Labour's immigration plans: tough action or Tory-lite?

Yvette Cooper is facing a significant backlash over the government's latest plans to combat illegal migration to the UK, which include ramping up deportations to levels not seen since 2018.

The home secretary has unveiled proposals to expand immigration detention centres. The Labour government is aiming to deport more than 14,500 illegal migrants within the next six months – "a higher rate than at any time since 2018", when Theresa May was prime minister, said The Telegraph.

The expansion includes the creation of nearly 300 additional places at "two controversial immigration removal centres". Up to 100 new specialist intelligence and investigations officers will also be recruited to the National Crime Agency (NCA) to collaborate with European agencies in targeting people-smuggling networks.

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'Backwards step'

Critics have called the plans "a waste of taxpayer money", claiming they "lack detail", said The Independent. Labour has also been accused of failing to recognise "the dignity and humanity of migrants", a particular concern "in the wake of recent racist riots that targeted hotels housing asylum seekers across the country".

The decision to reopen two controversial centres – Campsfield House in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, and Haslar in Gosport, Hampshire – has been described as a "backwards step"; both sites were closed after being "plagued with problems" including hunger strikes and suicides. 

But while "successfully articulating a new position for Labour on migration" may prove difficult, Prime Minister Keir Starmer "does has one advantage at this point in his premiership", said Politico's Esther Webber.

“People might have low expectations of this government,” Luke Tryl, director of polling firm More in Common, told Webber, “but they definitely want him to give it a shot, and they want him to succeed.”

'Reheating' Conservative rhetoric 

Amnesty International's refugee and migrant rights programme director, Steve Valdez-Symonds, has described the plans as a "reheating" of old Conservative messaging on border security.

"People in urgent need – including those fleeing war and persecution in places like Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran – will keep coming to the UK and other countries, and the government needs to establish safe routes that reduce the perils of dangerous border crossings and the risk of exploitation by ruthless smuggling gangs," he told The Independent. He warned that a "securitised" approach could deter genuine asylum seekers from seeking refuge.

"Labour appears to have already started falling into the same tired old routine as the Conservatives did by now announcing policies focused purely on enforcement and increased immigration detention," said Daniel Sohege in Big Issue. Yet these types of policies "have been shown repeatedly not to work". 

Labour's "tough posturing" on immigration is an attempt to get ahead of figures set to be released this week. These are likely to show a continuing trend that has seen numbers of migrant doctors, nurses and care workers go down, but the numbers arriving in small boats remain high, said migration policy expert Zoe Gardner in Metro.

"But like the last government found to their electoral peril, they have misjudged what ordinary people really want from our immigration system." Labour voters "don't consider immigration a priority", said Gardner. And ultimately, the people who put Yvette Cooper into the Home Office "want to move away from the failed hate-fuelling policies of the past, towards humane and evidence-based management of immigration flows".