Shabana Mahmood has recently proposed a number of changes to the immigration system in the UK. This currently remains under development.
They are not evidence-based, preferring instead to rely on political assumptions. In particular the claims regarding ‘pull factors’ are not supported by the data. Personally I also find the idea that asylum seekers would be willing to cross the world’s busiest shipping lane in extremely dangerous circumstances is at best laughable, especially when we are to believe that the pull factors are one of the main reasons for it..
Other claims have been made about the changes and how they increase fairness, improves integration and reduces devision when in reality it makes each of these worse. The proposed changes will increase discrimination, reduce integration and deepen social division. There is also a rather depressingly predictable failure to recognise that the cause of these problems are not immigrants, but rather a combination of a huge backlog in a system nearing meltdown and a lack of safe routes for asylum seekers into the UK.
Labour would probably argue that they inherited many of these problems from the last Conservative government, but Labour are nevertheless choosing to treat the symptoms rather the actual problems. This is an unforced error and not something that is unavoidable. The consequences of this if it goes ahead will be purely Labour’s responsibility.
The choice to go down this road may make Labour’s life politically easier in the short term but we should be able to expect far better policies from them than the mess they are currently promoting..
The temporary nature of the planned protection introduces uncertainty and creates barriers to vital needs like housing and employment, without which integration is that much more difficult to achieve, and makes it more difficult for refugees to become tax-paying and economically productive members of British society.
Labour should be defending immigration and championing the vital role it plays in our economy. They have instead chosen to ape Reform and strengthen Reform’s position when Labour should be fighting both them and their policies.
There is also the small matter of cost and man power. If immigration status is to be checked every 30 months then this will require more man power and a smoothly running system when the Home Office already can’t cope with the backlog. The suggestion we should be adding more work to a system that already can’t cope with the current workload seems insane. Add to this that the changes will create a greater degree of reliance on state support and we end up with a system that is not only broken from the start but is also more expensive to run. This seems particularly odd when cost is one of the reasons given by the government for these changes.
In years gone by the word ‘law and order’ would be the sort of phrase uttered by pretty much all the main parties, and yet we now have policies being put forward that could undermine the 1951 refugee convention, since the convention focuses on stability and not the perpetual uncertainty in the planned changes. The proposed changes to family reunion and a right to a private/family life also leaves the changes open to legal challenges & appeals that end up with a greater financial and bureaucratic burden that we as a country will expended to be willing to fund with our own taxes.
These changes are wrong, badly thought through, ineffective, unnecessarily expensive, cruel, inhuman, remain politically motivated and flawed in the extreme. They should be dropped and the Home Secretary should be removed by the Prime Minister.