Labour peer Lord Alf Dubs, who fled Nazis as child as part of the Kindertransport, writes for The Mirror on the government’s proposed shake-up of the asylum system
I share the government’s wish to stop asylum seekers from taking dangerous journeys to the UK, but I don’t think their recent asylum and returns policy will achieve that.
There are elements in the proposals that I support, for instance community sponsorship which enables people to welcome refugees into their communities. And of course those with no right to be in the UK should be swiftly removed.
But I am concerned about what the proposals mean for those with a legitimate claim to asylum – people who are fleeing war and torture – and specifically for refugee children who arrive here via irregular means often because they have family in the UK, or are born here of refugee parents.
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The government’s proposal to review someone’s asylum status every 30 months for up to twenty years cannot fail to undermine communities. It would create two tiers of people – those who can confidently build their lives and those who must live in perpetual limbo.
There is a danger that the hostility generated by some of the immigration policies now being proposed will make communities ill-disposed towards people they perceive as ‘temporary visitors’. For children, this situation is even more stark. Is the government really suggesting that even those children born and raised here must accept that they could be uprooted and ‘returned’ to somewhere they have never lived should the government define their country of origin as safe?
The government justifies these proposals by claiming they will reduce “pull factors”. But that claim relies on the assumption that asylum seekers know about the policies of their destinations. Most asylum seekers know little about a destination countries’ asylum policy nor about access to rights or benefits. Instead, in the case of the UK, there are three factors that most influence an asylum seeker’s journey: having family here, speaking English and diaspora communities.
So what can we do to tackle the trade in human misery peddled by the people smugglers? Cooperation with our neighbours is the answer.
In the final months of the Biden administration, policies that combined border restrictions at the US Southern border and returns to Mexico with access to legal routes coincided with an 81% drop in irregular border crossings.
The UK government could prioritise closer working with EU neighbours, including expanding the UK-France one-in-one-out pilot, which draws on elements of the successful Biden policy, to other EU countries. This would see the UK significantly scale up the numbers of asylum seekers taken from Europe in exchange for equal numbers of returns.
The UK could go one step further and pilot the use of asylum centres in France as a first step in assessing a refugee’s right to asylum. What the UK shouldn’t do is pilot cruelty.