats of migrants attempting to cross the Channel, and in less seaworthy boats. People-smugglers can offer places in over-crowded boats knowing that those boats will be picked up by Navy ships and the migrants taken safely to England. From a people-smuggler’s point of view, and indeed from an illegal migrant’s, what’s not to like? Once they get to the UK, many migrants picked up from boats in the Channel don’t wait to find out whether they are entitled to settle here. They just disappear into the black economy.

The idea of using the Navy to reduce the number of illegal migrants crossing the Channel is almost – but not quite – as silly as the idea of transporting illegal immigrants to Rwanda. The chance of that working is close to zero. Legal challenges will almost certainly prevent the policy getting off the ground. Britain’s High Commissioner to Rwanda advised against it, on the grounds that Rwanda had been recruiting refugees to fight wars in neighbouring countries. Should any migrants actually be transferred from Britain to Rwanda, there is a good chance that they will suffer maltreatment at the hands of their hosts. It is not difficult to imagine what the courts will make of that.

And yet Liz Truss insists that she is committed to the policy. She has said she thinks it will act as a deterrent. It won’t. For deportation to Rwanda to work as a deterrent, thousands would have to be transferred there – and that is not going to happen. Illegal migrants to the UK have anyway worked out how to avoid being deported to Rwanda: don’t claim asylum, just slip away before you are ‘processed’.

Truss has also said she will ‘work with other countries to get new deals to find new locations’ for Britain’s illegal migrants. Well good luck with that. Rwanda was not the Home Office’s first choice. Officials tried just about everywhere else, but no other country was interested.

Truss’s promise to get the French to ‘deal with backlogs’ by being ‘very clear and robust in my negotiations’ is no more likely to yield results. The failure of the French to implement the border policies we want them to has many causes. But the one thing that is certain is that it is not because British politicians have so far failed to be ‘clear and robust’ in their negotiations with them.

The Home Office manages to combine crazily impractical policies with a determination not to do the one relatively simple thing that could actually reduce illegal immigration: deport illegal migrants back to their home countries. It doesn’t have to involve forcible deportation, and it usually doesn’t: most are persuaded by a combination of the offer of cash from the Home Office if they go, and the threat of being detained if they do not. But what matters is the likelihood of getting caught and then sanctioned. A few isolated cases won’t have any deterrent effect.

Fewer than 8,500 illegal migrants were forcibly or voluntarily returned by the Home Office to their native countries in 2020. The number persuaded to leave the UK for the year to March this year went up to more than 11,000. But in 2013, just eight years earlier, the figure was close to 47,000 – four times as many. And 2013 was not an exceptional year: the previous four each saw more than 40,000 illegals persuaded to leave the UK, as did the years 2014 to 2016. The number started to fall significantly in 2017, and dropped consistently for the next two years. Then in 2020, it went off a cliff: a measly 8,374, more than 11,000 fewer than in 2019.

Some of this fall was due to the effect of Covid lockdowns, but by no means all of it – as the figure for the year to March 2022 shows. There has indeed been an increase in the number of illegal migrants who returned home. But the most recent figure still only amounts to one quarter of the number who returned home in 2013 – which is what it would have been if there had been no Covid, and the numbers had fallen from 2020 at the same rate as they did between 2017 and 2019.

Again, not all of those who are recorded as going back do so as a result of some form of intervention by the Home Office. But by far the majority do. And generally, the two are linked: the more illegal migrants who go home because the Home Office helps them to do so, the more who eventually go home independently of intervention.

Unfortunately, the Home Office has been quietly demolishing the infrastructure needed to persuade illegals to return home. There are fewer people working in Immigration Enforcement, and less money available for it as the government devotes more to dotty projects. £120 million has already been paid to the Rwandan government – an amount which represents about half of the entire budget devoted to Immigration Enforcement.

That department has not been abolished, but it has been diminished. Persuasion requires credible threats, and credible threats require detention spaces: illegal migrants have to be served with a letter threatening them with deportation, then held for three days before deportation procedure starts. Six years ago, there were 4,500 detention spaces – not nearly enough. But now there are fewer than 2,500. The threat that an illegal migrant will be detained is increasingly empty: there is simply nowhere to put them. Illegal migrants identified by the Home Office are still issued with the letter threatening deportation – and then nothing happens. They are given the opportunity to disappear into the black economy. And most of them take it.

Truss has said she plans to increase the Border Force by 20 per cent. That would be better than continuing to run it down – but it’s nothing like enough to ensure that most illegal immigrants are persuaded to leave Britain, which requires increasing the Border Force by at least 100 per cent, something which is not going to happen while Truss is Prime Minister. Why? Because all the Home Office’s spare cash is going to be devoted to a futile attempt to transfer Britain’s illegal migrants to Rwanda.

Using Home Office officials to identify illegal migrants and then persuade them to go home is a lot simpler than transporting them to Rwanda or asking the Royal Navy to intercept boats in the Channel. It is also a great deal more effective. That the Home Office is only managing to persuade one quarter of the number of illegals it was ‘helping’ to return home a decade ago suggests that Priti Patel, the outgoing Home Secretary, has been deluded about what needs to be done to reduce illegal immigration. Let us hope that Suella Braverman, her replacement, will change that situation. Because as long as the delusion persists, immigration policy will remain an ineffective mess. And immigration, both legal and illegal, will keep going up.