Recent news has seen the approval of a controversial bill by the British Parliament, allowing the country to send refugees arriving in the United Kingdom to Rwanda, in East Africa. Despite criticism and disputes over the violation of international law, the government managed to achieve victory in the parliamentary vote, with a majority of 320 votes to 276.
The bill, known as the Rwanda Safety Bill, aims to end legal challenges currently preventing the UK from sending refugees to Rwanda, following an agreement between the two countries in 2022. This deal was reached due to the dramatic increase in the number of refugees arriving in the UK via small boats organized by human trafficking networks.
The UK’s aim is to send people arriving illegally to Rwanda, where they will stay while their asylum applications are processed. If their application is accepted, they will be able to return to the United Kingdom. If their application is rejected, they will be able to stay in Rwanda or seek asylum elsewhere.
However, despite this agreement being put in place and the British government sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the Rwandan government, no migrants have yet been sent to Rwanda. Judges and courts have argued that Rwanda is not a safe country to send refugees to, as they could face persecution there or be returned to their country of origin, which would be a blatant violation of the laws international human rights and refugee conventions to which the United Kingdom is a party.
The Rwanda Safety Bill was designed to allay these concerns by providing guarantees and oversight so that the Rwandan government meets its human rights obligations. However, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is not convinced and has stated that, even with this bill, the agreement with Rwanda remains incompatible with international refugee law. This likely means there will be legal challenges even if the bill passes.
Although the bill has been approved by the House of Commons, it must now go through other legislative steps that will slow down its passage as law and could potentially cause it to fail. This poses a bigger problem for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has promised to hold a general election this year.
How did we get here ?
In 2021, Nigel Farage, who was the main instigator of Brexit, began monitoring small boats crossing the English Channel from France to England. These boats were mainly filled with young, non-white men, according to Farage.
The number of people crossing the Channel in small boats rose from 28,526 in 2021 to 45,755 in 2022, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. Full figures for 2023 are not yet released, but a significant increase is expected.
Once again, Farage has put the Conservatives’ backs against the wall and set them an almost unattainable target.
This is why stopping small boats has become a major commitment for Sunak since he became prime minister at the end of 2022. To some extent, this is favorable territory for a conservative prime minister struggling in the polls in the approach of the elections. Immigration is an issue that should appeal to his core electorate and distract from the bigger problems facing the country, such as the cost of living crisis and flagging public services.
Will this work?
If, and it’s a big “if”, Sunak finally manages to send people to Rwanda, this does not necessarily guarantee a reversal of his situation or a better position to win the next elections.
In the best case scenario, if all boats stop and almost 40,000 people do not come to the UK, this represents barely a small part of net immigration, estimated at more than 670,000 in 2023 according to the most recent estimates.
Small boats may be the picture of immigration right now, but they make up a fraction of total immigration. It’s hard to imagine that the people most motivated to vote because of immigration will be happy with numbers still well above half a million, regardless of the people’s backgrounds.
Nor is it clear that there is a large audience for radical anti-immigration rhetoric in the UK. Polls on Rwandan politics and immigration in general are not very useful because respondents’ responses are often driven by the wording of the questions.
“If you ask the public whether people fleeing persecution should be allowed into the UK, the answer will generally be yes. If you ask whether illegal immigration should be reduced, the answer will generally be yes.”
So, even if the bill passes and becomes law, it is unlikely to actually solve immigration-related issues and improve Sunak’s standing for the upcoming election.