Labour’s ‘blitz’ on illegal immigrants is too small to work
New Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced an illegal immigrant blitz. Immigration Enforcement teams will descend on nail bars, beauty parlours and car washes to find illegal immigrants. Meanwhile others at the Home Office will be working to fast track deportations, with a focus on nationalities like the Vietnamese, who are easier to return to their country of origin because it is considered safe.
That sounds tough, but is it actually new? Just last year the previous government announced the first cross-government ministerial taskforce on immigration enforcement in order to crack down on illegal immigrants working, with raids boosted and another 200 staff hired. That led to the most immigration enforcement visits ever in one day, with 159 visits and 105 foreign nationals arrested. Nail bars and car washes were among the targets.
Similarly, if the Vietnamese are easier to return, then that is in part also because the last government signed a deal with Vietnam on illegal immigration. So it’s hard to see what is that different about Labour’s newly announced plans.
It’s unlikely that this blitz will have a significant effect. Returns are at historically low levels, largely because expanding human rights law has made it increasingly difficult. Only 1.3 per cent of those who arrived on small boats between 2018 and June 2023 were returned during that period. Even those asylum seekers whose cases fail are unlikely to be returned, with just 10 per cent of those who claimed asylum in 2020 and were refused it having been removed. Of those who were returned, a disproportionate amount came from other European countries like Albania or Romania.
That’s because, while most small boat arrivals come from places like Iran and Afghanistan, those countries aren’t considered safe to return to. So even if their asylum claim fails, it’s unlikely they will actually be made to leave Britain. This is what led to the Rwanda Plan: if human rights law made returns so difficult and if the last Conservative government was unwilling or unable to change those laws, then the only way to stop illegal immigrants was to designate a third party country as safe and fly them there instead.
Having axed Rwanda immediately on entering office, Labour no longer have that option on the table. They’ve said they’ll use foreign aid to incentivise potential migrants to stay at home and are seeking deals with Slovakia and Slovenia to crack down on smuggling gangs. The idea that £100 million ploughed into local economies will persuade people from countries much poorer than ours not to come is hardly convincing, while further deals with European partners are useful but fail to tackle the main challenges.
The government is surely aware that the latter half of the year always has more small boat arrivals than the first half, meaning that they can look forward to months of stories on illegal immigrants using the calmer seas to arrive in ever-larger numbers.
Perhaps therefore this big announcement is a return to the Blairite focus on publicly cracking down on illegal immigration to persuade voters they are listening to their concerns. Even as senior New Labour figures described how they sent out “search parties” to find migrants to come to Britain and used mass migration to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, they were also instituting “strict controls” on asylum seekers, trialling ID cards and considering radical plans like bulk deportations in RAF planes.
There’s no doubt that this had an effect, with the Blair government achieving a much higher rate of returns than we currently have. However, the Human Rights Act which they passed has slowly choked off the ability to replicate that. If the Home Secretary wants fast track deportations, she’ll have to explain how it will be different to the Detained Fast Track, which was suspended in 2015 after a legal challenge and has never been brought back.
So while it is good that the government wants to enforce our immigration laws, especially on industries which rely heavily on labour exploitation, the current plans are too modest to have much effect. Estimations of the size of the illegal immigrant population living here already go as high as 1.2 million. Tackling that will require a much bigger commitment.