Rob Bates: “Labour’s Asylum Plan isn’t ‘Control’ – it’s an Amnesty!”

This week, the Labour Government launched a sweeping illegal migration crackdown under their “tough-as-nails” new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. Or at least, that’s what they would have us believe. But as ever with immigration, politicians are not to be trusted, and the devil is in the detail. Are the new measures really going to stop the boats once and for all? Or is this all just spin, another charade by a political class desperate to make the migration issue go away without having to actually change anything?

This week on The Sceptic, I caught up with Rob Bates, Research Director at the Centre for Migration Control, to find out whether the much-vaunted crackdown is all it’s cracked up to be. What follows is an edited excerpt from our conversation:

Laurie Wastell: What do you make of this policy announcement? What are Mahmood’s key proposals?

Rob Bates: Over the weekend, the flagship policy measure that was being trailed was this idea that an individual who is given refugee status will have to stay on that status for 20 years, which is an increase fourfold on what they currently have to wait before they get given the permanent right to stay in the country.

That was interpreted by many as being incredibly strict and incredibly tough. I think they did a very good job of presenting it as such. But unfortunately, what it actually entails really is, an amnesty for many individuals that are coming across on boats illegally. Many illegal migrants who are having asylum claims granted will by these measures be able to stay in the country for a very long period of time.

Now, they caveat this 20-year route by saying that every 30 months there will be a review to check whether individuals’ country of origin is now safe and if there’s been regime change and so forth. But that fundamentally misunderstands how many asylum cases operate. They’re not based on ‘I’ve come from Syria and it’s war torn and a very bad place to live.’ It’s very personalized circumstances. Like an individual that’s perhaps fallen foul of his local community or an individual that’s forgot to pay a drug gang on time and has had to flee because otherwise he would face, he would claim, potentially life-threatening repercussions.

So I don’t know how those really personalised cases can be reviewed on a rolling 30-month basis. We’ve got a Home Office that is barely functioning as it is. How is it going to be able to conduct these 30-month reviews on every single individual that is claiming asylum? Especially if we continue to see large numbers of individuals arriving in the UK illegally or overstaying work and study visas, which I don’t think actually the measures put out will do anything really, to stop, or to tackle the pull factors that have led to so many people coming across the Channel.

Wastell: And of course, individuals applying for asylum will often claim, say, that they are homosexual or that they’ve converted to Christianity. They might stage some kind of very targeted political protest outside the embassy of their origin country, all of which supposedly show, therefore, that they might be politically persecuted if they went back home.

Bates: Right, and you get people putting one statement on their Facebook page and saying: ‘Look! I’m a political dissident. You simply can’t return me to this part of the world.’ So I really don’t see how actually that can be in any way properly implemented to the scale that the Government gives the impression of. And really refugee status in and of itself, whether or not it does lead to an individual getting settled status, gives a lot of benefits to those individuals that have broken into the country – it gives them access to the welfare state. We saw data put out by the Oxford University Migration Observatory this week which showed that 66% of individuals of adults with refugee status are claiming Universal Credit.

So this just gives you a scale of how much actually that status bestows the benevolence of the British state upon these individuals and gives them access to a lot of benefits that could mean they can have a pretty comfortable existence for a long period of time.

And then, of course, we get to the point where if for an individual, it’s determined their status has changed and there is a need for them to return to their home country, how is the Home Office in its current funding and organisational structure going to actually arrange that? We have immigration enforcement that is woefully understaffed and under-resourced. Its annual budget is actually less than some local councils. It has only about 5,000 members of staff. I just can’t see how, the Home Secretary is going to be able to enforce these measures.

And this is before, of course, we even get into the argument about whether the ECHR and the Human Rights Act and things like the Refugee Convention are going to scupper the plans. Quite frankly, I’m very sceptical that Shabana Mahmood’s proposed reforms to the ECHR Article Eight right to family life are going to actually be able to garner the support of the parliamentary Labour Party.

I also think they probably don’t do enough. If you’re redefining what family life is to immediate family, well, individuals will have a long period of time through which to have a child or get married as well. So there are so many pitfalls in this. And I think, unfortunately, the conversation is just centred on things such as seizing jewellery and things that are a posited as being tough.

And, you know, it will seem like a pretty stringent measure. But when you look at sort of what’s going on in Denmark, where they’ve got a similar policy of jewellery seizure, to help cover the cost of an individual’s asylum claim that’s been used a dozen or so times. It’s not something that’s going to be used widespread.

But unfortunately, the conversation, because of the lack of quality of many of our journalists in this country, has been so sidetracked by this image of people having bracelets ripped off their wrists and so forth, that we’ve not actually been able to focus on the real substance of the policy and just simply how ineffectual it would be on those measures that she’s set out.

Wastell: The proposal to seize jewellery from illegal migrants arriving on the small boats sounds almost performatively cruel – vice-signalling – precisely something designed to alarm pro-migration types. Is it really a smokescreen for Shabana Mahmood to say, look how tough we’re being with this measure, which really is just more of a token gesture?

Bates: Yes. And the fact that we’ve been talking about jewellery rather than actually, an incredibly damaging part of the proposal suggests that it has sort of worked to some extent. So I don’t think there’s been anywhere near enough scrutiny of the fact that this plan entails the creation of safe and legal routes, extending those numbers of individuals that are able to come into the country via sort of state-sponsored means.

We don’t know what the cap actually is yet. Very worryingly, they’ve said this is going to be open to consultation. And if you look over the track record of how Home Office consultations really work, actually what you end up with is a lot of left-wing activists, lawyers and in many cases, taxpayer-funded charities just bombarding that consultation with suggestions, effectively implanting every open-border whim going. Unless this is very, very closely monitored, I think what we could see “safe and legal routes” being created that are so wide, that have such broad scope and cover so many countries, that the numbers of individuals coming into the country could very well be higher.

And this is whole conversation has been posited around the idea of “control”. Oh, it’s just about controlling the chaos in the Channel. That’s all. We want to bring an end to the chaos in the Channel. Well, I think that fundamentally misreads where the public are on this issue. Yes, it’s incredibly annoying and it’s incredibly concerning to see what’s going on in the Channel. But it’s not just about that. It’s about the sheer number of individuals that are coming into our country and the fact that our society and many of our communities have been simply transformed in recent years. In a very, very short period of time, we’ve seen a complete transformation of town centers. We have seen the proliferation of certain types of organized crime. Again, we’ve seen an endless procession now, sadly, of, sexual assaults, murders, rapes. 

Wastell: And that would seem to be rearticulating the same flawed reasoning that we got after Brexit, which was that actually that vote, that populist vote saying we want to regain control of our borders, was not actually about reducing the overall numbers, but merely about gaining a sort of abstract sense of “control”. But it was about reducing the numbers. And we do want fewer people coming in.

Bates: Well, it doesn’t bring any solace to me as I walk around my hometown and just see the transformation. I see the degradation of parts of it. I see the wanton criminality. It doesn’t bring me any sense of comfort thinking: ‘But the Home Secretary is saying there’s going to be control to this.’ It just is something that is so remote – it’s spin. The Tories were really, really bad at with this in the last Parliament, MP after MP after MP tried to explain away the Boriswave by saying, ‘but you see we controlled this explosion of migration. This is something that we were able to monitor very closely.’

Well, actually, Kemi Badenoch said the other day that they took their eye off the ball. So that suggests that we didn’t have control of the immigration system and it ran away from ministers. But this is where politicians just get it fundamentally wrong rather than just address the simple fact that many Brits do not want to see migration in the levels that it has been, or even really at this point, migration at a net positive figure at all. I think actually public sentiment in this country is that net negative migration is essential, really, for us to continue moving forward as a functioning society and with some semblance of a cohesive nation.

You can watch the full interview here.