The Labour government’s proposed policies on immigration and border security are starting to look a lot like just a rehashing of the same old policies of “deterrence, detention and deportation” which we saw under the Conservative government.
Cancelling the Conservatives’ Rwanda policy on day one showed that we can have immigration and asylum policies rooted in fairness, not just publicity stunts. Ending the contract for the Bibby Stockholm gave hope that we would see a more humane system in place. Unfortunately, Labour appears to have already started falling into the same tired old routine as the Conservatives did by now announcing policies focused purely on enforcement and increased immigration detention.
As part of their new policy, home secretary Yvette Cooper has announced that it will bring on 100 new “specialist intelligence officers and investigators” into the National Crime Agency to target gangs, new plans to target employers who employ undocumented workers, increase immigration detention capacity by 290 beds, and redeployment of staff to drive returns.
These types of policies have been shown repeatedly not to work. In large part, the previous government’s policies along these lines, including the Albanian Returns Agreement, led to a significant rise in modern slavery claims, albeit with far fewer positive outcomes as it became harder for people to actually seek help from the authorities. Gangs use the threat of returns to increase their control over their victims.
Even when we aren’t talking about human trafficking, though, there are serious implications. Returns agreements don’t change what caused people to come to the UK. They don’t suddenly make someone less likely to leave a country if returned there. They risk creating a never-ending cycle of people having to rely on gangs, and gangs which are being strengthened by other policies.
Part of the announced policies is to further treat channel crossings as a criminal rather than migration issue. There are a number of problems with this, namely though that such policies, as seen with the previous government’s Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, invariably end up targeting the smaller, “self-facilitated” crossings. These are the ones organised predominately by friendship or family groups, rather than criminal gangs.