Our Channel dilemma won’t go away until we overhaul the asylum system
Over the last few days, we’ve heard incredibly troubling stories coming out of the Manston centre holding migrants who crossed over the Channel. The facility is holding as many as 2,000 more people than it has capacity for, with few coherent plans to deal with the delays. The overcrowding has left families sleeping in marquees, distressed children throwing notes over the fences with pleas for help, and disease such as diphtheria spreading.
Clearly, the current system is not fair. It’s not fair to the local communities and it’s not fair to the people arriving into the country. But the political discourse is paralysed and unable to find a way through.
Immigration is a good thing – we need much more of it. Currently, the UK has an incredibly tight labour market, with vacancies up 56.6 per cent on pre-pandemic numbers. Immigration can both be fortuitous for those who arrive and their country, if we are able to see the opportunities. For those moving here, their life chances are improved, and they will often send money home in the form of remittances, bolstering a global and connected economy.
But the routes to the UK need to be easier and safer. Clearly, the Rwanda policy is not acting as a deterrent and asylum seekers are willing to hand over huge sums of money to criminals to make the perilous journey across the Channel. Often, we act like there are no solutions here. There are. For example, we could make it easier for people to apply for asylum before first entering the UK. We could make it clear how many people we are able to accept every year. The opportunity for the middleman – in this case criminal gangs – is created by our unwillingness to grant visas to those refugees who seek it.
One of the easiest criticisms of this policy is: where do we house them? Where will they live? The UK already has a housing crisis and the fact we are unable to find space for those who would seek to find safe haven and contribute to our economy is an indictment of a planning system restricting the millions of new homes we need. The question, then of housing, should not be to double down on failed planning rules, but to question why we haven’t liberalised them before now. It is a policy which goes hand in hand with boosting Britain’s overall productivity.
More investment in the asylum system is undeniably needed. It should be pulled from an expensive and ineffective plan to send refugees to Rwanda and put towards processing claims quickly. This is a more effective deterrent than anything. If people know they will have their claims processed in a matter of weeks, they are less likely to attempt to make it to the UK under spurious circumstances.
Many deprived coastal communities are currently bearing the burden for a failed immigration system. It increases pressure on public services, it increases the risk of hostility, as we saw with the shocking petrol bomb attack in Dover, and it also creates an even more toxic conversation around immigration which conflates a failed system piling pressure on locals with foreigners coming to our shores.
Finally, and most importantly, the government needs to relax the rules around allowing asylum seekers to work. Under the current system, asylum seekers are only allowed to apply for the right to work if their claim has taken more than 12 months to be processed. And even then they are only allowed to work in roles on the official shortage list which are often highly specialised such as engineers and architects. It creates barriers between them and the society they seek to be a part of. Boredom and frustration will create a mental strain on their mental health, which increased the risk of them needing access to local services. The combination of financial deprivation and lack of stimulation can also easily lead to crime.
We’re not the first to do this. This is not revolutionary. We should follow the footsteps of many other countries such as Canada and Sweden who allow asylum seekers to work while their claim is being processed. It works well in other countries and it is a source of bizarre exceptionalism to think it won’t also work here.
This government could easily become unstuck by the migrant crisis. Only weeks into his tenure as prime minister, Rishi Sunak has become bogged down in an issue which refuses to slink into the darkness. By ignoring the problem and pursuing tried-and-failed approaches, he is only putting his own name on the line.