Labour’s immigration plans won’t stop the boats

After rightly condemning the Rwanda plan as a brutal, wasteful gimmick and scrapping it, Labour is now pursuing evidence-free gimmicks of their own on immigration.

This morning, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced yet another round of spending to increase immigration detention and deportations.

Cooper said: ‘By increasing enforcement capabilities and returns, we will establish a system that is better controlled and managed, in place of the chaos that has blighted the system for far too long.’

But this ramping up of existing failed action will do nothing to stop the boats or address the failures in our immigration system that produce the need for irregular journeys and irregular work. 

In my view, it is costly, vicious and guaranteed to fail – far from the promised change, this sounds a lot like the last government’s disastrous approach.

There is only one viable long-term approach to reducing irregular journeys by asylum seekers to the UK, be they in small boats, or lorries. That is to provide safe alternative means to access our asylum system, removing the need to use smugglers’ boats.

As long as we pretend that we can end the need for people to come to the UK at all to seek protection, and make hostile policies based on pursuing that fantasy, we force people to come without authorisation instead.

The only winners from this approach are the private firms that run our ever-growing border-surveillance, detention and deportation estate, and the smugglers who profit from there being no alternative means for people to reach us than through them.

Asylum seekers continue to come – our hostility has no impact on that – but it does increase the risk of death at our border.

In 2024 so far, the rate of people dying at our border has soared compared to last year by 450%. Organisations assisting people on the ground in northern France draw a direct line between the increase in deaths, and the increase in police patrols, fences, drones and enforcement along the coast.

People seeking to make the crossing now leave from more dangerous parts of the coast in more overcrowded dinghies, in the hope of evading patrols. The UK helps fund those French patrols as part of a deal signed under Rishi Sunak that will see Britain pay £480m over three years. 

As far as I can see, the evidence is that they simply don’t work and we should stop wasting that money at the expense of human lives.

The Labour Government is following in the same old approach of chasing the victims and the headlines

Creating safe routes to access the UK requires negotiating with France and the EU as a whole to establish systems for regulating migrant journeys and committing to a credible plan for sharing responsibility for those seeking protection. This isn’t an easy task, but it is the only approach that is backed by evidence and is worthy of our humanity.

Instead of making an honest assessment of these realities and putting forward a real plan, the Labour Government is following in the same old approach of chasing the victims and the headlines.

Shifting yet more resources towards locking up and deporting more people is cruel and does nothing to fix the situation. It costs over £100 per day to hold someone in immigration detention and that money goes straight into the hands of private companies contracted to run our ever-growing detention estate.

But while the number of detention places has ballooned over the last 30 years, and is set to grow again following this announcement, governments cannot point to any tangible positive result from increased use of detention. There’s always someone else, churned out by our broken system, to detain.

We lock up more people and still people come. We deport more people, and still more people work without authorisation in our country. Because as long as we punish the victims instead of fixing the systems that put them there, the doom-loop driving people into irregular journeys and irregular work continues.

This week, new immigration statistics will be released. They are very likely to show the continuing trend which has seen numbers of migrant doctors, nurses, and care workers go down, but the numbers arriving in small boats remain high.

I believe that Labour is seeking to get ahead of this bad news with today’s tough posturing. But like the last government found to their electoral peril, they have misjudged what ordinary people really want from our immigration system.

Labour voters don’t consider immigration a priority. The people who put Yvette Cooper into the Home Office want to move away from the failed hate-fuelling policies of the past, towards humane and evidence-based management of immigration flows.

They recognise that protecting refugees is a good thing, and immigration as a whole is necessary. So, we know these policies are not aimed at them.

Labour voters are being betrayed in the pursuit of headlines designed to attract people who are convinced by anti-migrant hate.

Today, Labour is not just continuing with failed policies that drive a doom-loop for immigrants, they are promoting the idea that immigration is bad and needs brutal, expensive action to enforce it away.

In the wake of racist violent mobs attacking asylum seekers, mosques and people of colour on our streets, it is an irresponsible validation of the idea we can or should simply get rid of the immigrants we don’t want.

As long as that narrative persists from our mainstream politicians, it is Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson who are banking all the political gain.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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