25 April 2024

Will the Rwanda plan work?

After receiving royal assent this week, the government’s long-delayed Rwanda plan is now law. Flights to take asylum seekers to the African country are scheduled to begin in July.

What’s the plan?
To send all asylum seekers who arrive in Britain illegally to Rwanda, a landlocked central African nation of 13 million people that’s roughly the size of Belgium. This is a one-way trip: those whose asylum claims are successful will be resettled in Rwanda itself, not the UK; those whose claims are unsuccessful will have to apply to stay in Rwanda on other grounds, or seek asylum in a separate country entirely. 

Is Rwanda safe?
Since a brutal civil war in the 1990s, and a genocide in 1994 in which almost a million people were killed, the country has made huge gains in economic growth and quality of life. But President Paul Kagame’s regime is undeniably autocratic: it is believed to have assassinated hundreds of political opponents around the world; in 2018, Rwandan police killed at least 11 refugees when they opened fire on a protest. This explains the delay in the Tories’ plan: it was blocked by the UK Supreme Court in November 2023 in part because of Rwanda’s disregard for human rights. To get around this, No 10 introduced the Safety of Rwanda Bill, which effectively forces the legal system to ignore these doubts. 

How does Britain’s illegal migration problem compare to other nations?
It’s relatively small for a big European country. The UK received 67,337 asylum applications last year, lower than Germany (334,109), France (167,002), Spain (162,439) and Italy (136,138). Of these, Britain imposes the longest waiting time before asylum seekers can apply to work – 12 months, compared to two months in Italy. Britain also spends 40% more than any other European country on housing each migrant, partly because a lack of homes forces the government to hire out hotels, and partly because of delays in processing asylum claims. 

Do any other countries process migrants offshore?
Yes – Israel even had a deal with Rwanda itself. It lasted from 2014 to 2019, before being suspended by Israel’s Supreme Court. About 4,000 people were sent to Rwanda in total, and reports suggest that the vast majority have since left the country to try their luck elsewhere. Austria, Germany and Denmark have all explored the idea of sending migrants abroad; in February, Albanian MPs approved a deal with Italy to hold up to 36,000 of its migrants per year. Arguably, the country which has controlled illegal immigration most successfully is Australia, which has been processing migrants offshore since 2001, on-and-off, on the Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru.

Why was Australia successful?
Reform UK leader Richard Tice, on the BBC’s Question Time last week, argued that Britain’s Rwanda policy would be ineffectual and that we should “do what the Australians did 10 years ago” – to physically “turn back” the boats. But that’s exactly what the former home secretary, Priti Patel, wanted to do, says Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. And she couldn’t. France refused to co-operate, saying it was “contrary to the laws of the sea”. Moreover, the boats Australia had to deal with were not flimsy dinghies but large vessels built to cross hundreds of miles of ocean: they could be safely redirected without risk of capsizing and drowning their passengers.  

How expensive is Britain’s Rwanda scheme?
Very. The government has paid Kigali at least £370m so far, to cover admin fees and accommodation, with a further £120m promised once 300 people have been transferred, and more than £150,000 for each individual migrant. It initially adds up to “almost £2 million a deportee”, says Trevor Phillips in The Times, making the programme “an object lesson in how to waste public money”. The potential numbers involved would barely make a dent in the backlog of asylum seekers: about 52,000 are currently eligible for deportation, but the government is planning to send only 500 to Rwanda in the first year. Rishi Sunak’s argument is that the scheme will save money in the long run, by deterring people from trying to enter the country illegally in the first place.

Is it moral?
A host of charities and NGOs say it isn’t. The UN says it goes against the UK’s “long tradition of providing refuge to those in need”. Ken Clarke, the former Tory home secretary, initially supported the scheme, but has since taken issue with the government overruling the courts to insist Rwanda is safe. Before that verdict, Matthew Parris, another moderate Conservative, argued that failing to close the Channel would lead to more people drowning – hardly a moral outcome. The smugglers’ trade, wrote Alexander Downer, the former Australian high commissioner in London, is “quite literally murderous. Migrants crammed onto dinghies, crossing one of the busiest stretches of sea in the world, put not only their own lives at risk but those of the coastguards, RNLI, Royal Navy crews and border guards who come to their rescue.”  

What do British voters think?
They’re worried about illegal immigration, but much less than they were before Brexit. Recent polling by More in Common suggests that, among 2019 Conservative voters, 60% would only judge the scheme a success if it reduced Channel crossings “significantly” or “entirely”. The narrative that ramming the Rwanda bill through parliament is “the symbolic victory that Sunak needs is a delusion”, says Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman.

What would Labour do instead?
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has promised that the party would not deport a single asylum seeker to Rwanda. Instead, Labour proposes a rather vague mix of cracking down on people smugglers and a “fast-track system for safe countries” – what that entails exactly isn’t clear. Regardless, the party has effectively “already killed the Rwanda deportation scheme”, says Tom Harris in The Daily Telegraph. Migrants and their lawyers will simply stall for time until the imminent change of government.

Isn’t legal immigration more important anyway?
Yes, says Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times. Net legal migration to Britain in the year to June 2023 was 672,000, more than 10 times higher than the illegal kind. Tory MPs such as Robert Jenrick argue that uncontrolled illegal immigration damages community cohesion, but “the same arguments apply just as well to legal migration”. For all the focus on the boats in the Channel, says Colvile, “it is those coming in perfectly legally who are the bigger story – and will do far more to reshape Britain”.

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