Shabana Mahmood’s Asylum ‘Fix’ is Destined to Fail
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s asylum ‘crackdown’ is not nearly enough to stop the flow, says Juliet Samuel in the Times. It still leaves Britain looking like a utopia for far too many. Here’s an excerpt.
In a nutshell, [Mahmood] proposes to turn asylum into a ‘temporary’ status, reviewed every 30 months; to make refugees wait 20 years for permanent residence; to remove the automatic right to bring over family; to require those with wealth to pay some of their way; and to evict from free housing anyone who breaks the law, works when they shouldn’t or fails to work when they should. To enforce all this she has promised more badass officials smashing down doors, digital IDs, visa bans for countries that don’t take back deportees, a shorter, sharper appeals process, bribes to make people leave and, er, a ‘consultation’ on removing families, like the 700 Albanian households who have lost their asylum appeals but are still living in the UK with all expenses paid by the state.
At face value, most of these measures sound sensible, blindingly obvious, even. But the UK, with our dysfunctional administrative and legal systems, widely spoken language, free public services and open economy, is not Denmark.
Take the proposal to regularly review asylum status in case a person’s homeland has become safer. It’s caveated: those refugees who find a job or enrol in “appropriate” study will be moved off the temporary visa on to what’s called the “work and study route”. With this status, they will be able to bring family members over and gain residence faster.
As several Labour MPs pointed out, the Home Office is already drowning in asylum cases. The easiest method for ‘clearing backlogs’ is the wave-through. How is it going to manage to review every refugee’s status and deal with any legal and logistical blowback? The answer is obvious. It will just find a way to shift people en masse into the “work and study route”, and hey presto, you’re back at square one.
Mahmood is also promising to change how our courts apply Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the provision on “private and family life” whose purpose was to stop states spying on their own citizens but which is now used to argue that an asylum seeker who has spent years appealing against deportation should get to stay because he has a close bond with his ex who kicked him out last year. This sort of reform has been tried before, in the 2014 Immigration Act and in the Nationality and Borders Act of 2022 (the latter, naturally, opposed by Labour). Each time the new law makes a bit of headway and then asylum tribunals and courts go back to inventing new rights that expand upon Strasbourg case law, making the problem even worse.
So it will be with any new legislation Mahmood manages to pass (and based on abortive welfare reform, passing it is not a given). The same thing will happen with her attempt to allow for only narrow exemptions (the word ‘exception’ appears five times in 25 pages). ‘Exceptional’ protections designed for children or ‘the vulnerable’ will be quickly expanded and applied to people with ‘anxiety’ or ‘trauma’, to parents, grandparents and so on. This is because nothing Mahmood is proposing will change the defective ‘human rights’ legal culture that got us into this mess.
Despite these huge risks to her plan, the home secretary nonetheless finds it necessary to give a sop to the inverse utopianists who dominate her party in the form of more “safe legal routes” into Britain for the world’s refugees. She’s proposing to invent three new ways to claim asylum, which she claims will be strictly capped and introduced slowly. Does anyone want to predict how that is going to go? Even before Ministers have shored up the castle walls, they’re thinking of ways to blast new holes in them.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: In TCW, Bruce Newsome has ‘10 reasons to be sceptical about Mahmood’s migrant measures‘.
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We can be sure the Home Office and its agencies will be on top of the 30 month reviews throughout the 20 years. They will be able toi trace the individuals in every case and check their behaviour against fully accurate state records of criminality, complaints and visits back to their places of birth.
In the oh-so-very unlikely circumstance of a missed review we know that no High Court judge would use it as reason to refuse permission for declining full citizenship at thye end of 20 years or any claims for benefits during that time. Don’t we?
As soon as this was announced and without even knowing details I knew this would be a scam and so it is proving to be. The BBC population will of course soak all this crap up and parrot what they receive from the telly box and everything will be fine.
The first crack appeared when it became clear that this was targeting Christian immigrants but definitely not muzzies.
A quick precis – it’s a bloody con.
The state extorts money out of us in exchange for protection. But instead of protecting us, it’s stuffing our neighbourhoods with outsiders we don’t want. What kind of protection is that? They take the money but don’t live up to their end of thei bargain they impose on us in the first place.
Does anyone agree with Pete? ”The emigration statistics this week point to a serious crisis. It’s not just a brain drain. It’s a broader abandonment of Britain. There’s no real reason for young and talented people to stay. Britain is a mess. The places that aren’t middle class white enclaves are derelict slums. Our towns are urban wastelands. Everywhere looks the same and nowhere looks good. Worse still, there’s no sense that we are building anything. We rip down derelict buildings only to replace them with equally grim Barrett boxes and “luxury apartments” and anywhere young people can afford to live, they simply wouldn’t want to, and you can’t blame them either. You can still buy a passable home in the post industrial slums – but only if you want to live among the human derelicts drinking themselves to death. We all complain that migrants are taking over our cities and towns like Dewsbury, but that’s because nobody else wants them. We leave grand old buildings to rot and do nothing with them. There is no sense of civic pride, no sense of ownership and no sense of purpose to any of our towns. Most of these places just need… Read more »
If we shut down welfare (without a concomittant requirement to do some work to get that welfare) most of these problems would end within 6 months. Lazy people would be forced to work or starve.
Stop assylum. We cannot cope. Tough on those who are escaping wars, etc. but I no longer care. Those people have to fight their own battles. I care about the safety and security of my people over all other things. Bringing incompatible, low impulse control people from garbage heap countries into my people’s land is madness. I want it reversed. If the parliamentarians do nothing, the angry people will do it for them and will punish the parliamentarians as well. Civil war looms large in our future. Prepare for the worst.
They have no intention of stopping mass immigration …. legal or illegal. It’s all just a performative exercise (including the loud “opposition” from the extreme lefties) to try and fool as many former Labour voters as they can.
The only message which needs to be sent out is:
“We’re full. We’re not taking any more and we’re going to start deporting those who are just parasites on the British taxpayer.”
And then leave the ECHR, repeal the HRA, scrap the Modern Slavery Act, resile from the UN Refugee Convention and start deporting.