Immigration

Progressives, don’t cheer Rwanda’s setbacks

The last-minute halting of the first flight to Rwanda is humiliating for Boris Johnson’s government. An urgent interim measure from the European Court of Human Rights prompted a domino effect of domestic court orders that ended with the plane returning to base without passengers. The ECtHR’s order came down to three factors. First, that evidence from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and others suggested asylum seekers transferred to Rwanda ‘will not have access to fair and efficient procedures for the determination of refugee status’. Second, that the High Court had found ‘serious triable issues’ in the government’s decision to treat Rwanda as a safe third country on the grounds that

Is Boris willing to make the Rwanda plan work?

Priti Patel’s first go at deporting migrants to Rwanda is turning before our eyes into one of those answers from the TV quiz show Pointless – when you see the on-screen counter drop remorselessly towards zero. At the time of writing, the counter for the number of migrants to be flown out to Rwanda is down to seven – from an original list of 130. While Home Office officials continue to insist their chartered plane will take off tonight with at least some migrants on board, other parts of government do not seem so sure. So we could still be about to witness a completely pointless answer. There is no

In defence of meddlesome priests

The British constitution is best understood as a dinner party. Imagine the key institutions of national life personified and sat around a table debating the issues of the day. True, as you and I picture this scene it is now a little late in the evening, the surroundings are worn and some hitherto unheard voices are beginning to loudly bark above the polite murmur of the older interlocutors. But the conversation carries on. One of the longest-standing participants in this national conversation is the Church of England; indeed, perhaps only the Crown has been part of it for longer. The traditions of Toryism and liberalism are comparative newcomers, Labour even

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

The police have bowed to the mob

On Saturday immigration enforcement officers went to Peckham to pick up a man suspected of overstaying his visa. When they arrived, a crowd of protesters turned up to stop the ‘immigration raid’, blocking the van from departing. When the police turned up, they also found their way blocked. Eventually, they gave up. The arrested man was released on bail. The Home Office released a statement which said that ‘preventing immigration enforcement teams from doing their job is unacceptable.’ This was accompanied by the universally understood but officially unstated caveat: not that we’d prevent you from preventing officers doing their job. We cannot have a situation where groups feel they can

A visit from Neanderthals: The Red Children, by Maggie Gee, reviewed

This is the kind of novel that will be discussed jubilantly in the book clubs of places like Lib Dem north Oxford. It is a social polemic disguised as fiction. Maggie Gee’s concerns are topical: migration, global warming, ‘the virus’, colour prejudice and first nations. The Red Children will be selective in its appeal. Strange red people with large heads suddenly appear in Ramsgate, and stand about naked on the seafront The plot is a surreal fantasy set on ‘the edge of England’, in Ramsgate, where Gee lives. Strange red people with large heads turn up suddenly and stand about naked on the seafront looking out to the Channel or

Brexit’s potential is beginning to be realised

The purpose of Brexit was to strengthen Britain’s ties with both the world beyond Europe and with Europe itself, but in a more democratic way that carries popular support. It was clear to Boris Johnson and to the Leave campaign that the EU ideal of free movement of people, an idea forged in the 1990s, had become difficult to reconcile with the reality of the contemporary world. High-skilled immigration made more sense than low-skilled, they thought, and a new system was needed to deal with 21st-century challenges while strengthening national cohesion. Johnson’s critics, naturally, portrayed the supporters of Brexit as xenophobes and knuckle-draggers who were afraid of the modern world

The Rwanda plan could save Boris

If you want to see what explosive growth looks like then I invite you to eschew all the old Covid charts and instead make your own graph plotting the number of Channel-hopping migrants year on year. In 2018 there were 299, in 2019 there were 1,843, in 2020 there were 8,466 and in 2021 there were 28,527. So far in 2022 arrivals are running at easily more than twice last year’s month-by-month tally, meaning we are heading for 60,000+ by the end of the year. Extrapolating the trend to the general election year of 2024 takes us into the ballpark of 250,000 – roughly equivalent to the entire population of

How to fix Britain’s broken asylum system

Asylum is often seen as a simple morality tale—the generous spirited are in favour of it, the hard-hearted against. And we certainly read plenty of high moral dudgeon directed at the Home Office’s pedestrian response to the Ukraine refugee crisis. Much of that criticism was deserved. The lack of preparedness and then the inability to adapt quickly under pressure and allow in anyone with a Ukrainian passport, especially those with relatives here, while sorting out the bureaucracy once they arrived, was indeed dismaying. But the tale relayed for almost a week from almost every media outlet—from the BBC via the Telegraph and Spectator to the New Statesman and Observer/Guardian—of a

Is it time to break up the Home Office?

When was the last time the Home Office produced some good news? Even in the middle of a crisis that most will concede the government has handled quite well, the department has managed to generate the usual abysmal headlines. Even the Foreign Office, slow as it was in cracking down on Russian oligarchs, couldn’t steal the limelight. There may perhaps be a narrow defence to be made over particular policies. Sources in the department point out that the Ukrainian government would prefer refugees to remain in neighbouring countries than come all the way to Britain. But take a step back and such arguments start to look ridiculous. Britain wouldn’t have

Are Poles really against immigrants?

Krakow The invasion of Ukraine is being felt across Europe. Already hundreds of thousands of displaced Ukrainians are spilling out west in an attempt to flee Russian hostility. Polish society and the conservative government have, on the whole, supported refugees from their troubled eastern neighbour. A recent poll shows that 53 per cent of Poles are in favour of taking in Ukrainian war refugees, compared to just 22 per cent against. In Germany, attitudes are more divided, with 41 per cent supporting the settlement of Ukrainian refugees compared to 38 per cent against. More than half of the supporters of the radical right nationalist Confederation party, whose detractors have long

Brace yourselves for Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump 2024

For Democrats, like the ‘insurrection’ of January 6th, the Trump policy of separating illegal-immigrant parents from their children in 2018 has been the political gift that’s kept on giving ever since. In 2020, the conspicuously inhumane protocol provided a rallying cry for candidates in the primaries and later for Biden as nominee. True, the policy did have a rationale beyond sheer sadism. American law restricts the number of days border agents may detain the underaged and likewise constrains children’s deportation. As migrants are better versed on American immigration statutes than most lawyers, savvy incomers (meaning most incomers) were rocking up on US soil with kids in tow — not always

Why The Spectator is wrong to call for amnesty for illegal migrants

The Spectator is a magazine for conservatives written by liberals. From that tension comes an editorial persuasion — there is no line — that can seem winsome, beguiling, even perverse. Optimistic but never idealist, sceptical of the big but not the new, The Spectator combines a radical’s grasp of the possible with a reactionary’s sense of the inevitable. It is instinctually Whiggish but plagued by spasms of Toryism, looking forward through the rear-view mirror of life. If National Review is in the business of standing athwart history yelling ‘stop’, the The Spectator has more often been found sprinting ahead of history yelling ‘hurry up’. In the 1860s, it came close to

Boris and Priti can’t blame France for the Channel migrant crisis

The sun is beating down again, the waves are less choppy in the English Channel and the small boats full of irregular migrants are pouring across once more. At least 1,000 men, women and children were reportedly spotted landing on the south coast yesterday. If these numbers are correct, it would have shattered the previous daily record of 828, recorded on 21 August. But Home Office sources were today briefing that was an over-estimate and the likely official number will be about 740, merely the second highest daily total ever. The graphs plotting the staggering acceleration of this traffic make grim reading indeed – this is one curve that has never

The ‘alpha migrants’ are here – why don’t we let them work?

We’re all slowly becoming aware that there’s a new migrant crisis. Last week Jon Donnison of the BBC, cruising the English Channel looking for asylum-seekers heading to the UK, found four young men, paddling by hand their tiny rubber dinghy. They’d come from Sudan via France, and for the last leg of their journey they’d dodged the oil tankers and container ships ploughing the world’s busiest shipping lane; only one of the young men even wore a life jacket. These were the latest of more than 9,000 people who have risked their lives to arrive by sea this year. The other story of the summer is the shortage of labour.

Douglas Murray

Turning the tide: how to deal with Britain’s new migrant crisis

In December 2018 the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, cut short his Christmas holidays to go to the Channel and stare at boats. Two hundred illegal migrants had crossed from France in the previous two months and Javid, buckling to public pressure, declared a ‘major incident’. On that basis his successor, Priti Patel, should cancel any holiday plans for the foreseeable future. The number of migrants coming in through this illegal route reached more than 2,000 in June, setting a new record. And this is just the start. The summer crossings are under way — and the British government seems to have no idea what to do about it. The

Immigration is Joe Biden’s Achilles heel

Having indulged an unhealthy interest in human migration for decades, I’ve been intrigued by how the number of illegal immigrants that journalists cite as living in the US never changes. For years on end, I’ve read that the population of America’s ‘undocumented’ — a euphemism that seems to upbraid the receiving country’s bureaucrats for failing to issue its woefully overlooked residents the proper papers — is 11 million. With the artificial precision that often attends these unverifiable figures, which derive their authority from sheer repetition, some journalists will quote the number as 11.3 million. Oh, there was a brief period about 15 years ago when that standard statistic rose to

The UK’s immigration figures are a fantasy

Journalists filing to deadline are apt to dig only so deep when googling for statistics, which in themselves are sometimes derided as worse than damned lies. Thus we’re often suckers for ‘known facts’. Besides, if the UK’s Office for National Statistics doesn’t produce reliable data, where’s a poor scribbler to turn? Nevertheless, the current uptake of Britain’s offer of settlement status to resident EU citizens exposes even this upright organisation’s immigration statistics as, well, worse than damned lies. Far more generous than the begrudging bureaucratic bramble of reciprocal packages on offer to Brits resident on the Continent post-Brexit, the UK’s settlement scheme for resident EU citizens had, by the end

It’s time the British faced some uncomfortable truths, says Matthew d’Ancona

As Britain starts its long Covid recovery, are deeper problems lurking beneath the surface? Matthew d’Ancona certainly thinks so, and in this brief, rather shrill polemic, he urges us to face some uncomfortable truths. Uppermost in his mind is the threat posed by the populist right, which he worries will try to blame Britain’s post-Covid economic hardship on immigrants. D’Ancona suggests that a message of intolerance would fall on fertile ground. Britain, he says, is already in a state of disarray: Public confidence in our institutions has plummeted, as has the belief in a widely honoured social contract; the notion of shared universal rights and responsibilities is mortally threatened in

Why is this Labour MP attacking police for enforcing the law?

The most outlandish political joke of the moment is the idea that the Labour party believes in strong border controls. Keir Starmer gave it a run out in PMQs yesterday, berating Boris Johnson by observing:  ‘Our borders have been wide open pretty much throughout the pandemic.’ Yvette Cooper, chair of the Home Affairs select committee, has also been unleashing her trademark owlish looks of disapproval at ministers over an alleged lack of stringency in Covid-related immigration measures. During the Queen’s Speech debate she complained:  ‘For months on end there were no public health border measures in place at all.’ Labour presumably hopes that to be seen outflanking the Tories on

Germany’s growing extremism problem

On 2 June 2019, a German politician was found lying in a pool of blood outside his home in Hesse. He had been shot in the head at close range with a .38 Rossi revolver. Walter Lübcke, the 65-year-old leader of Kassel city council, who had been a vocal supporter of Germany’s immigration policy, had been assassinated by a German member of the British neo-Nazi group Combat 18. On Tuesday, his killer was sentenced to life in prison. Lübcke’s murder is the most extreme example of Germany’s increasingly alarming relationship with immigration, anti-Semitism, and fanatical politics. Last year Armin Laschet, the chancellor candidate for Lübcke’s CDU party, dispatched a veiled