Labour won't stop illegal immigration by smashing trafficking gangs

Yvette Cooper’s immigration strategy is based on a lie. A powerful lie, a comforting lie, a lie that she may well have come to believe herself. But a lie none the less.

The lie is that we can halt illegal immigration by ‘smashing the gangs’. This delusion allows the Home Secretary to continue to think of the immigrants themselves as pitiable and deserving. (She once offered to house one herself, though, nine years on, we are still waiting.)

All her anger can then be directed at the people traffickers. Now the people traffickers are indeed an ugly lot, profiting from an illicit trade in human cargo. But they do not create the demand. They service it.

Yesterday, we learned that the Government proposes to sign ‘co-operation and security deals’ with a number of governments, including Kurdistan in Iraq and Vietnam.

But however much we pay the Kurdish or Vietnamese authorities to go after gangsters, the demand will remain.

The young men boarding dinghies in Calais are not helpless victims. They have paid around £10,000 to be smuggled into Britain, calculating that a couple of years of black-market work here will more that recoup that investment.

The way to halt the flow is to change their incentives. And the way to do that is to show that they will not be allowed to remain in Britain.

The reason so many people are determined to reach the UK, rather than ending their journey in one of the safe and prosperous states through which they pass, is that they know they won’t be deported.

Contrary to widespread belief, we do not offer more generous benefits than others. The draw is that, once you arrive, you can stay.

In the unlikely event that the authorities catch up with you and order you to leave, you can ask one of our immigration lawyers to bring a challenge under human rights legislation.

Our judges hate deportation orders. This newspaper reported recently on an illegal immigrant who had been convicted of child abuse and ordered to leave, but overturned the decision on grounds that (I’m not making this up) his removal would harm his relationship with his children.

Nor should we fall for the second immigration lie, the notion that we could staunch the flow of people if only we raised living standards in their countries of origin, a strategy that appears to be part of the overnment’s new approach.

In fact, rising wealth in these countries is fuelling the migration. The spread of iPhones, for example, allows people to transfer information and credit, enabling journeys that their grandparents could not have contemplated.

If Vietnam or Kurdistan eventually came to equal our living standards, numbers might dry up. But, while they are in the process of getting there, numbers will rise.

We can’t stop people coming here and, once they arrive, we can’t remove them. Until we tackle that problem, which was what the Rwanda scheme was designed to do, we won’t halt the cross-Channel flow.

Subsidising faraway countries is a gimmick. Yes, the Italian government, led by Giorgia Meloni, has reduced the number of illegal Mediterranean crossings by paying Tunisia and Libya to crack down on small boats.

But Tunisia and Libya are glad to take people back in exchange for this assistance. France is not.

Indeed, given that both France and Italy are largely under EU jurisdiction when it comes to immigration, the ability of Brussels to have it both ways is remarkable. When boats head towards the EU, it interprets the law as meaning that it can turn them around. But not so when boats leave the EU.

As the former director general of the border force, Tony Smith, puts it: ‘EU policy on maritime interventions is at best inconsistent, and at worst disingenuous. The plain fact is that the EU should stop pretending that maritime interdiction and returns of UK-bound migrant boats to France is not an option.’

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Quite. But since that is not going to happen, Labour is trapped by precisely the same logic as the Tories. If we can’t return illegal immigrants to France (because it refuses to take them), and we can’t deport them to their countries of origin (because they have destroyed any evidence of where they are from) we are left with only two alternatives.

Either we let them remain in Britain or we send them to a safe third country. That was the logic that led to the Rwanda plan, the very rumour of which, even before it came into effect, was reducing the number of illegal crossings and even prompting some illegals already in the UK to leave.

Labour, in a fit of virtue signalling, cancelled the Rwanda scheme on taking office. Ironically, the rest of the world is now looking at adopting similar schemes. Several EU states are exploring Rwanda-style options. Donald Trump is looking specifically at Rwanda. All of which will push even more sans-papiers our way.

The French will continue to escort dinghies to the median line, we will continue to provide a taxi service to Kent, and numbers will rise. What was it Starmer used to say about ‘restoring trust in politics’?

Lord Hannan is president of the Institute for Free Trade