After nearly two years of legal and political challenges, Britain’s parliament has finally passed a law confirming that Rwanda is a safe place to send people who arrive in the UK illegally by sea. This is a major policy win for the Conservative government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and a victory for common sense. Britain, like the United States and Europe, is experiencing mass illegal migration in the guise of asylum claims. The British devised the Rwanda plan in response, but the U.S. already has successful equivalents that can be resurrected when there is a will to once again control America’s borders.
Like those coming to the United States by land, most people illegally arriving in Britain by boat are economic migrants. Britain’s asylum system has been swamped by growing demand, and backlogs for processing cases stretch into years.
In 2018, only 300 people arrived illegally in the UK by small boat from France across the English Channel. In 2022, it was more than 45,000. And in August 2023, the UK received its 100,000th illegal boat-borne immigrant, one of 700 who arrived each day. Nearly all of the 100,000 are still in Britain, joined by ever-increasing numbers.
From Jan. 1 to April 21 this year, 6,265 small boats arrived in the UK carrying illegal immigrants, with the largest numbers being from Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Having left the European Union, the British are unable to return asylum-seekers to the first safe country in the EU under what are called the Dublin Regulations. By mid-2023, 96 percent of asylum-seekers who arrived in 2021 had not received final decisions in their cases, and around 50,000 were being housed in hotels, costing the United Kingdom the equivalent of more than $8.8 million U.S. a day. The limitless liability of illegal immigration to the UK is an important electoral issue for Conservative Party voters.
Sound familiar?
In August 2023, Sunak’s government passed an Illegal Migration Act that barred people who entered illegally by sea from applying for asylum. The act requires British officials to return inadmissible aliens—without appeal—back to their birth country, if possible, or if not, to a safe third country.
To implement the act, Britain needed a safe third country to house putative asylum-seekers pending case processing. Britain does not have any developing-country neighbors, so they struck a deal with Rwanda in 2022 in which that Central African country would be compensated to take up to 1,000 putative asylum applicants over five years.
Anyone sent to Rwanda could opt at any time to return to their home country or to be resettled in Rwanda as refugees, but they could not return to Britain. The British government fought a series of legal challenges to its policy, but passage of the new law should clear the way for removal flights to Rwanda within weeks from now.
Sunak says he means business. “The only way to stop the boats is to eliminate the incentive to come, by making it clear that if you are here illegally, you will not be able to stay,” he said at a press conference. “We are ready. The plans are in place.”
The government has also set aside judges and courts on standby to handle the inevitable legal challenges.
The Rwanda plan is Britain’s attempt to regain control over its borders and national sovereignty.
The goal is to cut off the possibility of asylum from boat arrivals, thus both destroying the business model of maritime smugglers and saving lives. This past week, five people died when over 100 illegal migrants attempted to cross the English Channel in an overcrowded boat.
The Rwanda plan has many opponents. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees argues that if the UK is successful, it will set a “worrying precedent for dismantling asylum-related obligations that other countries, including in Europe, may be tempted to follow …” Perhaps so, but the alternative is to cede control over immigration to foreign actors in perpetuity.
The British hope to emulate the success of Australia, which in 2001, started turning back boats carrying illegal migrants. The idea was to give “no advantage” to asylum applicants arriving illegally by boat over those arriving by air.
Australia set up detention and asylum processing centers on the island nation of Nauru, and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Eventually, Australia adopted a strict rule that no asylum-seeker arriving by boat and processed offshore would ever be resettled in Australia. The policy faced considerable political opposition but was highly effective in reducing demand.
The message was quickly understood by would-be boat migrants and migrant traffickers across Southeast Asia. “Arrival numbers went off a cliff once the Australians started to deport ... because ‘news spreads like wildfire among refugees,’” wrote Matthew Paris in the Spectator.
When a later Australian government closed the Manus and Nauru centers, illegal migration soared again. In 2012, more than 600 people drowned when boats carrying illegal migrants capsized. In response, Australia reopened the offshore centers and resumed sending back all illegal aliens who arrived or attempted to arrive in Australia by sea.
As before, the putative asylum applicants remained in the offshore centers for the entire time, pending the adjudication of their cases. The offshoring policy and an unbending Australian government destroyed the market for maritime migrant smugglers. For example, in 2014, only a single boat carrying migrants made it to Australia.
At its peak in 2014, Nauru’s camp had 1,233 asylum applicants living there. By June 2023, only three remained. Though the boat-borne illegal migration virtually stopped, a credible ability to restart offshore processing is vital to Australia maintaining its current control over seaborne illegal immigration. Therefore, Australia is paying the equivalent of $288,000 U.S. a year to Nauru to keep the detention/processing option open in reserve.
The United States does not have the advantage of being an island. But as recently as the Trump administration, we had Safe Third Country agreements in place with Central American countries and the Migrant Protection Protocols with Mexico. Under these agreements, any asylum applicant coming to the U.S. and first passing through a third safe country to get here would be sent back to that country if he or she had not applied for asylum in that country. For example, all those who crossed illegally into the U.S. from Mexico were returned there pending their case adjudication.
The United States needs to use all the economic and diplomatic leverage at our disposal to revive those agreements. Meanwhile, similar to the UK and Australia, we should prohibit asylum applications from those illegally crossing between ports of entry to discourage frivolous and fraudulent asylum claims.
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Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.
