Asylum Matters’ Director, Louise Calvey, writes about why moves to bring Britain closer to the EU Migration Pact should worry anyone who cares about asylum rights.
Ten years on, the shadow of Brexit continues to dominate our political narrative. For those on the centre and left, there’s a ghoulish ‘gotcha’ too often deployed against the pro-Brexit right: the idea that leaving the EU has driven more people to cross the freezing Channel in overcrowded dinghies.
Now, with the tighter and more hostile rules of the new EU migration pact in force, some who want a closer relationship with the EU are ramping up this narrative. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has recently made headlines with his support for a return to the pact, but he’s far from the only one pitching entry to this agreement as a migration silver bullet, and with the UK EU Summit due in November there will doubtless be more chatter around it.
“The boats weren’t a problem before Brexit”, these voices boast – even referring to the death traps that have cost uncounted refugee lives as “Brexit boats”. The idea is that boat crossings arose because, on leaving the EU, the UK exited the Dublin II agreement, which required that people claim asylum in the first EU state they reached.
There are a few issues with this argument and the first is: it’s not really true. The use of boats arose largely because of COVID, and the massive decrease in cross-channel freight it caused. Before the boats, the issue was perhaps less visible, but comparably dangerous: people were crammed into the back of HGVs dying from suffocation, or strapped to the top of the Eurostar risking electrocution. With freight crossings down, exploiters found their way to the beaches, proved the route for group travel, and they haven’t stopped since. People smuggling has been a bloody stain on our migration system for decades, since the tightening of visa controls and the implementation of carrier fines. Weaponising the people in small boats as a Brexit gotcha is no more accurate than it is ethical.
But far more importantly, this misty-eyed nostalgia for the EU driving interest in joining new migration pact ignores the enormous harm it does to people who’ve fled war and torture. Whatever you think of Brexit, no one who values human lives should be celebrating this pact, let alone considering joining.
Here’s how the pact, adopted in 2024 and in force since June this year, works. People seeking safety are required to apply for asylum only at entry points: typically in border states like Greece and Spain. They then face up to 24 weeks detention in ‘specialised border processing sites’ – essentially, mass containment camps. Here people are held under the principle of the ‘legal fiction of non entry’ – essentially meaning that although they’re on EU soil they are legally treated as though they are not, denied the rights attached to being physically present in an EU state.
Non-border states have an obligation to take on a quota of those people who are recognised as refugees needing protection. In theory. But wealthier states can buy their way out of filling their quotas, via a system that values the price of a refugee life at £17,000.
Externalising borders in this way allows wealthier countries to contain refugees off shore, making it easier for them to shrug off their legal and moral responsibility to provide dignified, safe, human rights-respecting conditions to refugees. Conditions off-shore generally receive far less political and media scrutiny, and it’s much more difficult for people to have access to lawyers, doctors and support.
Meanwhile, rather than basing distribution on states’ ability to help, refugees are disproportionately funnelled towards poorer states. It’s not just that this is unfair: it dehumanises refugees and fundamentally misunderstands the assets they bring to countries. They are not a ‘burden’ to be dodged but friends to be made, colleagues to work with, neighbours to chat with, people that have risked their life to live freely and in peace – they understand these values better than anyone.
The Pact also provides the legal architecture for individual member states to broker their own third-country removal agreements, specifically by removing the previous long standing strict requirement that an asylum seeker must have a prior personal connection to that country. Essentially, this means the Rwanda Plan 2.0 is being peddled across the EU.
The EU migration pact does nothing to address the root causes of dangerous migration. The UNHCR estimates that at least 24,000 people have died or disappeared in the waters around the central Mediterranean, a key entry area to the EU. Hundreds of thousands more have disappeared making land journeys across the Middle East and North Africa, with women in particular facing rape, kidnap and abuse on these journeys. Yet the bloc has done nothing to create the safe routes that would allow people to travel safely, to help people facing war, torture or starvation trapped in countries like Sudan, Afghanistan or Palestine.
The simple reality is, amid climate change and global instability, the world is becoming more dangerous. We will not live in a world without migration, nor should we hope to do so. Our only choice, then, is between dangerous, dehumanising routes that cost lives and put money into the pockets of exploiters, or sustainable routes for people to move calmly and safely.
Experts and NGOs across the world have developed plans for accessible safe routes for decades, models have been piloted and tested, which have proven to deliver far better outcomes at far lower costs to taxpayers. Let’s listen to them. Imagine what all the time, money and political bandwidth currently being ploughed into making refugees’ lives more difficult and dangerous could achieve if redirected with that intent.
The EU migration pact will be as much a failure as the UK’s various doomed attempts to “stop the boats”. It will remain so until the global community opens its eyes to the reality that people move, they always have, and they always will. We can ignore their humanity and watch them suffer and die, or we can help them to move safely. But that is the only choice.