Migrant crisis could pay for 62k extra nurses – it’s time to cap numbers & leave European Convention on Human Rights
THE migrant crisis in the Channel is spiralling out of control – and with it, the costs of our immigration and asylum system.
Since the crossings began in 2018, around 83,000 migrants have made it ashore here.
That’s more migrants than there are regular soldiers in the British Army.
Looking after them while our incredibly slow system grinds away, processing their asylum claims, is not cheap.
In fact, since the crossings began in 2018, the annual asylum bill has more than tripled to £2.1billion.
To put that in perspective, that is enough to cover the wages of 62,000 nurses.
Alternatively, given the looming strikes in the NHS, the extra £1.5billion we are now spending on asylum seekers could instead have funded an extra five to six per cent pay raise for every nurse in the country.
And the costs are still rising.
We don’t yet have the full figures for the 2022/23 financial year but with £5.6million being spent every day just on hotel accommodation for asylum seekers, the next set of official figures will be truly eye- watering.
Yet, desperate as it is to find cost savings and patch up the public finances, the Government has seemed powerless to deal with the Channel crisis.
Treaties with France, a deal with Albania, deployment of the Royal Navy . . . but still 44,000 migrants have made the journey so far this year.
That is partly why, in a new report published by the Centre For Policy Studies, former No 10 Chief of Staff Nick Timothy and I are calling for a radical overhaul of our failing immigration and asylum system.
Our vision is founded on the principle of deterrence and has three main pillars.
First, no migrant who arrives illegally should ever be allowed to settle here.
Offshoring asylum seekers needs to become the default.
That means implementing the Rwanda deal at scale and signing similar deals with two other countries.
We should be prepared, if necessary, to offshore tens of thousands of asylum seekers.
We may well need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights to achieve this. If so, so be it.
Savings of £8billion over five years
Our analysis, drawing on the hugely successful Australian example of “Operation Sovereign Borders”, shows that offshoring could feasibly yield savings of £8billion over five years and significantly reduce the number of Channel crossings.
Second, we need to toughen up and properly resource immigration enforcement, including through the open-ended detention of asylum seekers in barracks-like facilities and the use of GPS tagging.
This will end the exorbitant hotel bills.
This will entail reversing the budget cuts to Immigration Enforcement (16 per cent in real terms since 2013), but with the number of migrant crossings still climbing, to do otherwise would be a false economy.
We also need to tighten up a leaky system which allows failed asylum seekers to slip off into the underground economy and evade detection for years.
That means tougher penalties for employers and landlords who facilitate illegal immigration, and far better use of data so we know exactly who is entering and leaving the country.
Third, future grants of asylum should be handled exclusively through dedicated schemes, as we did in the Syrian refugee crisis.
That way, we will be able to choose who comes here and how, with annual numbers capped by statute at a maximum of 20,000.
Public fed up with flouting of our laws
In doing so, we can also properly target our scarce resources at the most vulnerable using five criteria we set out in the report: vulnerability, geography, urgency, availability of alternative support and domestic capacity.
But first we need to get the Channel crossings down to basically zero, which means offshoring and tougher immigration enforcement.
None of this should be a hard sell for the Government.
Exclusive polling carried out for our report shows that 74 per cent of voters think the Government is handling the crossings badly.
Further, 59 per cent of voters think immigration has been too high over the past ten years — only nine per cent think it has been too low.
On six out of ten suggested metrics, the public think that immigration over the past ten years has had an overall negative impact — including on wages and jobs.
In a cost-of-living squeeze, at a time when everyone is having to tighten their belts, spending ever more taxpayers’ money on asylum seekers cannot be allowed to continue.
As the Home Secretary writes in the report’s foreword: “The British public are fair-minded, tolerant, and generous in spirit. But we are fed up with the continued flouting of our laws and immigration rules to game our asylum system.”
The recommendations we set out would put the UK on course to stop the Channel crossings, cut the ever-growing asylum bill and allow the Government to spend taxpayers’ money on the things that truly matter to a majority of voters.
- Karl Williams is a senior researcher at the Centre For Policy Studies.
