Like those coming to the United States by land, most people illegally arriving in the UK by boat are economic immigrants. The UK’s asylum system has been swamped by growing demand, and backlogs for processing cases stretch into years.
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 about 50,000 were being housed in hotels, costing the UK the equivalent of more than $8.8 million per day. The limitless liability of illegal immigration to the UK is an important electoral issue for Conservative Party voters.
Sound familiar?
Anyone sent to Rwanda could opt at any time to return to his or her home country or to be resettled in Rwanda as refugees, but they could not return to the UK. The UK 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.
Mr. Sunak says he means business.
The government has also put judges and courts on standby to handle the inevitable legal challenges.
The British hope to emulate the success of Australia, which in 2001, started turning back boats carrying illegal immigrants. 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 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.
When a later Australian government closed the Manus and Nauru centers, illegal immigration soared again. In 2012, more than 600 people drowned when boats carrying illegal immigrants 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 illegal immigrants 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. Although the boat-borne illegal immigration virtually stopped, a credible ability to restart offshore processing is vital to Australia’s maintaining its current control over seaborne illegal immigration. Therefore, Australia is paying the equivalent of $288,000 per 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 United States 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 United States from Mexico were returned there pending their case adjudication.
The United States needs to use all the economic and diplomatic leverage at its 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.
