UK targets reform of ‘Hotel California’immigration system
It is both sad and true that the UK has evolved from being a sanctuary for those in need of protection after fleeing conflicts or persecution to the ultimate place for asylum seekers, economic migrants and victims of organized crime gangs that specialize in human trafficking.
There are bogus student visa suppliers and shady companies profiting from skilled and unskilled workers, offloading low-paid workers onto the caving social security system of the UK once they earn their settled status.
So, it is a welcome step to see that the country’s new interior minister, Yvette Cooper, is already showing a drive and a resolve to fix the chaotic immigration and settlement system she inherited after years of less-than-perfect immigration legislation and policies. Cooper, the home secretary since Labour’s landslide election win over the Conservatives earlier this month, deemed the last of these policies, the now-scrapped Rwanda plan, to be the “most shocking waste of taxpayer money ever.”
In a stinging speech in Parliament this week, Cooper said the Tory government had created an asylum backlog that meant the system was like “Hotel California,” referring to the famous Eagles song.
She said the previous government stopped processing thousands of cases, meaning people that have entered the asylum system since March 2023 would never leave it. She is promising to hire enough officers to process and clear the mounting backlog.
The plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, which was created as a deterrent to prevent migrants using small boats to reach the UK, wasted nearly £700 million ($902 million) without deporting a single person. Only four people went to the East African country voluntarily before Labour scrapped the relocation program.
Cooper said the wasted money included “£290 million payments to Rwanda, chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them, and paying for more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the scheme.”
This is in addition to the more than £3 billion spent annually on housing and providing for asylum seekers in the UK while their claims are processed. Cooper said the previous Conservative government had planned to spend more than £10 billion on the Rwanda scheme in total.
Illegal migration is an issue being grappled with by governments across Europe, as more than 380,000 people are believed to have entered the EU through irregular routes in 2023, an increase of 17 percent on the previous year. About 41 percent of those arrivals are believed to have come in small boats across the Central Mediterranean, 26 percent on land through the Balkans and 16 percent across the Eastern Mediterranean.
For years, a common approach to dealing with the migration crisis has remained elusive, fueling the ascendance of populist and far-right parties across Europe, destabilizing nations and causing rifts between allies and neighbors.
The UK’s new Labour government has made a promising start after making border security one of its top priorities. It has already taken steps to establish a Border Security Command to coordinate the work of all the agencies and departments involved and give them more powers to confront the people smugglers.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer also made it a government target to help lead the Europe-wide efforts to combat organized immigration crime and the people-smuggling gangs trading in human lives, in cooperation with Europol, Frontex and individual member states.
He even signaled he would be open to considering offshore processing arrangements similar to the one between Italy and Albania.