The cynical nonsense of “safe and legal routes”

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The cynical nonsense of “safe and legal routes”

Pete North • 17 June 2022

Yvette Cooper thinks we were born yesterday

Addressing the Commons, Yvette Cooper once again trotted out the mantra that the answer to the dinghy crisis is to open up more “safe and legal routes”. It’s a plausible soundbite but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

I’m still not sure what it even means. For sure, we could set up reception camps in countries neighbouring war zones and then select on a lottery basis who gets to come to the UK, but quite obviously not everyone who wants to come can come so we’d need to put a number on how many can come – and nobody who advocates “safe and legal rotes” will venture a number.

But what then? What about those who won’t take no for an answer? They’re going to come to Calais anyway. Before the ports was secured in 2016 they’d mob lorries and attempt to board them, or cling on to the underside of HGV trailers. Now that’s impossible, they turn to smugglers. So then do we send three coaches a day out to camps in Calais? How will that deter those with no legitimate claim? All you’ll do then is incentivise more to come, exacerbating the problems in Northern France.

The thing about migrants who pay smugglers is that they don’t respect our borders at all. If they’re told they can’t come in, they’re still going to try and find a way, They’ll keep trying it on for as long as there is no real danger of being deported. In continuing to accept those who pay smugglers, we are in fact discriminating against the genuinely vulnerable in that the system favours those with the means to pay the many thousands of Euros to smugglers.

The only way to disincentivise the crossings is to make it absolutely clear that it will not be rewarded. I personally do not favour dangerous pushback tactics but I do think once escorted ashore they should be bussed to the nearest airport to board an RAF transport aircraft. If not to Rwanda, then a facility in the Falklands.

If there is a case to be made for more safe and legal routes, then the focus should be on taking the most vulnerable from the more dangerous refugee camps, which suggests women and unaccompanied children, not feral males. It would certainly strengthen the moral case for defending our border at Dover. Not that we need a stronger case. Defence of our borders is a sovereign right.

The view of the NGOcracy is that migrants should not be housed in hotels, barracks or reception facilities at all, citing poor conditions. I personally don’t subscribe to the view that migrants make the trip because we put them up in “four star hotels”. It’s a bit of a right wing trope. The NGOcracy is right that months and years in limbo in a grubby hotel is catastrophic for mental health, especially when the Home Office is dragging its heels on asylum decisions.

But then then refugee groups won’t explicitly say what should happen instead. We can deduce that for ourselves. We get the message. We’re supposed to set them up in social housing distributed throughout the country with no limits on who can come, and no grounds for claiming asylum is too spurious. They won’t say that outright because they know what the majority of taxpayers will say about it.

I get the feeling that the Home Office is quite deliberately slowing down the process of asylum decisions as a deterrent, but it’s clearly not working. All we’re doing is storing up a battery of problems as the creaking asylum system is completely overwhelmed.

Ultimately the system will only work if it actually removes those with no right to be here, but that’s the one thing the Home Office doesn’t seem to be able to get a grip on. Some countries have refused to take back their illegals and landing rights for deportation flights have been refused. This is where Britain needs to get tough and start sanctioning the likes of Pakistan unless they take their illegals back. We can easily cut off financial transactions, depriving Pakistan of the remittances it relies on. We should also explore trade tariffs.

The government blames lefty lawyers and the ECHR, and though it’s true that the NGOcracy are wreckers, driven by an ideological zeal for open borders, a government with a near eighty seat majority shouldn’t have any problems clipping their wings. The real question is why doesn’t act? How long is it going to allow itself to be held hostage? Run of the mill Tory incompetence alone does not explain it.

Leaving aside the dinghy issue, illegal immigration seems to the the hot potato that no government seems to want to touch. There are more than a million illegals in the UK, and this government is massively expanding non-EU immigration. I don’t think this can be sustained without dangerous consequences.

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