Why record Channel drownings are unlikely to deter migrants

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has travelled to Dover today to try to get a grip on a UK asylum system she says is “broken”.

The process for housing asylum seekers has been labelled a “national disgrace”. Overcrowding at detention centres set up to process record numbers of migrants crossing the Channel has led to the spread of disease and the government spending millions of pounds a day to house people in hotels.

The number of people crossing the Channel this year will soon reach 40,000, twice the number that had arrived by this time last year.

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Braverman, recently reinstalled as home secretary after being forced to resign, has been accused of ignoring legal advice and deliberately allowing overcrowding at the Manston airfield processing centre in Kent. “The Channel migrant crisis has swiftly emerged as one of the biggest challenges facing Rishi Sunak,” said The Times.

Last week, the prime minister spoke about how to finally fix the crisis, telling French president Emmanuel Macron that they must find a way to make cross-Channel migration “completely unviable”.

But what are the options for Sunak to fix the UK’s broken asylum system?

What did the papers say?

“Key to fixing the crisis is a deal that stops migrants making the journey in the first place,” said The Times.

France and the UK already have an annual security pact that governs the Channel border. Under the 2021 agreement, the UK sent about €60m to France in exchange for specific policing and control measures. However, Sunak is said to want a more “ambitious” deal.

Euronews said that “in contrast to previous governments, which took an aggressive stance towards France with regards to migrant crossings, the new UK administration has already adopted a more conciliatory tone”.

According to The Times, Home Office officials believe that if the interception rate can reach 75%, “it will be enough to destroy the business model of people smugglers and make attempts to cross the Channel not worthwhile”. However, the French interception rate has dropped from 50% last year to just 42% this year.

Some charities have suggested that the UK should allow asylum seekers in northern France hoping to reach the UK to register their claim with UK officials and then be safely placed on ferries to be brought to the UK while their claim is processed.

The Guardian said if such a scheme were adopted it would “achieve what the government has repeatedly promised to do: smash the business model of the people smugglers”.

Perhaps the most contentious option is the “turnback” policy, which gives UK Border Force officers the power to intercept migrant boats and redirect them back towards France.

After Australia introduced the policy in 2013 to “combat migrant boat arrivals”, the number of maritime asylum seekers fell from 20,000 to just 160 people and the next year none arrived, said The Times. However, the tactic risks breaching international maritime law and would require the co-operation of the French authorities, who have already stated they will not comply.

The suggestion “triggered a heated battle inside the government amid fears that people on the boats could puncture them as UK vessels try to turn them around, meaning they would have to be rescued”, The Telegraph reported.

What next?

The issue is increasingly pressing because the current system is designed for about 20,000 asylum seekers a year so “when around 50,000 applications were made last year (the highest number since 2003) by mainly irregular entrants – 28,500 from the Channel, more than 8,000 on lorries – it seizes up”, said The Spectator.

Aside from building new migrant centres to house and process those applying for asylum more efficiently, The Times has said the Home Office is “considering introducing targets for staff to process 80% of asylum claims within six months”.

Some in Tory circles have pressed the government to try to make the UK a less attractive proposition for asylum seekers, a policy that has its roots in Theresa May’s controversial “hostile environment” strategy of a decade ago.

But informal work in the black market is “easier to find in Britain”, said The Times, and many people who make it across will have family and contacts here who can “smooth their path”.

For now, both Braverman and Sunak have reaffirmed their commitment to follow through with the controversial deal to send illegal migrants to Rwanda.

Yes “it has many drawbacks: it is inhumane, it is expensive, it is unwieldy and impractical. And, like socialism, it has never been tried” said Tom Harris in The Telegraph.

But if “ministers finally find a way through the morass of legal objections, judicial reviews and general outrage of the legal and charity establishments”, it could actually provide “a severe deterrence effect on others contemplating that short, hazardous journey across the waves”.