The objections are flying in. On February 16th refugee groups and religious figures, including some bishops, complained that the government “risks playing into a toxic politics”. The next day a clutch of trade unionists and left-wing MPs complained about its “performative cruelty”.
Several actions provoked the letter-writers. The government has introduced a bill to Parliament that would criminalise some asylum-seekers who cross the English Channel in small boats. It has quietly changed the immigration rules, in effect barring water-borne migrants from becoming British citizens. And it has released video images of migrants being marched onto an aeroplane.
The government will lose no sleep over the criticisms of its actions, unless ministers happen to stay up late, toasting their good fortune. The complaints are likely to draw attention to their efforts to remove convicted criminals and unsuccessful asylum-seekers. Enforced removals have risen since Labour came to power, but, annoyingly, the public has failed to notice.
Not all Britons loathe asylum-seekers. Polling by Ipsos for British Future, a think-tank, last July showed that 46% sympathise with people trying to cross the English Channel, whereas 47% do not. Performative cruelty is politically safe all the same, because of an imbalance in how people think and vote on the issue. People who detest immigration are often obsessed by it; people who are relaxed or even welcoming tend to ignore it, and allow other issues to sway their votes.
But if ostentatious meanness will not hurt the government, it is not likely to cut the number of asylum-seekers much, either. Migration researchers have tried to understand why asylum-seekers try to reach particular countries by studying patterns of applications and by asking migrants. They find that asylum-seekers are usually drawn to countries that are nearby, which contain many of their fellow countrymen. They often do not know, or do not care, about governments’ policies.
It is also becoming clear that Britons are not just upset about asylum-seekers. In the year to September 2024, the country received 99,800 asylum applications. That is almost exactly the same as the prior year, when the figure was 98,900, and not much more than the year before, when it was 92,800. Meanwhile concern about immigration has soared (see chart).
The probable cause is a surge in other kinds of movement. Beginning in 2022, the Office for National Statistics began to report extraordinarily high levels of net migration. In November 2023 it estimated that 672,000 more people had arrived in Britain in the 12 months to June 2023 than had left; that number was subsequently revised up to 906,000. Students and workers, who found it easier to obtain visas because the government lowered salary thresholds upon leaving the EU, boosted the tally. So did Hong Kongers and Ukrainians, who were given special visas.
The new government has offered only vague hints about how it will manage the kinds of migration that drive the overall numbers. The trade-offs are nasty. If Britain cracks down on foreign students, universities might go bust; if it shuns workers, hospitals and care homes will struggle even more than they do at the moment. It is so much easier to boast of toughness against people in small boats.■
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