In bygone days, harassed parents used to threaten their offspring with boarding school as the ultimate Dickensian punishment for persistent misbehaviour.
Children did not then know that few parents could remotely afford to banish them to this terrifying gulag – or that for some, boarding school would be a thrilling improvement on the status quo.
Since the advent of Google, no parent has been able to work this bluff, but it remains a reasonable metaphor for the UK’s immigration struggles.
For a couple of years, the government has been threatening illegal immigrants with Rwanda. Arrive in your leaky boats or stifling lorries, or rip up your passport at Heathrow, and you’ll be bounced to the central African country, where you may settle and rebuild your lives.
This threat is now a promise. Parliament has finally enacted the Rwandan deportation law – a huge relief for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who unwillingly copped this pass-the-parcel policy after Britain’s successive leadership failures and was half-expecting to lose the vote. It’s become his flagship issue against his own inclinations, yet he’s been forced to throw everything at it.
He stared down a revolt in his own party – though more opponents wanted a tougher regime than opposed it altogether.
The House of Lords is now also looking unlikely to block it.
Its viability, however, remains at the old boarding school-bluff level. The deportation fees would be a bargain, but it’s just a teeny bit illegal to force people to live in a country against their will. Even were the legislation drafted – in the teeth of jurisprudential propriety – to exclude all domestic avenues for appeal from the deportees themselves, other countries’ lawyers are waiting to pounce.
Britain risks breaching international law, becoming subject to reproof and sanctions.
Vowing to ignore “foreign judges”, Sunak plans to lay on battalions of British judges to fast-track the expected appeals. That has him deeper in the soup: for political intervention in the judiciary’s ordering of its own priorities against a slew of other court work with equal or greater claims to queue-jump.
The policy is at least a creative approach to an intractable problem shared by many developed countries: expired social licence for sustained or increased immigration, with infrastructure and public tolerance straining to accept continued inflows. Unsanctioned incomers to the UK are consigned to a purgatory of restrictions, legal uncertainty, poverty and sometimes indefinite detention – misery only the truly flinty would not deplore.
Since the remarkable peace agreement that ended its 1994 genocide, Rwanda, has been stable and has had covetable economic growth. It is avid for more residents. For someone fleeing a bleak, lawless, impoverished life, it might well qualify as a step up.
Opponents have struggled to condemn this proposed solution as inhumane without insulting a developing African nation. Rwanda is a democracy, notwithstanding President Paul Kagame repeatedly getting more than 90% of the vote. Though 75% literate, it has significant poverty. Still, many of the illegal immigrants in question are fleeing comparably impoverished and much less benign regimes.
As so often in today’s culture wars, critics have alighted on Rwanda not being “safe”. Inconveniently, it has one of the lowest crime rates in Africa. But what-about-ery, by its nature, is endless.
Sunak could conceivably triumph if he could get a few downtrodden immigrant families on national TV, beaming in from their new Kigali homes saying, “Actually, we love it here! Thank you, Britain!”
Fat chance. The policy’s irreducible problem is that it’s not to Rwanda that the desperately displaced surge, but to Britain. Even if an illegal arrival volunteered to resettle in Rwanda, lawyers would queue around the block to prevent them.
And anyway, what’s a detention centre but a boarding school without the school bit?
