Rishi Sunak has led voters to believe that his new Illegal Migration Act will mean no illegal migrants will be allowed to stay.
According to the Prime Minister, this in turn will break the business model of people traffickers, by rendering it pointless for any migrant to pay big sums for a place in one of their dinghies. And thus will he be able to ‘stop the boats’.
Mr Sunak seemed to take a partial step back from this bold talk earlier this week when he confessed that he might not be able to stop all the boats by the next general election given the ‘complexity’ of the issue. Now we can see why.
The latest statistics from the Home Office on immigration and asylum make clear that far from getting a grip on wholesale abuse of the asylum system by would-be economic migrants, the government is sinking ever-deeper into the mire.
The figures tell a dismal story of ongoing failure. The Home Office is simply unable to cope with the rocketing numbers of claimants. A total of 175,457 asylum seekers were awaiting an initial decision on their case at the end of June, compared with 122,213 the previous year. In a single year spending on the asylum system almost doubled, from just over £2 billion to very nearly £4 billion. During the year there were more than 78,768 asylum applications made (main applicant only), up a fifth on the previous 12 months. Once dependants are factored in, the number of applicants rises to a two-decade high of close to 100,000.
Britain also still runs far ahead of France, Germany and other big European countries when it comes to the success rate of applicants. Some 71 per cent of those applications that the Home Office did manage to process resulted in either the granting of refugee status or other forms of leave to remain at first adjudication i.e. before the multi-layered appeals process even kicked in.
Even those who arrived by small boat and whose applications were processed recorded an almost 50 per cent success rate in gaining refugee status or other forms of leave to remain at first instance from Home Office desk officers. That percentage is bound to rise much further once well-funded immigration lawyers with expertise in preventing deportations get involved.
And of course, it is not even as if Mr Sunak has got anywhere to send many of those whose applications fail. The Rwanda scheme is still stuck in legal limbo, while many countries are simply not interested in taking back their fake refugees.
As it happens, the figures for legal immigration are also running out of control: work visas are up 63 per cent, study ones up 34 per cent and family visas up an amazing 110 per cent, a figure hitherto more normally associated with the effort that footballers claim to be giving for the team.
Can there be a single person in the country who truly believes that another year down the line the grant rate for illegal arrivals will have fallen to zero, as envisaged by Sunak’s legislation? Or indeed have fallen at all? Or that parliament will be implementing an effective cap on the number of refugee places on offer, as he has also pledged?
Better weather in the Channel this month has taken the number of people arriving illegally by dinghy since Sunak made his ‘stop the boats’ promise in early January to above 19,000. It still looks likely that 2023’s out-turn figure will more or less match the 44,000 who came across in 2022. And remember that the Channel migrants account for only around half of all asylum applications anyway.
We are locked into a cycle of escalating claims, escalating costs, escalating backlogs and escalating public outrage. Nothing that has happened under Sunak suggests that the international asylum system can or should be sustained in this era of mass human transit.
And yet withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights or the UN Refugee Convention remain steps that ministers will only hint at. To so rampantly over-promise and then under-deliver on this issue – after seeing the likes of Priti Patel and indeed Johnson come a cropper – casts doubt on Sunak’s level of political nous.
Many times now this Prime Minister has promised to do ‘whatever is necessary’ to stop the boats. Yet he hasn’t stopped the boats, he isn’t stopping the boats and therefore he obviously hasn’t taken the necessary steps. Of course, Labour is most unlikely to stop the boats either, other than by laying on free ferries for all-comers, which is not what the British public has in mind when it hears that phrase.
But irregular migration on this dangerously escalating scale really is unsustainable. As Sherlock Holmes once declared: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ So someone else will one day be elected who really is prepared to do what it takes to stop the boats. Long before then it seems very likely that the boats will stop Rishi Sunak.
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