Today we will learn exactly what Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood meant when she hinted last week that the government would adopt a Danish-style migration policy to deter new arrivals. One thing she will announce is a ban on visas for nationals of three countries which she says are not taking back enough failed asylum seekers: Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The ban may be extended to other countries later.
How about withdrawing aid from any country which refuses to take back every single one of its failed asylum-seekers?
It is a pretty token gesture. None of these three were in the top 20 countries for illegal migrant arrivals in 2024 – they come under ‘other countries’, which accounted for a total of 1,487 arrivals between them. Why not start with Afghanistan (5,919 arrivals by small boat in 2024) or Iran (4,158)?
There does also seem to be a large hole at the centre of this policy. If you are trying to ban people from doing something illegally, why punish the people who are trying to do it legally? It is as if a supermarket, fed up with shoplifters, closed its checkouts and stopped people paying for things. It won’t mean the end of illegal migrants arriving from these countries – they will still be able to hop into a dinghy, be picked up by the taxi service that the UK coastguard has become, brought to Britain and put up in a four-star hotel. It is just the legal migrants perhaps trying to come to Britain to take up jobs in health and social care who will be turned back. Angola, Namibia and the DRC might well be able to live with that – after all, they might even appreciate fewer of their trained doctors and nurses being allowed to emigrate to a developed country.
There is a potentially more effective tool which the government has at its disposal – the aid budget. How about withdrawing aid from any country which refuses to take back every single one of its failed asylum seekers? The DRC, for example, received £47 million in UK aid in 2022. Afghanistan received £353 million, and yet took back only 13 per cent of its failed asylum seekers (why, by the way, has the UK government allowed itself to become a sponsor of the Taliban?). We paid Nigeria £110 million in aid, but it took back just 6 per cent of failed asylum seekers, we paid Somalia £100 million but it took back just 1 per cent, we paid Ethiopia £90 million but it took back just 4 per cent. Suspending the aid budget would hit the governments of these countries where it hurt most. Why wouldn’t they want to take back their illegal migrants in return for being able to continue to enjoy aid money?
Does anyone really believe that Mahmood’s scheme will come to fruition anyway? We know what happens every time ministers make a new proposal to fight illegal migration: Labour backbenchers rapidly gang up against the government, asserting that the slightest of efforts to make life more difficult or less comfortable for illegal migrants is ‘pandering to the far right’. And then the government backs down. I’ll give it a week before Mahmood says sorry, no we’re not going to adopt a Danish-style policy on illegal migration after all. We’re going to stick with our British one – and get taken for suckers.
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