Has Shabana Mahmood gone far enough to end Britain’s immigration crisis? It’s a sign of the dangerous level of public anger that she’s put forward a reform package that is opposed by many in her own party, with MPs accusing her of “racism”, “dehumanisation” and “performative cruelty”.
To her credit, she’s understood she must destroy the “pull factor” that’s made Britain a magnet for hundreds of thousands seeking to escape war, oppression or privation. She’s also understood that the problem is being exacerbated not just by human rights law, important as that is, but also by the law on refugees.
The Refugee Convention 1951 defines a refugee as someone with a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country and who must not be sent back to face serious threats to their life or freedom. Created after the Holocaust, when virtually every country denied entry to Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany, it was broadened in 1967 to encompass refugees from all countries.
The world has changed, and hundreds of millions could now claim asylum under the convention’s criteria. So Mahmood has brought forward proposals to make claiming asylum and permanent settlement in Britain a more onerous and uncertain process. Leave to remain will be made temporary, with the safety of the asylum seeker’s home country reviewed every 30 months. As soon as it’s deemed safe, the asylum seeker will be returned there.
Such a judgment, though, is subjective and contestable. Is Syria now safe under its ostensibly born-again-moderate new president? Hardly, if you are a Druze or Christian facing the regime’s Islamist death squads. How safe can people be in any country being torn apart by war or groaning under tyranny?
But there’s surely a much more important objection. Even if people really are threatened by their country’s regime, they may themselves pose a danger to the people of Britain. Islamists fleeing other Islamists may still be committed to waging holy war against the West.
The Refugee Convention was certainly never intended to export violence and terror to countries granting asylum to those fleeing violence and terror. The idea that there’s an obligation to import such danger is absurd and lethal to public safety, let alone social cohesion.
While providing sanctuary in certain circumstances is a moral obligation, what should concern Britain above all is not the security and well-being of the rest of the world but the security and well-being of its own people. The test for admitting refugees shouldn’t just be whether their home countries still pose a threat to them. It should also be whether such individuals are likely to pose a threat to the British or their way of life.
Putting your own people first isn’t racist or xenophobic. Keeping them safe and protecting your country and its culture are the first duty of a nation, the irreducible bargain between the state and its citizens.
Human rights law has provided the sucker punch to this bargain. The assertion of universally applicable values in the European Convention on Human Rights, such as the right to private and family life claimed by many asylum-seekers, means signatories such as the UK can’t put their own people first.
Mahmood intends to deal with this by redrafting domestic human rights law to limit that claim and thus restrict its use by the courts to frustrate the removal of illegal migrants from Britain. However, while the UK remains a signatory to the ECHR, migrant removals may still be frustrated by appeals to the human rights court in Strasbourg.
Mahmood has copied aspects of Denmark’s tough approach to migrants. However, the Danes have also been constrained by activist lawyers and judges implementing European human rights law. It therefore seems unlikely that Britain can get on top of the immigration crisis without leaving both the ECHR and the refugee convention altogether.
Mahmood’s ostensibly robust approach is undermined by a basic conceptual flaw. She’s said that “illegal migration” is “tearing the country apart”. But what’s tearing it apart is not just illegal migration. It’s mass immigration both legal and illegal. Net migration is expected to bring in over six million people by 2036, a population increase equal to five cities the size of Birmingham. More than 1.2 million foreign-born claimants are now living on universal credit.
This is totally unsustainable. It threatens to capsize Britain’s public services. It’s also eroding the country’s historic culture and national identity through a babel of disparate ethnic, cultural and religious groups, with a large and growing number of people not prepared to conform to the country’s core values. This is driving a wave of boiling public rage. Most people want to live in a country they can recognise as home, which they love and share as a common national project rooted in its particular history and principles.
The government, however, is still committed to multiculturalism, which seeks to replace national identity by the universal brotherhood of man, kumbaya and John Lennon’s imaginary nirvana with “no countries”, “no religion” and “nothing to kill or die for”. A multicultural society is a contradiction in terms. That’s what tears a country apart.
Until Britain is governed by politicians who are committed to upholding the nation and its identity, and understand what that really means, immigration reform will consist of half measures that will satisfy no one.