In a previous Spectator article, Alasdair Palmer presented a solution to the UK’s illegal migration problem. He correctly pointed out that all previous attempts to reduce the number of people arriving illegally had been unsuccessful and, after carefully explaining why they had failed, he suggested Home Office officials should ‘identify illegal migrants and then persuade them to go home’.
Alas, Alasdair’s plan was not well received by some Speccie readers, who took to the online comments section to pour scorn on the general idea.
One reader argued that the Royal Navy would be best employed ‘if they were sinking the boats and leaving their passengers to flap a bit in the water before taking any survivors back to France and dumping them on the beach’. Another saw this as a ‘potential for a TV game show’ and that it ‘could increase uptake of the licence fee’. Many other comments were less restrained.
It is 70 years since the United Nations adopted a Convention to deal with the refugees who were stateless or unable to return to their former countries following the chaos of the second world war. The Convention became law when there were fewer than a million refugees. There are now 100 million people displaced globally of whom 26 million have already been classified as refugees.
For the past two decades, debate has raged within the refugee industry about the future of the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees. In 2005, a major conference in the UK accurately outlined the problems and noted that:
‘In 1951, no one anticipated that the process of refugee determination would become institutionalised. It was not foreseen that there would be a requirement of due process by virtue of which the claimant would have a right, expectation, or entitlement to advice and legal representation … The drafters of the 1951 Convention did not consider that decision-making would be anything but discretionary by an enlightened administration but without their being hampered by the requirements of due process as we understand them.’
Refugee law has developed throughout the Western world to such an extent that billions are spent processing refugee applications in wealthy nations instead of sending the money to the UNHCR to fund refugee camps. For Australia, the obscene amount of money spent in trying to remove the Biloela-four, let alone the 30-something million spent on Christmas Island processing, is proof the system is beyond repair.
The principal beneficiaries of current international refugee administration are immigration lawyers, migration agents, and – above all – people smugglers. This unholy triumvirate benefits a tiny portion of the millions of refugees around the globe. They benefit those with sufficient money to be able to get to the west while the tens of millions of real refugees languish in refugee camps with no hope of ever being offered asylum.
‘We declare that from now on, no refugees will be accepted from any country we deem beforehand to have reasonable internal procedures for guaranteeing safety and human rights. Don’t even bother trying to come.’
Bolt’s solution met the same fate as the hundreds of other suggestions about reforming the UN Convention. It went nowhere. This is partly because bureaucrats are better at managing problems than solving them. Adding to the difficulty, the politics of this problem have become so toxic that politicians lack the courage to tackle it.
There is only one workable solution.
In Australia, along with most of the other rich nations accepting refugees, lawyers have steadily expanded the criteria which needs to be addressed when considering whether someone is entitled to a Protection Visa. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is only one of several legal instruments used to enable kids to remain in Australia. If they apply for Protection Visas and are rejected at the first stage, there are other mechanisms for appeal in a process that takes years. Even if the government can return an unsuccessful refugee applicant to their country of origin, the cost of the legal processes and flight arrangements usually run into the hundreds of thousands for each returnee.
The solution is to accept anyone who wants to arrive in the West and claim the right to live here as a refugee. They can then be sent immediately to the nearest UN-administered refugee processing camp to await their turn for resettlement. The money that is saved in this manner can then be given to the UN to fund the refugee camps. This will temporarily increase the pressure on already overcrowded refugee camps, but it will also reduce the number of people trying to get into Europe and the Anglosphere. A properly administered process will mean that the young men trying to get into first-world nations will be middle-aged by the time they get a chance in the queue and this must reduce the number of ‘chancers’ trying to give it a go.
Throughout the main destinations for the refugees, billions of dollars can be saved and then given to the UNHCR, or to a body set up by the West to administer this process. Above all, it gets this population out of the hands of people who make a living out of getting refugees into first-world nations and journalists looking for a cheap human interest story.
The world has to accept that a system devised 70 years ago to process less than one million refugees is no longer viable today. Modern communication systems – including air travel, television, mobile phones, and the internet – mean we live in a world that is connected in a way that the creators of the 1951 Convention could never have envisaged.
That radical change is needed is undeniable. The problem is that it is in the interests of most UN members to preserve the status quo. In particular China, and Russia are not overburdened by floods of refugees and watch, with amusement, the problems emerging in the West. It is pointless assuming they will listen to reasoned arguments.
Eventually, if a global agreement cannot be reached, then the Anglosphere and Europe must withdraw from the UN Convention. The Australian model of offshore detention is the only one that has worked so far and the UK’s attempt to replicate it in Zambia is recognition of the success of this approach.
It is the way of the future.
