Finally a politician has told the truth about migration – for years we have been living with a defunct global system
FINALLY a politician here has told the truth about migration.
It took a speech in Washington yesterday for the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, to tell some home truths.
For years we have been living with a defunct global system when it comes to immigration.
The United Nations Refugee Convention, set up after the Second World War, committed countries to giving asylum to people facing persecution.
But in the decades since then several things have happened.
The first is that the reasons people can claim asylum have grown and grown.
“Persecution” has become “fear of persecution”.
And the number of people who can qualify for that has become endless.
We now have talk of “climate refugees”, as though people whose countries have become unseasonably hotter must, as a matter of right, move north.
We can’t take them all in
There are more glaring examples.
For instance, as Braverman mentioned in her speech, there are now vast swathes of the world where it is difficult and sometimes dangerous to be gay or to be a woman.
But that cannot mean that everyone in countries across Africa, the Middle East and Far East where that may be the case should all come to Britain.
Or Europe.
Or other developed countries.
We cannot take them all in.
Technically, almost everyone in Afghanistan who is not a member of the Taliban has an asylum claim.
Can all of Afghanistan move?
What has made this even more of a problem is that we live in an era where travel has never been easier or cheaper.
Smartphones and other devices have also made it easier than it ever has been to see what life is like elsewhere and plan to move there.
People can text relatives, friends, contacts or gangs and find routes into countries.
And once there — as we know in Britain — they almost always stay.
The Home Secretary wants to address this.
But every attempt she has made to do that has been thwarted.
Take the small boats crisis.
The movement of a constant flow of people into Britain across the Channel on smugglers’ boats should not be a difficult problem to address.
Ten years ago Australia — which also has the benefit of being an island — faced a similar challenge.
Their then Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, put in a policy of turning the boats around or forcing people to be processed on an island far away from Australia.
In the past couple of years two Home Secretaries here in the UK have attempted something similar.
The Rwanda plan would see people who break into this country deported to central Africa to have their asylum claims looked into there.
To my mind, this is not enough.
We do not have the resources or skills to just endlessly analyse the asylum claims of the whole world.
But it is the start of a plan.
The beginning of a deterrent.
Yet even that plan has been challenged repeatedly in the courts.
Despite all the fanfare and all the condemnations from people who think Britain can take in the whole world, the Rwanda facilities are still empty.
Our Government is still fighting this in the courts.
And perhaps one day soon they will be allowed to start the flights.
In the meantime, this country is just a sitting duck.
We have people breaking our laws by forcing their way into our country every day.
And we are meant to just sit back and take it?
One reason is that the hands of governments in this country and around the world have been effectively tied.
Everybody knows it.
In Italy, right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni came into office on a promise of stopping the boats that land illegally in her country from Africa.
But since she has been in office, Italy has seen another record surge in migration.
It doesn’t matter who is in power, it seems, because they aren’t really in power.
Not so long as these outdated conventions are in place.
Buckling under the strain
Even left-wing French President Emmanuel Macron recognises that we are facing an impossible situation.
In an interview this week he was challenged about France’s own asylum commitments.
His response: “We cannot embrace all the misery of the world.”
He is right.
Everybody in power knows it, whether from the Left or the Right.
It is the same in America, where major cities such as New York are buckling under the strain of a constant flow of illegal migrants from the country’s southern border.
The American Left knows this is a problem and doesn’t know how to deal with it.
The American Right knows it is a problem but doesn’t seem to know what to do about it.
That is one reason why Braverman’s Washington speech was so important.
She addressed a potential catastrophe that every developed nation is facing.
And she called for other countries to join her in not just facing up to it — but dealing with it.