Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
I wish there was a word in the English language for the queasy feeling I get when an issue that matters is co-opted by people I can’t stand. I feel it every time I see the former home secretary Suella Braverman, whose parents came to Britain from Mauritius and Kenya, spouting bile about immigrants. I resent her ugly language, but also the fact that the right wing of the Conservative party, in its sound and fury over immigration, is letting establishment liberals off the hook.
We can all scoff at the Rwanda plan, which Rishi Sunak has bizarrely, and unwisely, made a test of his premiership. This cynical stunt by Boris Johnson would never take more than a few hundred failed asylum seekers, even if it were workable. We can all tut sombrely at the damage that would be done to our country’s reputation if we left the European Convention on Human Rights, which some Conservatives are arguing for. We can attack homeowners in the English countryside as “Nimbys” for worrying about the scale of housing needed to accommodate Britain’s burgeoning population. I have done all of these things, but I also know this is a cop out. Believing in democracy means acknowledging that Britain and Europe face a mismatch between the growing numbers of people seeking a home on our shores, and the scale of arrivals that voters will accept.
Across the Channel, the issue is tearing Europe apart. Centrist, moderate Sweden has been plagued with gang violence and the emergence of “no-go” areas, with its prime minister lamenting that integration has failed. The French government is split over an immigration bill that has already cost one ministerial resignation. The German chancellor is being urged to process asylum seekers offshore and to recognise more third countries as “safe” places to which irregular migrants can be returned.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because there aren’t many policy options available. In 2004, Tony Blair’s government tried to persuade Tanzania to let UK officials process asylum claims there, especially those claiming to be Somali refugees. (The Tanzanian government refused.) Blair also, according to newly released documents, considered creating “safe havens” for rejected migrants in Turkey and Kenya. These never came to pass — but his frustration at the hurdles in removing failed asylum seekers has been shared by politicians across parties for two decades.
Immigration is not a fringe matter. When asked to name the single most important issue facing the country, 30 per cent of UK voters last month said the economy and 20 per cent said immigration, with health and the environment trailing behind. The public don’t lack compassion for people in desperate plight: More In Common has found considerable sympathy for victims of modern slavery and for Afghans fleeing the Taliban, and a dislike of hardline ideas like stopping all refuges entering illegally.
Economically, the calculation is simple: falling birth rates and early retirements leave little option but to welcome more working-age migrants. The Poles who came to Britain after 2004 were some of the most talented and hard-working of their generation, and their retreat since Brexit is a huge loss. But a rapid influx of young men can create real tensions. In September, 200 people were arrested at a festival in Stuttgart after a fight broke out between Eritrean exiles. A moderate German friend who lives there told me that while he admired Angela Merkel’s sentiment, “Wir schaffen das” (we’ll cope), during the height of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, he now feels she was naive.
To portray such concerns as “far right” is to make the same mistake of patronising voters that the globalisers did before Brexit. The rise of Geert Wilders in Holland, the AfD in Germany and Marine Le Pen in France are rooted in the failure of democratic governments to reassure their citizens that they are in control of immigration.
The looming question is how western democracies can balance legal obligations with political imperatives. The desire to “offshore” migrants in third countries arises from the fact that signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 protocol have a legal duty to hear asylum claims from anyone who enters their territory. But removing failed asylum seekers is hard, not least because many claim this would breach their human rights. The current inquest into the murder of three people in Reading by a Libyan jihadi who claimed asylum in 2012 and was never returned to Libya lest he came to harm is the kind of case that makes ministers tear their hair out.
Eventually, Europe may have to reconsider how its courts balance the rights of refugees versus citizens. The meeting last year between Giorgia Meloni of Italy and the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen in Lampedusa, where migrants outnumber residents, recognised the failure of the Brussels’s Dublin Regulation, which makes the country of first arrival responsible for feeding and housing migrants while their asylum application is being processed. But the EU is limited in what it can do. Its new “migration pact”, which aims to share new arrivals fairly between member states, has already been undermined by some countries refusing to take any at all.
Tory headbangers who trample on these sensitive and complex issues are not convincing the public or reassuring our international allies. But the issues they raise are ones that deserve the attention of everyone who would rather we did not sleepwalk into populism.
Register for the FT’s subscriber webinar on 24 January 2024 (1300-1400 UK time) on The Migration Debate: a challenge for liberal democracies?