To stop the boats, make it safe to stay

When parliament discussed the Rwanda plan this week ahead of voting on it, the Home Secretary and the shadow Home Secretary faced off across the dispatch box. As Yvetter Cooper spoke for Labour, James Cleverly apparently muttered “what’s your plan?” over 30 times at her like some kind of broken politician toy.

This is a recurring theme: forcibly deporting refugees to Rwanda is the only option. There is no alternative and nobody else has a plan. If you disagree, you must want open borders.

Any time you hear a politician saying “there is no alternative”, you should pay close attention, because it is almost never true. Of course there are alternatives. A good place to start is with the facts, because those are not actually familiar to most people. When asked to estimate the percentage of immigrants in the UK population, a recent survey found people estimating 27%. The real figure is 14%. The debate around immigration is almost exclusively conducted in hysterical extremes, and that isn’t how most people really think about the issue. The majority of Britons have a positive view of immigration and that figure is rising rather than falling. The Conservatives’ rhetoric is aimed at a specific slice of the electorate in order to buy their votes, but it doesn’t reflect us as a nation.

With that in mind, we ought to be able to have a grown-up conversation about migration. It’s not for me to deliver ‘a plan’, but solutions might include more safe routes into the country, and the ability to apply for asylum from overseas. Labour’s plan, because it does have one Mr Cleverly, includes applications at embassies. They also call for a significant increase in caseworkers to clear the backlog of applications, as it can take years to navigate the process. Allowing people to work while their claim is processed would give people dignity and purpose, while reducing dependence on the state, but neither of our political parties has picked up on that obvious idea.

Specifically on boats and people trafficking, current government policy explicitly focuses on deterring people from attempting a channel crossing, and punishing those that do. A more compassionate alternative is to focus on the trafficking gangs rather than their desperate clients, working with France to identify and close down smuggling operations. That would require us to work better with our neighbours, at a time when Britain has been turning its back.

That brings me to a wider theme. All approaches to illegal migration that only focus on the people arriving are missing the longer term solutions. It’s mopping the floor rather than fixing the leak.

Nobody wants to be a refugee. Most people would rather not leave their homes and families in order to find work and a future for themselves and their children. So the best way to ‘stop the boats’ is to work much harder at making it safe for people to stay. The work to prevent dangerous channel crossings doesn’t start on British beaches, but in places like Iran, Albania, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, the five countries that people originally left with the UK in mind.

How? Through development aid, peace-building, diplomacy, human rights advocacy and investing in international institutions. To that list we can also add climate action, which could be a growing factor in migration. As Amitav Ghosh explains very well in his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, people don’t usually leave their homes for a single reason. It’s a mixture of circumstances, of which climate is only one. But as the climate changes and pressure increases on vulnerable parts of the world, it will be more and more common as a factor in pushing people from their homes and off on dangerous migration journeys.

People have always moved and will continue to do so. Managing those movements needs increased engagement with global affairs, and of course Britain has done the opposite in recent years. The Conservative government closed the Department for International Development, dropped its aid budget commitments and redefined aid to spend more of it here in the UK. It has scrapped climate policies and burned its leadership on the issue on the global stage. For all the talk of an open and progressive country, Brexit represents a turning away from the world.

That will need to change if we seriously want to take a long term approach to managing migration, rather than pitching populist gimmicks. We cannot pull up the drawbridge, or to quote another populist gimmick, ‘build the wall’. There is no easy fix, but lasting solutions lie in looking outwards and working together.

Most importantly, rather than boasting about how tough we are on refugees, we should be tough on the things that cause people to become refugees in the first place.