Boris Johnson’s Rwanda plan to ‘solve’ immigration won’t work – this is why

Put yourself, for a moment, in the shoes of someone who wants to come to Britain. They may be a refugee, or an economic migrant, or fall into some other category. For now, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are absolutely determined to make a better life for yourself.

You’ve heard about this bizarre scheme the British government has cooked up to catch you and send you off to a camp in Rwanda for “processing”. You’re not stupid (an assumption too often made by British policymakers) and you draw the necessary conclusion. You won’t be particularly deterred by the threat, because you’re already prepared to put your actual life on the line by trusting people traffickers and getting into an unseaworthy and overcrowded vessel.

What you decide to do instead is avoid the authorities, not even bother trying to claim asylum – even though you may be fleeing certain death – and just make sure you don’t get caught. You will pay a premium to ensure that happens.

The market, for that is what this trade in people is, will adjust. There will be ways to get people across the Channel without involving the Border Force, HM Coastguard or Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), and get onto British soil right across the coast. You just need bigger, safer vessels with adequate fuel and clement weather.

Once on the beach, you make sure you know where you’re going and you do so stealthily. You go entirely underground, and enter into a twilight world of unregulated cash work, illicitly rented properties, exploitation and crime – undocumented and unknown to the authorities. Perhaps one day there will be an amnesty, as in America, or someone will forge documents for you so you can become more established. But, one way or another, you’ll still want to get to Britain, and you’ll still make it happen.

It’s a cat and mouse game, controlling migration. It always has been and always will be. Ask America. Some countries, such as Australia, are so remote that they can deter and divert migrants, though they don’t know how many arrive via other routes.

It’s worth remembering that one reason why there has been such an upsurge in the cross-Channel boat crossings is because it became extremely difficult to get into Britain in the back of a lorry. Tighter security at the Channel ports, technology, Brexit and Covid all conspired to make the road and ferry route impractical. So desperate people took even bigger risks with their lives – they did not just give up and settle in France.

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So, yes, new routes will be devised to get into Britain – by sea, by road, by ferry, and by air. Migration may be reduced, though not by much, and at enormous human and financial cost. The irony, of course, is that it used to be much easier to control this type of migration when the UK was in the EU, there was the Dublin Regulation on claiming asylum, and cooperation between the French and British authorities.

Now the British have to pay the French to do the impossible job of patrolling their entire north coastline, and it has failed. Now Britain has tried to copy the Australian approach, and that too will fail. Frankly, even a threat to sink the boats would fail. So would abolishing what meagre benefits and accommodation the refugees receive on arrival (on the bogus assumption they see the UK as a “treasure island” of welfare).

These people have crossed continents and risked everything they own and cherish, including their own lives, to get to Britain. Even Priti Patel’s Rwanda plan isn’t going to put them off. They’re not invaders. They’re not evil criminals. They’re not scroungers. They just want a better life. But this Rwanda scheme will push them underground and inevitably into poverty and crime. It will make things worse, for everyone.