Britain’s controversial asylum seeker bill explained
LONDON − A conservative majority in Britain’s Parliament pushed through a controversial plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, capping a fight that critics blasted as an expensive, inhumane and impractical way to deal with immigration.
British lawmakers won support Monday night with the measure aimed at satisfying one of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s legislative priorities: “stopping the boats.” Specifically, the small inflatable dinghies and even kayaks filled with thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who cross the English Channel each year from France.
Opponents noted the plan may cost more per head than a three-year stay at The Ritz; it may be incompatible with international human rights law. It may not even be, experts say, an effective policy.
The measure had already cleared the House of Commons last year but had been held up in the House of Lords, the British Parliament’s unelected second chamber, whose members are tasked with scrutinizing potential legislation. Members of the House of Lords and many opposition lawmakers were concerned the policy may open up migrants and asylum seekers to abuse and also raised questions about its legality.
Labour Party lawmaker Stephen Kinnock described it as a “post truth” bill because it describes Rwanda as a safe country for asylum seekers against the opinion of courts and humanitarian groups.
Political tensions over immigration, illegal and authorized, span the globe. Amid a surge in border crossings from Mexico, the Biden administration has carried on with building barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border that were a signature immigration policy of former President Donald Trump. For more than a decade, Australia has sent asylum seekers to small Pacific islands while their applications are processed. From France to Hungary, European countries have in recent years been strengthening laws to allow their governments to detain and deport foreigners.
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Britain’s plan? Deport migrants and asylum seekers 4,000 miles away to Rwanda, in East Africa. Here’s what Britain’s policy is, how it works, what it costs and what backers and critics say about it.
‘Stop the boats’: What is Britain’s Rwanda asylum plan?
In 2018, just under 300 small boats carrying migrants and asylum seekers attempted to reach Britain from France, according to Migration Watch UK, an independent research group.
By 2022, that figure reached nearly 46,000.
The U.N., humanitarian groups and migration researchers say no single factor can explain the increase. Many are fleeing war or political and economic persecution. Some come due to family ties, cultural links, because they speak English or because they perceive Britain to be a safe and tolerant country compared to other destinations in Europe or elsewhere. Some studies suggest the spike mirrors longer-term global increases in displaced people. And some experts, such as Hein de Haas, one of the world’s top migration scholars, argue that global migration levels have stayed largely the same − at about 3% of the world’s population − since World War II.
“International migration is not as high as we think,” De Hass writes in “How Migration Really Works: A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics,” published in 2023.
Under the legislation passed Monday night, for the next five years, any migrants and asylum seekers seeking to enter the Britain will have their applications processed in Rwanda, to where they will be deported on specially designated government charter flights. If their claims are successful they will be allowed to return to Britain. If not, they can apply to stay in Rwanda or a third country.
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The British government hopes that the prospect of being sent to Rwanda will act as a deterrent to those seeking to enter Britain by sea. The crossings can be rough and dangerous. Drownings are not uncommon. They are also a constant source of political division and debate.
Like the U.S., Britain is expected to hold an election this year and immigration is a voter fault line, with some commentators even suggesting that the success or failure of the Rwanda bill could be crucial to Sunak and his Conservative party’s fortunes in the upcoming vote.
“The passing of this landmark legislation is not just a step forward but a fundamental change in the global equation on migration,” Sunak said in a statement after the bill passed.
What does the Rwanda asylum plan cost?
The British government has already paid Rwanda about $300 million even though the program has yet to begin. Over the five years, it’s expected to cost at least $670 million, according to Britain’s National Audit Office, the government’s spending watchdog, though it could cost more.
It’s not quite clear how many potential asylum seekers Rwanda is prepared to accept as part of the program. Rwanda has been coy on that point. Though Sunak has claimed it is in the thousands.
Still, Britain’s spending watchdog has forecast that the total cost to the British taxpayer for each deportee is about $2.5 million. This figure includes fees to Rwanda’s government for agreeing to take part in the program and the expense of flying and accommodating each deportee in Rwanda for about three years, the average upper end of how long it takes to process an asylum application.
This $2.5 million figure led Lord Carlile of Berriew, a member of Britain’s House of Lords to quip during a debate about the Rwanda bill that he had “not looked on the Ritz Paris website for some time … but my recollection of looking at that website is that one could keep somebody in that hotel for three years, and have some money back, at the price that this process, as the National Audit Office says, will cost the country. Is this a fair and compassionate system, and is it a cost-effective one?”
What’t the cause of the delay, and what do critics, backers say?
The policy was first announced by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2022. But then he resigned over a mass revolt from his own party over his personal behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic when he attended parties and ignored his own government’s lockdown guidance.
Johnson’s departure was then followed by months of resignations by high-profile ministers and legal challenges to the Rwanda bill over a myriad of conflicting allegations including that policy was not tough enough; that it would not ultimately work long-term; or that it unlawfully breached the human rights of migrants and asylum seekers, partly because they would be deported to a country where rights groups and think tanks such as Freedom House say political dissent is routinely suppressed though surveillance, intimidation, torture and suspected assassinations of dissidents.
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“The British government refers to people arriving through this route (The English Channel) as ‘illegal migrants’ but that in itself is contestable because the right to seek asylum is a human right,” James Wilson, the director of Detention Action, a British charity that campaigns for better treatment for asylum seekers, previously told USA TODAY.
“Every asylum claim to the U.K. should be heard fully and fairly in the U.K.”
When Britain’s Supreme Court appeared to agree with that assessment, determining that Rwanda “was not a safe country,” lawmakers were forced to make changes to the bill with additional safeguards for those sent there and guarantees they won’t be subject to “refoulement”: returned to countries from which they have fled where they could face ill-treatment.
Jeff Crisp, a migration researcher at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Center, has said that the Rwanda deal is “a convenient way of distracting attention from the fact that legal migration to Britain, most of it from non-EU states whose citizens are black or brown, has soared since Brexit” − Britain’s 2020 withdrawal from the European Union, whose backers sought lower immigration.
But the scheme’s backers insist it will make a meaningful difference.
“Parliament has the opportunity to pass a bill that will save lives of those being exploited by people-smuggling gangs,” Dave Pares, Sunak’s spokesman, said last week. “It is clear we cannot continue with the status quo … now is the time to change.”
What’s next? And what do Rwandans make of it?
Still, even now that the bill has passed both Houses of Parliament, it’s not entirely clear when the first flights to Rwanda with migrants and asylum seekers will actually take off, though Sunak said Monday in a press conference that it would be within “10-12 weeks.”
In his statement after the bill passed Sunak said “our focus is to now get flights off the ground, and I am clear that nothing will stand in our way of doing that and saving lives.”
Still, before the bill formally becomes law, it needs to be given “Royal Assent,” a process, mostly a formality, where Britain’s monarch, King Charles III, approves new legislation.
A memo leaked in the British press claimed that the government is holding similar discussions for an asylum processing program with countries including Botswana, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire and Armenia. It’s unclear if this represents a potential Rwanda back-up plan, or an expansion of it.
At least one British humanitarian group that works with migrants and asylum seekers and was instrumental in blocking the program last year through the courts said it is exploring options for fresh legal challenges. “No one is going to Rwanda,” Care4Calais’s website says.
In Rwanda, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, an opposition politician, said that Britain’s asylum bill is not a good fit for poor countries like hers, where the government struggles to meet most peoples’ basic needs. She said Rwanda already has an influx of refugees from neighboring countries such as Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo that it is not adequately caring for.
Umuhoza said a recent announcement by RwandAir, the country’s flag carrier airline, refusing to participate in the program by flying asylum seekers from Britain because it may tarnish Rwanda’s image overseas is an indication of how many people there feel about the idea.
She said migrants and asylum seekers sent to Rwanda under the British plan will eventually notice that Rwanda can’t provide them with any of the opportunities they were after.
“They will leave, as was the case with immigrants sent to Rwanda from Israel,” she said, referring to a program that ran from 2013-2018 and saw about 4,000 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers relocated from Israel to Rwanda. Many were swiftly deported to neighboring Uganda.
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