EU Referendum


Immigration: getting the diagnosis wrong


31/10/2014



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It's almost comedic the way the hacks are trailing in our wake, this time Fraser Nelson who comes to the startling conclusion that leaving the EU wouldn't solve our immigration problem.

"The complex truth", he tells us, "is that the mass movement of workers affects every nation, which is why even non-EU countries like Switzerland and Norway have greater immigration levels than Britain. The United States controls its own borders (in theory) yet illegal workers remain a huge political issue. Immigration will always be a problem for any rich country – the more important question is how you handle it".

As recently as here, we were writing in precisely the same terms, but also arguing here, on 9 October, that leaving the EU, per se, would not solve our immigration problems.

The same point was raised by the "formidably briefed" Owen Paterson at the beginning of the month, and the end of last month, but we were also arguing the same point at the beginning of September. Our seminal piece, though, was in May of this year, when we argued for a "global solution" to immigration.

But now, months after the event, Mr Nelson comes waddling into the debate but, if he is behind the curve, his readers are more so as three thousand comments spiked with Ukipite vitriol take him to task for even suggesting that the UKIP mantra of leaving the EU is not the answer to all our ills.

This is not helped by The Dear Leader who gets it spectacularly wrong in declaring: "We should say to people who come into Dover from Calais and who claim refugee status, 'I'm sorry, you've applied at the wrong country, you've got to go back to France'. And that is what we should be doing".

This is typical of the ignorance of Mr Farage, and the inadequacies of those around him. All of them fail to realise that the reason we don't and can't and therefore don't send these asylum seekers back to France is nothing to do with the EU. It has everything to do with our own judges and the Human Rights Act.

The blockage stems from a case in 1999 when the Court of Appeal, headed by Master of the Rolls, Lord Woolf, found that France and Germany were not "safe places" to send refugees facing persecution "from forces other than the state", whence we could no longer return asylum seekers to either country. The then home secretary, Jack Straw, the Guardian reported, had acted unlawfully in ordering three asylum seekers to be returned to France and Germany. 

With some prescience, the Independent reported that Britain would have to accept thousands more asylum seekers. Hitherto, the government had relied on the Dublin Convention, that required that migrants applying for asylum within the European Union should have their application heard in the first member state in which they set foot. Now this had been set aside.

The ruling was described as "very important" by Anne Owers, director of the human rights organisation, Justice. She said the Government would have to review its Immigration and Asylum Bill which was based on the assumption that other EU states were safe destinations for asylum seekers, even though those states had harsher interpretations of the United Nations convention on refugees.

Straw did not leave it there. He took the case to the House of Lords, but the ruling was confirmed in the year 2000, just before Christmas, when barely anyone noticed. Nevertheless, the judgement is available online for those with wit enough to look it up – which evidently doesn't include Mr Farage's current advisers.

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With this, and other cases, the so-called "Dublin system" is creaking at the seams. To Germany and France, together with Austria, Greece has been added to the UK list of "no return" countries, while the EU has consistently failed to develop a coherent asylum policy.

For all that, asylum seekers are a very small component of our overall immigration burden, but the problem for policy-makers is that they grab disproportionate headlines, providing a living illustration of immigration out of control - a proxy for all the other immigration issues. And, with the Lords ruling have dropped out of the popular memory, the likes of Farage are milking the issue as part of the anti-EU campaign, adding to the government's discomfort.

The point though, is that this is not an EU issue. Whether we were in the EU or not, there would still be asylum-seekers queuing up at Calais trying to get to the UK, and we would still be dealing with the same legal constraints.

After all, the UK has not signed up to the Return Directive, so this law does not apply, and we are thus bound by ECHR judgements and the UN Refugee Convention. In so doing, we are dealing with the principle of non-refoulement which, outside the framework of the conventions, has become customary law.

As with so much to do with immigration, therefore, we have to look beyond the simplistic mantras, and explore the complexities that are clearly outside the grasp of the more virulent Ukipites. Aside from the few reasoned voices, their only contribution is to poison the debate, polluting the comment threads with their ill-tempered diatribes.

But, as the lumbering Nelson observes, Mr Cameron is also playing it wrong. In particular, we would aver, he is also failing to point out the source of our problems. But then Mr Cameron is compromised by his failure to address the ECHR and related issues, leaving him open to attack from the likes of Farage, who have never hesitated to disseminate their own brand of ignorance.

To a very great extent, therefore, Mr Cameron is the author of his own misfortune. He needs to up his game, even more than Farage. Ideally, they would both catch up, along with the Fraser Nelsons of this world, and then maybe we could have an informed debate that would actually get us somewhere.

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