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Shabana Mahmood’s Desperate UK Immigration Gambit
Foreign Affairs
Shabana Mahmood’s Desperate UK Immigration Gambit
Labour’s leftist pieties are finally buckling under the weight of public opinion on mass migration.
Britain’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, may seem like the unlikely face for a harsh crackdown on migration. She is herself a second-generation migrant—a Muslim of Pakistani descent. She once called for a general amnesty for all illegal migrants working in Britain. Yet last week, she unveiled a package of measures she described—quite reasonably—as the “most substantial reform to the UK’s asylum system in a generation.” Her critics on the left immediately accused her of channeling Donald Trump, Tommy Robinson, and even Adolf Hitler.
Mahmood deserves credit for recognizing two things. First, that the UK’s asylum system—supposedly designed to help those fleeing war and persecution—has simply become a funnel for illegal immigration, facilitating the mass arrival of small boats over the English Channel. This is a system that is so dysfunctional as to be actively dangerous, failing to keep out serious criminals, let alone sort the genuinely deserving from those gaming the system for access to the labor market. Second, that the British public will not put up with this any longer. From the multibillion-pound cost to the taxpayer of housing thousands of arrivals to the now frequent, highly publicized attacks by asylum seekers on members of the public, the consequences of allowing unchecked illegal migration have pushed the British people to breaking point.
Illegal immigration has led to mass protests outside asylum hotels. It has led to national flags (both the St. George’s Cross of England and the Union Flag of the United Kingdom) springing up in towns, cities, and villages across the country. It is an issue no political party intent on its own survival can afford to ignore.
Mahmood’s plans aim to reduce the pull factors drawing illegal migrants to Britain. These include tightening the criteria for gaining asylum, reducing the number of appeals for failed asylum claims, making refugee status temporary rather than permanent, threatening visa bans on countries that refuse to repatriate their own citizens, and forcing asylum seekers to pay for the cost of processing their claims and housing them.
A cynic might say that Mahmood and the Labour government have simply been panicked by the polls. If an election were held tomorrow, Keir Starmer’s party would face a total electoral wipeout. The prime minister’s personal approval ratings are even lower than disgraced Prince Andrew’s. And the failure to get a grip on migration—consistently shown in polls to be the number one issue facing the country—is one of the major factors behind Labour’s woes. (One dimwitted Labour MP accused the home secretary of trying to “appease” the voters with her hardline messaging, as if fulfilling the electorate’s demands were not the very purpose of democracy.)
Yet there is every reason to believe Mahmood is sincere in her desire to get a grip on this issue. She has argued, convincingly, that the broken asylum system is driving racial division, and restoring control over the borders is not capitulating to bigotry, but necessary to keep it in check. “The pace and scale of change has destabilized communities,” she says. This rebounds against all people of color, who are suddenly made to feel like they don’t belong, that their place in Britain is somehow illegitimate.
Mahmood has been on a journey towards a faction within the British Labour Party known as “Blue Labour” (blue being the color of the UK Conservative Party). This is a faction that mixes social conservatism and patriotism with a more socialistic or social-democratic view of economics. Its enemies are the woke left and the libertarian right. It has no truck with trans rights or no-borders utopianism.
What Mahmood has left unsaid—even if some of her reforms undoubtedly touch on this—is that the public are furious about the two-tier treatment towards new migrants. There is a widespread sense that the welfare of asylum seekers is prioritized over that of British citizens. Indeed, this was even made explicit in a recent court case over a now notorious asylum hotel in Epping, Essex, on the outskirts of London. After an Ethiopian residing in the hotel, who had arrived on a small boat just days before, sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and an adult woman who tried to rescue her, months of protests ensued locally. When the local authorities tried to shut the hotel down, Mahmood’s predecessor, Yvette Cooper, fought back. In court, Home Office lawyers argued that the British state’s legal duty to prevent asylum seekers becoming destitute trumped any and all concerns voiced by the Epping residents.
There is also widespread anger that the criteria for gaining asylum are overly generous and, in any case, rejection rarely leads to enforced removals. Migrants—including criminals slated for deportation—have gained asylum on the most spurious and illogical grounds imaginable. An Afghan flasher successfully argued that his “sexually disinhibited behaviour” would put him at risk in his own country. An Albanian gangster avoided deportation because his son would not like the taste of “foreign chicken nuggets.” Being transgender, being an alcoholic, and being a paedophile have all in recent years been successfully cited as reasons for bestowing refugee status on illegal migrants.
Not that it matters especially whether asylum is granted or not. Migrants are rarely removed from the UK, even when their claims are rejected in court, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Emad al-Swealmeen, a Jordanian posing as a Syrian, was twice denied asylum but managed to remain in the UK long enough to try to blow up the maternity ward at Liverpool Women’s Hospital in a (mercifully unsuccessful) suicide bombing. The Afghan illegal immigrant Abdul Ezedi was granted asylum on his third attempt, even after racking up several sexual assault convictions. He then went on to throw a corrosive substance on a female refugee and her children before killing himself in London’s River Thames. Seemingly every week brings a new horror story with a small-boat migrant or asylum seeker at the centre: a child raped in Nuneaton, Warwickshire; a restaurant owner stabbed to death in a bank in Derby in the East Midlands; a woman who worked in an asylum hotel, stalked and murdered by a Sudanese resident. The Home Office’s policy of dispersing migrant accommodation around the country means that the kind of violent depravity that might once have been limited to criminal gangs in big cities is no longer a rare sight in deep England.
So can Mahmood stop the boats and restore Britain’s sovereignty over its borders? There is one main reason to be doubtful: Her party’s (and her leader’s) ironclad commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights, the source of many of the most absurd asylum decisions, is likely to blunt the impact of any reforms.
Nevertheless, it is telling—and not before time—that the British government feels it can no longer duck the issue of mass illegal migration and hide behind the vapid virtue-signalling of the left, who insist the “real” problem is the super-rich on their yachts (who are, in any case, mainly leaving the UK), rather than unchecked arrivals on small boats. Migration is the single largest issue in the UK because it is where the voters most keenly feel their powerlessness. Their views and life experiences cannot be reconciled with the “no borders” pronouncements of their supposed betters. Shabana Mahmood’s migration controls may be too late to save this struggling Labour government, but they may help the voters feel they have a voice in British politics once again.
The post Shabana Mahmood’s Desperate UK Immigration Gambit appeared first on The American Conservative.
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