01/09/2015
Something that very few people seemed to have picked up in the torrent of reporting about the migration crisis is the
ONS observation that there were 25,771 asylum applications in the UK for the 12 months to the end of June, which was substantially lower than the peak number of applications of 84,132 in 2002.
When irregular migration into Europe is at an all-time high, however, it might be worth noting that in 2003, there was the
Le Touquet Treaty under which provisions, the UK was permitted by the French to station immigration officers in their ports, thereby preventing asylum seekers reaching British territory to claim international protection.
By 2005, the
level had dropped to 25,712 and, by 2009, applications declined further, falling to 17,916 in 2010. Since then, the numbers have risen each year to reach 24,914 in 2014, but nowhere near the 2002 peak.
It is reasonable to assert, therefore, that French cooperation has had a significant effect on asylum seeker numbers in the UK so much so that, while Germany braces itself for 800,000 this year, our levels will likely remain at around two percent (or less) of gross migration.
If anything, the situation is likely to get better. With Britain pumping £35 million in three years to secure the Calais ports (part of the so-called Evian arrangements), Manuel Valls, the French prime minister,
is claiming that Calais port and the Eurotunnel site are now "fully under control".
"Countries from where migration is coming must hear this message", he said yesterday: "Today the Franco-UK borders are fully under control. To come to Calais is to throw yourself into a dead end".
This comes as France is preparing, with the injection of £3.6 million of EU funding, to turn the makeshift "jungle" into a fully-equipped reception centre, the upshot of which is that migrants will be processed on French soil and will no longer be able to move on to the UK to claim asylum.
Between the UK and France, this is intergovernmental cooperation, which owes nothing to EU treaty law, the effect of which is actually to ensure that the UK is scarcely affected by the Mediterranean migration crisis. Contrary to the media reports, the combination of French assistance and the Channel is keeping Mr Cameron's "swarm" at bay.
Nevertheless, this does not stop the likes of
Damian Green parading his ignorance, with the inane comment that Britain would face a mass influx of refugees from Calais if the country voted to pull out of the EU.
On the face of it, the intergovernmental arrangements in force would be unaffected by UK withdrawal. Even if we can't exclude the possibility of retaliatory action by France, the bilateral arrangements should hold, despite Green claiming that France "would not be under any obligation to prevent migrants from crossing the Channel".
It is this sort of ignorance, however, that is dominating the debate. Whether it is Teresa May,
confusing freedom of movement with freedom of establishment, the muddle over the
Schengen area, which is irrelevant to the current crisis, or the continued confusion over terminology, few pundits seem to have taken the trouble to understand the technicalities of this complex issue.
Most of all though, the abysmal standard of reporting by the media has elided the problem of irregular migration and the entirely separate and much greater problem of regular migration. So distorted has the coverage been that if you ask people for an image to represent the problem, migrants boarding trucks in Calais will come to the fore, when the true representation should the arrivals halls at Heathrow.
Sooner or later though, it will dawn on the majority that, by comparison with the rest of Europe and in absolute terms, we don't have a refugee crisis.
But, as we see with Libby Purves in the
Times writing: "I can't be proud of a barbed-wired Europe", the broader crisis represents a significant failure of EU policy. This should benefit the "no" campaign if the issue is handled responsibly and sensibly â and positioned as a major policy failure.
To do that, though, the "no" campaign and its supporters need a much better grasp of the issues, and the ability to vanquish the ignorance that is dominating the debate. Currently, they show no signs of acquiring either.
