The case for an asylum amnesty

Many feared mass unemployment as a fallout from Covid-19. Instead, we have ended up with the opposite problem: a labour shortage. The lack of lorry drivers has led to some items missing from supermarkets. Pubs, restaurants and many other businesses are struggling to re-open as completely as they would like for want of adequate staff. As Matthew Lynn says in his article, the labour shortage has already had a positive effect on workers’ wages. The situation also presents a rare opportunity for long-overdue reforms elsewhere — particularly when it comes to processing asylum seekers.

For years, there was public concern that there were far more immigrants coming to work in Britain than ministers ever expected. Politicians from all parties preferred to dismiss the concern as nostalgia or xenophobia rather than address rational fears that salaries were being forced down or that public services were being squeezed. This was a fateful misdiagnosis. An economic model based on an endless supply of cheap labour from the European Union has been the curse of the British economy for the last two decades — a curse that voters wanted to lift in the 2016 referendum. It was never part of the official Brexit campaign — in which Boris Johnson played a prime role — to close down migration, only that it be brought under control. Britain is one of the world’s most welcoming countries for migrants, but voters also want the system to be fair.

If checks and controls are applied on the borders, this allows for more leniency for those who are already here, specifically, the large population of asylum applicants who are fully and needlessly dependent on the taxpayer. At the end of June there were nearly 60,000 outstanding asylum applications, a number which has almost trebled in the past three years. Of those, 42,000 cases have been outstanding for at least six months.