‘Starmer’s refugee plan: Will a Europe deal and “smashing” gangs really work?’

The British public are open to welcoming refugees, but not on an uncontrolled basis. In the face of ongoing irregular migration across the English Channel, Sir Keir Starmer has begun to sketch out Labour’s alternative to the Tories’ Rwanda plan. The Labour leader’s recent comments suggest his plan to address the public’s concern is to seek to combine compassion with control, through fairer sharing of responsibility for refugees within the European region, allied to a ‘get tough’ approach to people smuggling. 

Refugees can be generated by a wide range of unforeseen events from any country in the world, in any numbers, at any time. In theory, they can all turn up at your border, claim asylum in your country and you then have sole responsibility for them. This possibility is not acceptable to any state.

It is therefore an irony of the International Refugee Convention that, precisely because of the obligations they have signed up to, those states that are signatories have the greatest incentive to try to prevent potential refugees arriving. The Economist has likened the result to “a dystopian television gameshow”, where a glittering prize awaits those refugees who – aided by people smugglers – manage to successfully run the gauntlet and sidestep states’ repelling efforts, but immiseration, or even worse, awaits those who do not.

People smuggling is very hard to crack down on, as history shows

The Labour leader’s dual strand approach can only work in tandem. On its own, even the toughest action against people smugglers rarely works very effectively for very long. For the last 25 years, Global North states have relentlessly criminalised people smuggling and the broader ‘migration industry’, with limited results.

People desperate to escape to a better life have always been willing to pay other people to assist them, and today, the demand for this service is greater than ever. It is very hard to stop. The migration industry is just too disparate and disjointed – a mix of criminal elements interspersed with large numbers of ordinary people just going about their everyday business of providing transport, food, rooms and money transfer services – to simply totally ‘crack down’ on. 

Targeting the migration industry upstream sounds sensible. But facilitating movement of people often forms a significant part of local economies, particularly when many communities lack such profitable alternatives.

Action versus people smuggling tends to lead to more organised criminal operators moving into, not out of, the business. As controls get tougher, profit margins increase to reflect the more professional, sophisticated and innovative methods required to circumvent them. This also incentivises the remaining players to maximise those profits by not merely assisting people movement, but by more aggressively marketing their services to actively encourage it.

A multilateral system is needed – but it will not be easy to achieve

What could hope to combat this? Realistically, only a multilateral system in which the state where an asylum seeker’s claim for protection is made does not determine the state where they end up. If refugees could access the same protection regime, whether they had just crossed the nearest border or had travelled thousands of miles across many borders, who would then be willing to pay to travel thousands of miles? 

This means returning refugees across borders they have crossed, but never to danger, and a fair sharing of responsibility for refugees in the region. This would not only be perfectly compatible with the UK’s international law obligations under the Refugee Convention, but a fairer application of them. The primary hurdles to achieving this are not legal, but political, the solution a diplomatic one. It will not be easy.

Sir Keir’s plans may be well-timed, though. A window of opportunity may be opening up for the UK to contribute to the development of a revised refugee responsibility sharing system within Europe, precisely because the current EU system has proven so dysfunctional and, despite recent announcements (yet again) of a ‘breakthrough’, remains mired in a fundamental lack of consensus.

Ultimately, a revised approach on refugee responsibility sharing within Europe will almost certainly have to proceed without the full cooperation of all EU states, which could provide an opportunity for the UK to participate, to help design and find its own role within a better system between willing states – one that could bring fairer treatment for more refugees, but also greater order and control to how refugees are protected in Europe and with responsibility for that better shared.

Would such an approach be acceptable to the British public?

Would such an approach be acceptable to the British public? Not surprisingly, the current Prime Minister immediately responded by arguing that such an approach might open up the UK to potentially having to accept as many as 100,000 refugees a year. But an earlier European Stability Initiative report suggested an annual 40,000 figure.

And in this context, one should not forget there has been scarcely a murmur of public discontent about the hundreds of thousands of refugees and humanitarian migrants that the UK has more recently taken in in a more controlled manner, under its Syrian resettlement scheme and from Ukraine and Hong Kong. 

And a regional refugee responsibility sharing arrangement would not necessarily always mean the UK taking in additional refugees from other European countries. Yes, this may generally be the case, as the UK’s geographical position provides it with an important element of remove and control. But the flow could also be in the other direction.

The UK’s history mean that it has unique, deep, long-standing connections with some of the world’s most populous countries, potentially exposing it to what could be the largest refugee flows on earth were those societies ever to fracture. In such a situation, the UK having agreed to a broader regional responsibility sharing mechanism for refugees could seem less of a burden and more of a lifeline.