Robert Jenrick is right: the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum is ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’. The former immigration minister, who resigned earlier this month, is not the first European politician to rubbish the treaty, which was unveiled on Wednesday with much fanfare. Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Rally in France, said that his party will ‘oppose with all our strength this mad project of organised submersion of Europe’.

The Pact has been years in the making and according to Brussels involved intense discussions between the 27 Member States. When Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced details of the deal, she boasted that it ‘means that Europeans will decide who comes to the EU and who can stay, not the smugglers. It means protecting those in need’.

The Italian government, who this year have seen over 150,000 migrants land on their shores – an increase of over 50,000 on 2022 – also expressed their satisfaction with the pact. Foreign minister Antonio Tajani said Europe and Italy could now ‘count on new rules to manage migratory flows and to combat human traffickers’.

Jenrick’s scepticism is not misplaced. This pact doesn’t defend Europe’s borders, it manages them, in typically tepid technocrat fashion.

But there has been no comment from Giorgia Meloni. Italy’s PM is reportedly recovering from illness but she may also not wish to associate herself with a treaty that will only encourage mass migration to Europe.

The problem is that the ‘new rules’ deal only with what in EU jargon is known as ‘internal migration’; the Pact does nothing to tackle the real challenge of ‘external migration’ – stopping the boats in the first place. As Jenrick puts it, because Brussels have ‘resigned themselves to mass illegal migration, the EU Commission is now fixated on treating the symptoms of the problem, not delivering the cure.’

The Pact is comprised of five interlinked pieces of legislation that define how the EU will receive, manage and disperse the irregular arrival of migrants. Among the measures will be faster vetting of irregular arrivals, the establishment of border detention centres and swifter deportation for those whose requests are rejected.

Migrants who are accepted will be dispersed across the other Member States, contingent on the size of their population and economic strength. Countries can refuse to accept migrants and instead contribute to an EU fund that will pay for border fences and surveillance technology.

Once a migrant sets foot on Europe the chances of them being deported are slim; either human rights groups, led by the European Court of Human Rights, will do their best to ensure they are not removed, or the country of origin in question will refuse to accept their nationals. This is frequently the case with Algerians ordered out of France.

The Pact won’t make a blind bit of difference to the people smugglers, who will keep loading people into unseaworthy boats in return for a few thousand pounds each. But news of the Pact, and of France’s new immigration bill, will have quickly spread on the social media networks and there will be a rush to reach Europe before the tighter legislation comes into force.

The EU believes it can stop the boats by doing deals with countries such as Libya, Tunisia and Turkey. But none of these deals have done much to stem the flow of migrants into Europe. This is no surprise to Jenrick, who described the regimes in some of these countries as ‘unreliable partners’.

Many migrants in 2024 will come from central Africa, particularly the Sahel, where Russia has in recent years replaced France as the region’s preferred partner. Earlier this month, Niger terminated two EU security and defence missions in the country, and on the same day it announced greater military cooperation with Russia.

Niger was in the early years of this century a popular route for African migrants seeking a new life in Europe. The EU signed a deal with the country in 2015 that helped significantly reduced the number of people crossing Niger en route to the North African coast. Following the summer coup in Niger, that deal is no more.

The EU is seriously mistaken if it thinks this Pact will resolve the migrant crisis. In truth, the centrists in Brussels probably know it won’t but there are European elections next June and they hope the publicity given to the pact will deter voters from swinging right. Roberta Metsola, president of the EU parliament, called the Pact ‘a huge success for the constructive pro-European centre ahead of the start of an election year in Europe’. But Jenrick’s scepticism is not misplaced. This pact doesn’t defend Europe’s borders, it manages them, in typically tepid technocrat fashion.

As Jenrick says, one of the rare successes in fighting illegal immigration was Greece’s controversial turn-backs of migrant boats at sea. Fabrice Leggeri, the then head of Frontex, the EU border agency, was pressured into resigning following the fallout from that controversy. Leggeri did so without regret, stating in his letter of resignation that his mandate ‘has silently but effectively been changed’ – by which he probably meant that his agency was no longer expected to protect Europe’s borders but to protect the rights of those arriving. This, in essence, is what the new pact does.