The ‘alpha migrants’ are here – why don’t we let them work?

We’re all slowly becoming aware that there’s a new migrant crisis. Last week Jon Donnison of the BBC, cruising the English Channel looking for asylum-seekers heading to the UK, found four young men, paddling by hand their tiny rubber dinghy. They’d come from Sudan via France, and for the last leg of their journey they’d dodged the oil tankers and container ships ploughing the world’s busiest shipping lane; only one of the young men even wore a life jacket. These were the latest of more than 9,000 people who have risked their lives to arrive by sea this year.

The other story of the summer is the shortage of labour. Desperate farmers are being forced to leave vegetables rotting in fields for want of pickers and packers. Haulage companies report a shortage of lorry drivers; restaurants, just reopened post-Covid, are closing again for lack of staff. So why can’t we put two and two together? If we urgently need pickers and sorters, waiters and chefs; if agriculture and hospitality depend on labour they can’t now find, why not let asylum-seekers do those jobs?

This is not as odd an idea as it sounds. I’ve met a lot of illegal immigrants over the past eight years, working with a therapeutic advocacy project for Syrian refugees, the Trojan Women Project, and I can promise you that these are impressive and hard-working people. Without exception, in my experience, anyone who can walk for days, negotiate with people-traffickers, survive the journey across the Aegean in an overloaded rubber boat, dodge the Turkish and Greek coastguards, hitchhike through Europe and then go another 500 miles and smuggle themselves into the UK by lorry or boat is exceptional. You’d want them on your team. We call them the ‘alpha migrants’. Yet they are forbidden to work until they get their ‘leave to remain’ and refugee status.