Politicians are doing an excellent job responding to the Calais migrant crisis – if you’re assessing them against the rules of a Summer Crisis, that is. Today we have yet another ‘crackdown’ on employers who give jobs to illegal immigrants, with James Brokenshire announcing that ‘rogue employers’ will feel ‘the full force of the law’ and that he will ‘use the full force of government machinery to hit them from all angles’.
This does sound rather as though Brokenshire is going on a rampage in a combine harvester, but in plain English, what he apparently means is raids on building sites, care homes and cleaning contractors.
Of course, crackdowns don’t really make much difference to the crisis in Calais, but they do give the impression that ministers are Doing Something, and this in itself is very important in a Summer Crisis. Bonus points are allocated for using hackneyed language about government machines hitting people from all angles while announcing a crackdown. Ministers also seem to think that using unpleasant language about the migrants themselves works well in a summer crisis, with David Cameron describing a ‘swarm’ of people travelling across the Mediterranean and Philip Hammond using the word ‘marauding’.
Britain is lagging far behind many other European countries on recognising asylum seekers, with the latest Eurostat figures showing that it recognised 34 per cent of claims in the first quarter of this year, well below the rates of many other northern European countries such as Sweden (73 per cent), Denmark (88 per cent), the Netherlands (71 per cent) and Germany (44 per cent). It is worth noting, though, that France has an even lower rate of recognition than Britain, at 27 per cent, and this is why politicians have been trying to apply pressure on France to process more claims from migrants in Calais – even though those migrants want to reach Britain, rather than stay in France. And not all of those who want to come here will seek asylum anyway: they are economic migrants fleeing poor countries in the hope of a better life.
What is to be done, and who should Britain let in? Some commentators say we should just let everyone waiting at the border in as it is still a relatively small numbers. Others argue that this would encourage even more to come to the French port, and that it would undermine those who travel to the UK legally.
In the latest issue of the Spectator, Paul Collier outlines a plan for responding not just to the Calais migrant crisis, but to the wider problem of people leaving failed states and war zones to seek better lives. Collier’s plan, which you can read here, is something politicians who want to go far further than a ‘crackdown’ could adopt if they were feeling brave – but will they?
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