Rishi Sunak’s Government Is Anti-Asylum

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has now made it official that one of his top priorities is to pass a law that effectively bans people escaping conflict, persecution, or famine from seeking refuge in the nation with the world’s sixth-largest GDP. His government’s illegal migration bill says anyone who enters the United Kingdom through an illegal route will be detained and swiftly deported to a “safe country’’ such as Rwanda and banned from ever stepping foot in the U.K. again.

Sunak advertised the legislation as a deterrence tool to discourage people from undertaking life-threatening boat journeys and economic migrants from “jumping the queue.’’ Experts and activists told Foreign Policy the practical effect of the policy will be to render it effectively impossible for most to claim asylum in Britain.

“It is not possible to claim asylum from outside the UK, and there is no visa which allows people to enter the UK in order to claim asylum,’’ Julia Tinsley-Kent, policy and strategic communications manager at Migrants’ Rights Network, wrote in an email. “This means that most people have no choice but to enter the UK without permission. People may come hidden in vehicles, on boats.”

Activists in several European Union countries also condemned the legislation and said it could have a ripple effect in the EU. Even though the U.K. is no longer a member of the EU, it is still a part of Europe and ostensibly committed to respecting international law and basic human rights. Activists fear abandonment of those guiding values by a leading European nation may have a cascading effect elsewhere on the continent. They said it might embolden the far-right as well as an increasing number of conservative politicians calling for similar provisions that would weaken protections granted to asylum seekers in Europe.

The European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), an alliance of more than a hundred non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across 40 European countries working with asylum seekers, reminded the U.K. of its historic obligations in an editorial. ECRE Director Catherine Woollard questioned whether one of the most multicultural countries in the world, with more than a million job vacancies, could really not host refugees primarily from “countries where the UK has a little history, recent and distant, rarely glorious—whether they arrive by boat or by plane?”

Michael Williams, a board member of the Swedish Network of Asylum and Refugee Support Groups, told Foreign Policy that Britain’s proposed policy completely undermined the right to seek asylum. “The [1951] Refugee Convention explicitly states that no asylum seeker be punished for entering a country illegally,’’ he said. In any case, he added, the U.K. would not be able to stop the boats unilaterally, since they depart from another country, France, over which London has no jurisdiction.

The U.K. has struck an agreement with France, under which the French will be paid to depute more coast guards to stop the boats. But the British know and the French don’t hide that that will not be enough. Fabienne Keller, a French politician and a member of the European Parliament, told Foreign Policy that the territory “from where the boat(s) depart is vast,’’ and the smugglers constantly adapting, making the job of law enforcement officers harder. “The British government has to face the reality,” she wrote. “Its job market is attractive and accommodating for third-country nationals with no regular status. The EU cannot bear the responsibility of this situation.’’

Wiebke Judith, policy and advocacy officer for PRO ASYL, a German NGO working for the human rights of asylum seekers, said it was “absolutely shocking’’ that the U.K. planned to send asylum seekers to countries such as Rwanda and in doing so exit the international protection system. “This is going to help the far-right,” she told Foreign Policy from Berlin. “They will simply point at the U.K. and say, ‘See, they are doing it, so we should do it too.’”

Germany’s populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) hailed Britain’s legislation and demanded, “When will we finally have it?” Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, a member of the right-wing Northern League party, called it “harsh but fair”; and France’s far-right politician and commentator Éric Zemmour congratulated Sunak, who, he said, “unlike Macron’s government, is choosing to protect his people from the flood of migration.” On a recent visit to London, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni praised Sunak’s plans to deal with immigration; in the past she has spoken of equally morally reprehensible ideas such as a naval blockade to stop desperate asylum seekers mid-sea.

In a discussion with Foreign Policy on May 25, Judith said politicians in Germany and the EU were drawing inspiration from Britain’s bill and calling for third-country deportations. At the EU level, there are currently discussions about a reform that could pave the way to deals similar to the one the U.K. made with Rwanda, she said.

Responses from Carlo Fidanza, the head of the Italian delegation in the European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the European Parliament, substantiated some of Judith’s concerns. “I do not agree with the term deporting,” he wrote to Foreign Policy on May 27, in response to a question on what he thought of plans to deport asylum seekers to a third country such as Rwanda. “Displacing asylum seekers to a third country in order to be able to examine the requirements for asylum is a necessary measure.”

On June 8, the EU agreed on a new framework on migration that reportedly calls for deportation of failed asylum cases to a third country, albeit one with some sort of a connection to the asylum seeker. That is much better than the British bill, but still gives individual European countries the right to decide which third country qualifies as safe. Activists were cautious to comment before they see the fine print of the agreement but generally believed externalization policies were gaining more appeal despite little to suggest they curb irregular immigration.

Data has shown that when one illegal route is blocked, another is found. Britain’s crackdown on trucks as an oft-used mode of transport by irregular immigrants is cited as one of the reasons that led to more people taking the so-called small boats. In fact, English Channel crossings increased 60 percent last year to more than 45,700 people, compared to around 28,500 the year before.

Secondly, the fact that asylum has been granted to more than 90 percent of those who arrived by boats since 2018 suggests that, while the path may be irregular, the cases are legitimate. The top five nationalities crossing the channel are Albanians, Afghans, Iranians, Syrians, and Eritreans—most fleeing a barbaric regime or unlivable circumstances.

Thirdly, there are not enough legal routes for asylum seekers to enter the U.K. As of February, only 22 vulnerable Afghans had been resettled in Britain through a legal route established in 2022, after then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson had promised to house at least 20,000 people, according to a report in the Guardian. Concomitantly, the number of Afghan nationals arriving in the U.K. on small boats increased sixfold last year—to more than 8,000—as compared to 2021. The International Rescue Committee has recommended that the British government offer asylum visas as “people fleeing conflict and crisis cannot pre-emptively apply to claim asylum from their home country.’’

The stop the boats bill comes across more as an election campaign ploy than a serious measure to offer asylum to those more deserving, since it outrightly denies the process that determines each case independently. In a statement, the UN Refugee Agency said the bill breached the U.K.’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention. If passed, it will extinguish the right to seek refugee protection in the U.K. for those who arrive irregularly, “no matter how compelling their claim may be,’’ the agency’s press release stated.

Finally, offshoring of asylum cases has been tried before and failed—details the British government conveniently omitted when it pitched the legislation to the British people. Australia opened offshore processing centres for asylum cases in the Papua New Guinean island of Manus and the Pacific nation of Nauru. Hapless people languished in inhumane conditions in these centers that soon overfilled; by 2014 no more people could be deported there.

Denmark peddled back on talks with Rwanda to deport 1,000 refugees a year primarily because the European Commission said doing so violated EU asylum rules and there could be legal action if the plan were implemented. The U.K. is not a part of the EU, but it is a member of the European Court of Human Rights and runs the same legal risk should it enact the bill. At a Council of Europe meeting in Iceland in mid-May, Sunak lobbied to reform the court, particularly Rule 39—an interim measure that blocked the U.K.’s proposed deportations to Rwanda in 2022. The rule guards against deportations if “there is an imminent risk of irreparable damage.”

Despite the recorded failure of offshoring asylum seekers elsewhere and ample evidence that detentions and quick deportations are not only morally questionable but also don’t curb immigration, the British government is going ahead with its plan. “Stop the boats” is a catchy phrase and the Tories hope to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment ahead of elections if they repeat it enough times. Sunak still might not win the election for the Conservative Party, but he will forever be known as the first brown British prime minister who unveiled a regressive, and as some would say a racist, law with far-reaching ramifications.