Reform’s Plan For Dealing with Illegal Migrants Is A Good Start

This post, authored by Noah Carl, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic

In a recent interview with the Times, Reform leader Nigel Farage unveiled his plan for dealing with Britain’s illegal migration crisis. It involves four key elements:

• Leaving the ECHR and suspending other relevant treaties
• Banning those who arrive through irregular channels from claiming asylum
• Moving illegal migrants from hotels and rented accommodation to disused RAF bases, and keeping them there
• Striking deals with migrants’ home countries, or failing that, deporting them to third countries or British overseas territories like Ascension Island

Predictably, the plan has been criticised by Farage’s political opponents. One Tory MP claimed that he “is just recycling many ideas the Conservatives have already announced”. Which would be easier to take seriously if the Tories hadn’t had 14 years in government to implement some of those ideas.

Meanwhile, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats claimed that Farage’s plan won’t work. Labour called it “pie in the sky” and the Lib Dems insisted it “doesn’t offer any real solutions”. But what would a real solution look like?

The current situation is manifestly preposterous: tens of thousands of migrants turning up uninvited on the South Coast, and then being housed in hotels and private accommodation at taxpayers’ expense – to the tune of billions of pounds per year. And crucially, the overwhelming majority of such migrants are adult men.

Of the 237,592 attempts made to illegally enter the UK since 2018, 85% involved men. (I’m excluding individuals for whom sex was not known or reported). This is arguably the single most important statistic in the entire debate. It is also worth noting that, of the attempts involving men, 83% involved men aged 18 or older (and the true figure is almost certainly higher because some migrants lie about their age).

In other words, the people that British taxpayers are paying to house in hotels all across the country are not desperate women and children with nowhere else to go. They are overwhelmingly drawn from the least vulnerable demographic group.

Even by the Left’s own self-professed values, this is an absurd policy. There are millions of people around the world that are far more needy than the people who turn up uninvited on the South Coast. And we could help them by providing food, medicine and other essentials in situ. Does anyone really believe that covering hotel bills for adult men in Britain is the best way to help the world’s poor?

Even the Economist, long a bastion of pro-migration sentiment, admits that Europe’s asylum system is not working and should be scrapped. As the magazine correctly notes, “it cannot cope with a world of proliferating conflict, cheap travel and huge wage disparities”.

As far as I can see, neither Labour nor the Lib Dems has any plan that would prevent the continual inflow of illegal migrants into Britain. (Saying that you would “create safe and legal routes” is not a plan.) And the current situation is simply not sustainable: of course people don’t want large numbers of adult men being housed in their communities.

The main weakness of Farage’s plan is the difficulty of striking deals with countries like Iran, which is among the biggest sources of illegal migrants. Britain does little trade with Iran and already imposes sanctions on its government. In fact, sanctions relief might be the only way to make them take their citizens back.

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