Last Autumn, on the Greek island of Samos, I met a young Cameroonian woman who had just arrived by small boat. On her first attempt to enter Greece, undertaken while heavily pregnant, she had been rounded up, assaulted, and pushed back out to Turkish waters by Greek security forces. She gave birth in western Turkey and then embarked on the same journey undeterred. As we spoke in the shade of a monastery, her new-born baby gurgled and blinked at me.
In the summer of 2020, I spoke with a Sudanese man whose boat to Italy had been intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard—effectively a seaborne militia trained and funded by the EU to stem irregular migration—and taken back to Libya, where he was detained and tortured for ransom. The man is now in Europe: he had successfully made yet another attempt to cross the Mediterranean, undeterred.
On Thursday, Boris Johnson said that his government’s plan to deport migrants to Rwanda would be a “considerable deterrent” to crossing the Channel in small boats. Studies have shown over the years that violent anti-migrant policies rarely prevent migrants from trying to reach their intended destination, they merely add to the suffering. I have reported from multiple borders across Europe for years and, in my experience, most migrants are unaware of the intricacies of individual countries’ asylum regimes. Some may have heard but may not believe, some are convinced that they will be the lucky ones and surmount the obstacles, and some have experienced so much brutality at the hands of dictatorships on their journey that a bit more brutality by democracies is a small price to pay.
Flying asylum seekers to an actual dictatorship that produces its own refugees is yet another step into the dystopian. Aside from its own dark record of repression of its own citizens, Britain’s new jailer is not a model for treatment towards vulnerable migrants. In 2018, Rwandan security forces shot dead 12 protesting refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Rwandan plan is touted as a strategy to beat the people smugglers but it will do no such thing. It is far more likely to create a smuggling franchise in Rwanda to cater for those who do not want to stay there. Between 2013-2016 Israel embarked on a similar scheme to deport thousands of African asylum seekers to Rwanda. Abandoned, almost all promptly left for Europe using smugglers.
If the British government genuinely wanted to challenge the criminal gangs who traffic in vulnerable humans, it would open far more opportunities to enter the country legally by enabling asylum applications from outside the country. The rapid development of routes for Ukrainian refugees demonstrates that such action is possible, even as the UK remains the only country in Europe to actively erect burdensome bureaucratic hurdles in their way. Indeed, if Priti Patel and her officials had not been cooking up the crude headline-grabbing Rwandan scheme for “over nine months,” there might have been more capacity to assist the Ukrainians comprising the largest refugee crisis in Europe for a century.
In all likelihood, this plan is probably not intended to “work” on its own terms, but rather present an illusion of tough action and deliberately court righteous opprobrium from Labour, civil society and imagined “open borders activists” at the start of a local election campaign. I do not discount the possibility that a few dozen migrants might be sent to Rwanda at the very beginning, amid much PR fanfare, before the whole arrangement inevitably disintegrates under the weight of its own dysfunction or unpredictable developments in Rwandan politics. In 2016, I watched the first EU-chartered ferries deport migrants from Greece back to Turkey under a legally-questionable, multibillion-euro arrangement to make the crossing the Aegean “unviable.” Turkey, ridden by political turmoil, tore up its end of the deal months later and has never agreed to readmit the asylum seekers that Greece deems inadmissible. As a result, thousands endure indefinite detention and severe mental health issues on glorified penal colonies at vast expense to EU taxpayers.
The Rwandan plan is part of a wider agenda that seeks to dismantle the entire concept of asylum, to be replaced with a handful of flimsy and insufficient legal routes that do not correspond to the realities of how displaced people move. It is an attempt to appease an electorate that I suspect is not as bloodthirsty as policymakers imagine, though they could become so when hairbrained schemes are prioritised over sensible controls. Such strategies will only embolden extremists advocating for ever-more violent treatment when they fail, and then we will be in very dark territory indeed.
