By Jordan Fermanis
Last month Home Secretary Priti Patel released the government’s long awaited proposal to reform Britain’s refugee and asylum regime. The genesis of these reforms goes back to the election of the Johnson government in 2019, when the prime minister-elect vowed to “shake up” Britain’s immigration policies alongside his quest to finalise the elusive Brexit withdrawal agreement.
But from the very start, it was clear that immigration reform would be just another part of government policy conceived within the misguided prism of Brexit. From the beginning, we were being told Britain’s asylum system was “fundamentally broken” and that a new system would attract the “best and the brightest” to Britain with the government promising to implement an “Australian-style” system. These claims had the whiff of empty Brexit platitudes rather than the concrete policy reform needed to redesign an area of government that plagued many home secretaries of the past.
The person Johnson anointed for his immigration shake up was a British Asian former public relations executive Priti Patel. Johnson found his successor after the previous Home Secretary Sajid Javid refused to concede to the demands made by Dominic Cummings and Johnson that he sack his staff in order to remain in the office.
As the daughter of Gujarati shopkeepers, Priti Patel represents an appealing proposition for a Conservative Party long seen as too white, male and upper class. But her identity and background shouldn’t belie her politics. Alongside Brexit luminaries Iain Duncan Smith, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove, Patel was a member of the eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG) inside the Conservative Party and one of the most ardent Brexiteers on the campaign trail during the 2016 referendum. In 2012, Patel set out her political ambitions by co-authoring the infamous Britannia Unchained pamphlet with future Johnson cabinet colleagues Kwasi Kwarteng, Dominic Raab and Liz Truss. The oft-quoted treatise of supercharged Thatcherism criticised Britain’s working classes by claiming “the British are among the worst idlers in the world,” and advocated for a British economy based on low rates of unskilled immigration and free market principles.
The Home Office portfolio represents Patel’s second bite at the cherry after an ignominious exit as secretary for international development under Theresa May. Her stint as Home Secretary so far has focused on the addition of more police officers, addressing the Windrush scandal left by the previous government and tackling forms of violent crime like knife crime and county lines trafficking.
Yet it is reform of the refugee and asylum system that Patel has staked her reputation. From the outset she has adopted an image of unflappability - using clear, simple language while parroting government talking points. One example is her repeated claim that migrants arriving to Britain through clandestine means like crossing the English Channel on small boats, in the back of lorries or inside sealed shipping containers are illegal migrants. This claim is at odds with refugee organisations who say that migrants are entitled to internationally agreed legal protections when moving from country to country before making an asylum claim.
Predictably, the government’s new plan for immigration expounds its hardline approach to immigration coupled with detectable allusions to Brexit politics.The plan echoes the Home Secretary’s slogans of a “firm and fair” system ad nauseam, yet it also curiously includes several nods to the Brexit campaign agenda by claiming to fulfil the government’s “promise to regain sovereignty”.
It is clear from the New Plan for Immigration that the government blames asylum seekers themselves for a system in disrepair. The government says that there are 109,000 asylum claims in the asylum system, but that almost 73% of these claims have been in the system for over one year. It proposes to solve this impasse through a “one-stop” process, attempting to dispel lengthy appeals and speed up the claims process.
One of the most significant reforms in the new plan is the refusal of migrants entering the UK who have travelled through the EU or what the government calls a “safe country”. This will include expanding the government’s “asylum estate” through reception centres while asylum seekers are in processing and the possibility of offshore asylum processing facilities in the future. This controversial measure means that upon arriving in the UK, asylum seekers would be taken to an overseas territory or another country while claims to enter Britain are being assessed. The treatment of asylum seekers who arrive through clandestine means as illegal migrants means they will be considered inadmissible in the new system, subject to legal changes to the UN Refugee Convention in UK law. Another worrying sign is that the new plan does not say how the UK intends to induce or persuade countries, especially those in Europe, to take back asylum seekers that it wants to exclude from its new system.
The new plan reiterates one of the Home Secretary’s favourite lines since being appointed; criminal networks and people smugglers are responsible for the problems in the British asylum system. Undoubtedly criminal elements do play a significant role in trafficking people across borders, but it is naive to think that the problems of the asylum system will disappear once organised crime is reigned in.
As an Australian, I’ve seen all this play out before. About a decade ago, we were faced with our own manufactured migration crisis as upwards of one thousand boats entered Australian waters in a single year, an exponential increase on previous years. After an election that was almost completely decided on immigration issues, the number of boat arrivals declined sharply due to a suite of deterrence policies. Since then, immigration is conspicuously missing from contemporary Australian political discourse. It isn’t that the conservative government solved the problems of irregular immigration, but it relentlessly recycled divisive rhetoric that ultimately gave way to public apathy. Exhausted by the interminable political debates, Australia’s immigration policy has rarely been challenged since then.
Last year Priti Patel posted a photo on Twitter with one of the architects of Australia’s modern immigration system, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. No doubt Australia’s immigration experience was discussed in detail as a successful policy worthy of emulation in Britain. But this masks the reality. Britain is heading down the same road Australia blindly followed years before, where immigration ceases to be an issue based on humanitarianism and shifts to the domain of security and law and order. Being tough on immigration may stop the boats, but it doesn’t solve the problem.
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