Here’s How Labour Can ‘Stop the Boats’

The so-called small boats crisis has consumed British politics this year. As asylum seekers cross the English Channel on rubber dinghies to reach British shores, U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made cracking down on the crossings one of the Conservative government’s top five priorities. A lectern at 10 Downing Street even features the slogan “Stop the Boats.”

It’s not just the Conservatives who want to reduce the number of crossings. After sidestepping the issue for more than two years, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer in September outlined a plan to address the small boats. A Labour government, he said, would get tough on the people smuggling in asylum seekers and treat them on par with terrorists; it would also seek a deal with the European Union to share intelligence on smugglers.

There is a good chance Starmer will have the opportunity to implement these policies. The latest polls indicate that 46 percent of the U.K. population intends to vote Labour at the next election, compared with just 25 percent for the Conservatives. Most commentators seem to agree that the United Kingdom’s next general elections—which are slated to be held no later than January 2025—are Labour’s to lose. But the plans Labour has laid out are a missed opportunity to get to the heart of the issue. Refugees and migrants will continue to make the dangerous journey. A lasting solution to the small boats crisis will require Labour to provide safe, legal pathways to the United Kingdom.

In the first half of 2023, 11,500 asylum seekers crossed the English Channel. Globally, this number is relatively small—77,000 people navigated the Gulf of Aden to seek safety in war-torn Yemen in same period. But it’s a large number for the United Kingdom, which saw only nine asylum seekers enter on a small boat from July 2014 to June 2016. This has provided the Conservatives, desperate to distract from the failures of their 13 years in power, with what they describe as an “existential” threat only they can solve.

The Conservative government’s strategy has relied on trying to deter asylum seekers from even attempting the journey—namely, by eroding the right to seek asylum.

The 2022 Nationality and Borders Act created a system that divides refugees into two groups: those who enter Britain through “safe and legal routes,” and those who enter through “irregular” routes. The act deems the latter illegal and allows the government to remove people who take that route for offshore processing. Refugees who cross over irregularly also have no recourse to public funds or family reunification. Leading British faith leaders have criticized the bill for having “no basis in evidence or morality,” and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that it constitutes a violation of international law.

The Illegal Migration Act, adopted in July, went one step further. It enables the government to immediately remove people who arrive in the United Kingdom irregularly, effectively preventing them from claiming asylum.

The government’s approach is not just inhumane. It has also backfired. By restricting safe and legal routes for asylum seekers, the Conservatives have created a booming business for smugglers. Asylum seekers have compelling reasons to cross the English Channel—ones that, for many, outweigh the risk of drowning in the strong currents of the world’s busiest shipping lane. These range from the desire to reunite with family members to police brutality in mainland Europe to a connection with the United Kingdom due to work with the British military in countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan. As research suggests, deterrence efforts—whether they consist of criminalizing asylum seekers, making material conditions upon entry miserable, or other tactics—are not effective in preventing arrivals and only lead to more fatalities.

The government’s policies are also expensive. The United Kingdom spends around $10 million per day housing asylum seekers in hotels. But instead of addressing the country’s social housing shortage or its backlog of unprocessed asylum claims, the government has turned to short-term measures in an attempt to cut costs. This year, the U.K. tried to house asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm, a barge moored off the coast of Dorset county. Thirty-nine asylum seekers spent five days on the barge before being evacuated after Legionella—a bacteria that can cause a serious form of pneumonia—was found in the boat’s water system. Two months later, 21 people returned to the barge.

The most notorious scheme has been the Rwanda plan. Modeled on Australia’s controversial offshore processing facility in Nauru, the U.K. government proposed in 2022 to send asylum seekers to the East African nation while their claims were processed, at the staggering cost of around $210,000 per person. Before chronic underspending on social housing all but decimated Britain’s housing stock and forced the government to place asylum seekers in hotels, local councils budgeted just around $10,700 to cover the costs of an asylum seeker’s first year of resettlement.

Amid a cost-of-living crisis at home, the United Kingdom has already paid Rwanda around $176 million but has not removed a single asylum seeker to the country—and likely never will. The program’s first flight, chartered for June 2022 for an estimated cost of $629,000, was stopped after the European Court of Human Rights intervened. On Nov. 15, the U.K. Supreme Court ruled that Rwanda was not a safe country for asylum seekers, effectively preventing the U.K. government from going through with the plan unless the protections for asylum seekers in the scheme are entirely reworked.

Though Labour’s stance on asylum seekers is more humane, it misses the opportunity to address the root cause of irregular migration. In addition to Starmer’s plan, a number of Labour advisors and left-leaning commentators have suggested that the United Kingdom should sign an agreement with the EU akin to the bloc’s Dublin Regulation, which places the primary responsibility for processing an asylum seeker’s claim on the first safe country of entry. They argue that the regulation, which Britain elected to leave after Brexit, will deter asylum seekers, since it will allow the United Kingdom to deport them to any “safe country” they passed through en route.

These analysts point to the fact that small boat crossings have increased since the United Kingdom pulled out of the Dublin Regulation. But they neglect to mention that smugglers’ routes have changed as well. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, asylum seekers often crossed over from northern France via the Eurotunnel on freight trains or trucks. This route has become almost impossible as security has tightened in Calais, the city at the French end of the tunnel. Furthermore, while nearly all small boat arrivals are registered after they reach British shores, those who enter on trucks and trains disembark at different stages and are thus much harder to detect.

In any case, the Dublin Regulation has been a resounding failure. As an aid worker, I’ve worked with individuals from Afghanistan, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo who spend years undocumented, waiting to claim asylum after the fingerprints registered in their first country of entry have been expunged. A Dublin-style agreement would only prevent individuals seeking safety from starting a new life and contributing to British society.

Starmer still has time to reconsider Labour’s plans. Though Labour is wary of immigration policies that could be seen as lenient ahead of the election, it should not assume that it needs to play to voters’ most xenophobic tendencies. Polling consistently shows strong support for safe and legal routes for those fleeing war or persecution. Public approval remains strong even for programs that have resettled large numbers of asylum seekers, including the recent visa schemes that allowed 154,600 Ukrainians and 144,500 Hong Kongers to enter the country.

If Labour wins the next election, Starmer should adopt three policies to reinforce safe and legal pathways to the United Kingdom and address why asylum seekers are forced to reach the country.

First, the United Kingdom must commit to resettling more refugees, including via the UNHCR’s resettlement scheme. The Conservative government resettled 25,000 refugees through this program from 2015 to 2020 before abandoning it.

Labour should also fix the Conservatives’ failing Afghan resettlement schemes: the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) and the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP). Since they were launched in 2021, the programs have been too slow-moving to meet the United Kingdom’s moral obligation toward Afghans. Only 7,000 Afghans have been resettled out of the government’s target of 20,000, leaving thousands languishing in hiding from the Taliban.

Both ARAP and ACRS are poorly designed. Only 36 government staff handle ARAP, compared with 540 on the Homes for Ukraine visa scheme. Afghans must have already left Afghanistan to be eligible for ACRS, unlike Homes for Ukraine, which provides a pathway for entry for those still in Ukraine. Afghans applying under ACRS also are not guaranteed right to family reunion. These design flaws lead Afghans into the hands of smugglers: Afghans were the largest nationality taking small boats in the last quarter of 2022 (33 percent of arrivals) and the first quarter of 2023 (24 percent). By comparison, there are no reports of Ukrainians and Hongkongers arriving on small boats.

Labour’s second action should be to redress the United Kingdom’s restrictive family reunion policy. Under the current policy, spouses applying to join their partners with refugee status in Britain must have been living together for at least two years, and children with parents with refugee status must be under 18 and unmarried. Other family members cannot apply unless they can prove “exceptional circumstances,” such as meeting all the criteria of being unable to lead an independent life, having no other relatives to turn to for financial or emotional support, and being likely to become destitute if they live alone.

These policies are often futile against the intense pain of separation. By the British charity Care4Calais’s estimate, 50 percent of those who continue from a first safe country to the United Kingdom have family there. For those who meet the narrow official criteria, backlogs have resulted in thousands of family members resorting to irregular migration. Expanding the criteria for family reunion to all partners who can demonstrate a “genuine and subsisting” relationship, all children, and other dependents such as older parents would address a significant number of irregular crossings.

Finally, Labour should provide alternative routes for groups who are unlikely to have asylum applications approved—for instance, Albanian men, who had an 11 percent success rate in 2022, and Indian nationals, whose success rate was just 6 percent in 2021. Many of these individuals have pressing reasons for leaving home, but many of those reasons are economic, and so they are not eligible for pathways intended for those fleeing war or persecution.

To dissuade these demographics from resorting to smuggling, Starmer’s third policy intervention should tie smart immigration policy to chronic domestic labor shortages. Labor shortages have driven up inflation, which is currently higher in the United Kingdom than in any other G-7 nation. The most acute shortages are in the agricultural, construction, hospitality, and social care sectors. As these shortages threaten domestic supply, business leaders across all sectors have begged the government to address them. The government could meet demand by expanding its seasonal worker visa into a multi-year visa in sectors facing labor shortages, which Starmer could frame as a policy targeted at rejuvenating the country’s post-pandemic economy. This would ensure political buy-in and support Labour’s promises of delivering on economic growth.

Arrivals on small boats will only continue. For those who take this route, the right to seek asylum must be protected, in line with international law. But the next British government needs to focus on reducing the number of people forced to take the crossing. That will be the only way to address the moral panic that Britain has lost control of its borders—and avoid humanitarian catastrophe on its shores.