In 1941 the English Channel proved very effective in preventing an invasion by Adolf Hitler’s Germany, but it has proved much less effective in 2022 in deterring an invasion of illegal migrants from North Africa and the Middle East.
On one day last week almost 1300 of these migrants reached the English coast in 27 boats. These took the total number of arrivals for the eight months of this year to almost 23,000, close to double the number who had crossed the Channel by the same time last year.
All of these arrivals presumably will claim asylum as political refugees in Britain, thereby sparking legal proceedings that will take many years to determine, if ever. What they know is, once they have landed in Britain, the overwhelming likelihood is they will never be forced to leave. They are, of course, not political refugees but economic immigrants.
This is not in itself a cause for criticism. The US and Australia were built largely by economic immigrants. But in those cases their entry was authorised by the administrations of each country.
In a desperate effort to deal with this problem the British government devised a plan this year to process asylum-seekers in Rwanda. This was essentially an exercise in deterrence on the basis that those crossing the Channel would not do so if they knew their destination was Rwanda, not Britain. But immigration lawyers brought proceedings against the British government in the European Court of Human Rights, which granted an injunction to stop any deportations to Rwanda.
This is an issue of sovereignty. Britain has left the EU but is still subject to a court in Strasbourg, France. Why the British government is prepared to accept such a situation is difficult to answer.
The problem with the 1951 Geneva Convention on the status of refugees is that it defines a refugee as a person who has left their country because of a well-founded view of being persecuted in that country by reason of race, religion, nationality, membership of a political social group or political opinion. It no doubt was thought in 1951 that there would be individuals from time to time in this category but no one envisaged a situation where millions of people in some regions wanted to leave their countries and move to more attractive ones.
It also was assumed in 1951 that refugees would seek asylum in the first country in which they arrived after leaving their own unsafe regime. But, as in the case of those crossing the Channel, it is now possible to move through many countries, then finally settle on one – in this case Britain – as the place to make an asylum claim.
Almost all the boats crossing the Channel are leaving from France. This raises the question of why the immigrants, many of them unaccompanied young men, having moved through Europe from North Africa and the Middle East, do not want to try to settle in one of these European countries,including France, which they obviously want to abandon for Britain. Needless to say, the French have no interest in stopping the boats and they cannot be compelled to take their occupants back even if the British were to force them to turn around.
Most Western countries have a system for authorised immigrants and a separate quota for genuine refugees. The only alternative is the concept of open borders in circumstances where millions in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia would prefer to live in a Western country. But that solution to the problems of immigration in the modern world is never openly advocated by those in Britain who condemned the Rwanda proposal or those in Australia who have condemned the policies of successive federal governments. Yet it is an inevitable consequence of the views they espouse.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/britain-besieged-by-economic-migrant...Turning back boats and deportations are necessary. Court procedures for asylum claim reviews must be shortened and radically simplified. There is a whole immigration law industry. There shouldn't be. Grounds for asylum must be narrowed.