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Ex-PM Boris Johnson advisor: “Falklands should be looked at again as an asylum processing center”

“We should build a new Australian-style offshore migrant camp next door, and send every small-boat arrival and other illegal migrant there” Andrew Gilligan, a writer for Conservative Home, said

Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, has had a great ten days.

To invert Dora Gaitskell’s acid comment on a crowd-pleasing speech by her husband Hugh, the then Labour leader, all the right people are furious. The Church of England, the Refugee Council, Rachael Maskell MP, the Green Party: as a full bingo-card of the woolly-minded and wrong, who could want more?

Alas, not many of Mahmood’s new admirers on the right – or her critics on the left – seem actually to have read the detail of her proposals. They are, as so often, going by the media reporting and pre-briefing – such as the Sunday Times splash, the weekend before last, which proclaimed in its first sentence that Mahmood would be “forcing people arriving illegally to wait 20 years before they can apply for permanent settlement.”

Closer examination of the actual government document, when it was published the next day, shows that only those illegals in a status called “core protection” would have to wait 20 years. And long before anyone reached the 20-year mark, there would be virtually nobody in this status. As the document itself says, “the government does not believe that refugees should seek to remain on Core Protection long-term.”

Instead, it says, “we will encourage refugees to switch out of the Core Protection route wherever possible,” to a status called “protection work and study,” in which the illegal arrival can take employment, achieve far quicker permanent settlement (on the same timescale as a legal migrant) and bring in family members. As the document puts it, “the same conditions may apply as for other legal migrants and UK citizens.” Mahmood’s much-ballyhooed “temporary” status, with refugees sent back if their countries are now deemed safe, appears to apply only to the small numbers of illegals on “core protection,” not the majority moved on to “protection work and study.”

In short, arriving illegally and claiming asylum will still be the easiest way into UK settlement and citizenship for someone who cannot obtain an immigration visa. The ability to work will, if anything be regularized and formalized. Free board and lodging will still be provided to the vast majority of claimants, and they will still receive free or preferential access to services that UK citizens may have to pay for, or wait for.

There are some actual toughenings, or potential toughenings, in Mahmood’s plan, including a proposal to step up removals of those refused asylum, tightening some legal definitions, and asking those with income or assets to contribute to the costs of their stay. But their impact will be marginal. Seeking asylum in Britain will still be an amazingly attractive deal – and Mahmood’s package is unlikely to much reduce the flows of people wanting, quite understandably, to take advantage.

The only way to stem the numbers is to make the deal less appealing. To find a place for all the illegal migrants which is safe, which is compliant with UK law, which recognizes that some genuinely need protection – but which is also somewhere they really, really won’t want to be.

Enter the Falklands.

In the middle of East Falkland, thirty miles from the nearest tree, in a bleak moor where the wind never stops blowing, is a big RAF airbase with a runway for large jets, a hospital and a school, surrounded by thousands of acres of empty, undeveloped land.

We should build a new Australian-style offshore migrant camp next door, and send every small-boat arrival and other illegal migrant there. The model would be Afghanistan’s Camp Bastion, which was quickly built from nothing on a totally barren site by the Army to reach a capacity of 28,000.

The message to the new guests would be simple. We will keep you safe. We will treat you according to British legal standards. We will house you decently, if austerely, in dormitories. We will not keep you prisoner (unless you start smashing the place up, attack the staff or otherwise break the law.) But you won’t be able to work. You will be bored out of your mind. And you will never, ever get to Britain. You will remain in the Falklands until you choose to return (at our expense) to your home country; or to any other country that will take you; or until you die – whichever comes first.

Something like this was vaguely considered in the last government.

Officials had various objections, none of which seemed very strong to me.

The Falklanders certainly wouldn’t like it, but they would equally certainly live with it. The base is five miles from the nearest civilians, and 35 miles from the only sizeable town. And without the blood and treasure shed by Britain, the Islanders would now be speaking Spanish. It was also said that the flights would have to stop en route, raising legal complications. But the usual stop is at Ascension, also a British territory. And some aircraft can now do the distance non-stop, anyway.

We ended up settling on Rwanda instead, but Rwanda was never going to cut it, both because of genuine concerns about its safety and human rights but more importantly because it would never have taken enough people to create a real deterrent. On the Falklands, the size of Northern Ireland with a population of 3000, there is no shortage of room.

As it becomes obvious that Mahmood’s cunning plan will fail to stop the boats, I think Labour might start to get interested in the Falklands. It would be expensive, but worth it, because if every small boat passenger ended up in the Falklands, the small boats would very soon stop coming.

 

Column by Andrew Gilligan, a writer for Conservative Home.