Send them to Rwanda
Why the UK's 'migration partnership' Stinks
George Orwell described the political writing and speechifying of his era as ‘largely the defence of the indefensible’ characterised by a combination of ‘ euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness’ in order to conceal ‘a gap between one's real and one's declared aims.’
The writer who introduced the concept of doublespeak into the English language would not have been surprised by the UK’s new ‘Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership’, better known as the Rwanda asylum plan, which Boris Johnson and Priti Patel introduced to their punchdrunk country last week.
It’s no mean feat to formulate a policy which has been criticised by UNCHR, the Church of England, Human Rights Watch, virtually every human rights and refugee organisation in the country, and even the Home Office itself, but this is what Johnson and Patel have achieved in their announcement that asylum seekers crossing the English Channel will be flown 4,000 miles to Rwanda.
UNHCR accused the UK of ‘shifting…its responsibilities and obligations under international human rights and refugee law onto a country which is already taking great asylum responsibilities.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury denounced the ‘sub-contracting out our responsibilities, even to a country that seeks to do well, like Rwanda’ as ‘ the opposite of the nature of God,’ which as close as you can get to calling a policy satanic without actually saying so.
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants claimed that ‘These unspeakably cruel plans play fast and loose with the lives of refugees and will put people in danger.’ Even Theresa ‘hostile environment’ May rejected the Rwanda plans ‘on the grounds of legality, practicality and efficacy’.
All these criticisms have been directed at the policy which the UK government’s website claims will ‘contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated and unlawful cross border migration by establishing a bilateral asylum partnership in which Rwanda commits to receive asylum seekers from the United Kingdom, to consider their claims for asylum.’
Under the terms of the agreement, the Rwanda government will receive an initial down payment of £120 million in a five-year initial period. This is good business for them, less so for the asylum seekers sent from the UK who will be able to ‘access their rights under international law through the Rwanda domestic asylum system’ and settle in Rwanda if their claims are recognised.
The agreement insists that ‘Rwanda has willingly been hosting and giving shelter to hundreds of thousands of refugees, offering adequate systems of refugee protection, consistent with the principles of international solidarity that underpin the international refugee protection system.’
It also states that 'the United Kingdom and Rwanda will work together ‘to promote a new fair and humane asylum system, deter illegal migration and create safe and legal routes for those fleeing persecution.’
Here we enter the world that Orwell described, in which political language conceals the deeper meaning of what it purports to describe. It should be obvious that you don’t uphold the principles of international solidarity by sending asylum seekers who have come to your country to seek refuge in another country that they haven’t chosen to go to.
That is neither ‘fair’ nor ‘humane’. If the UK seriously wanted to create ‘safe and legal routes’ for those fleeing persecution, it could have done that without sending asylum seekers to Rwanda.
The Orwellian drift reaches a rhetorical apotheosis with the barely comprehensible claim that the Rwanda policy will ‘ enhance the international protection of refugees by promoting responsibility sharing by ensuring that refugees are not subject to penalties on account of their illegal entry or presence.’
These statements might mean something in isolation, but they can’t all be true at the same time. If you are trying to ‘deter illegal migration’ by sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, then it must be because you consider Rwanda to be a less desirable destination than the UK.
So being sent to Rwanda can’t be something that simultaneously ‘deters’ asylum seekers and also ‘enhances’ their international protection.
If one of the richest countries in the world is forcing asylum seekers to seek asylum in one of the poorest countries in the world, then this not so much an expression of ‘international solidarity’ as a selfish, mean-spirited and cruel abrogation of the UK’s responsibilities under international law.
None of this has prevented the architects of the Rwanda policy from using language to resolve or blur these contradictions in precisely the way that Orwell described.
In his Dover speech announcing the policy, Boris Johnson hailed the UK’s ‘proud history of welcoming people from overseas’ before going on to explain why his government intends to pack thousands of asylum seekers off to Rwanda.
Johnson hailed a ‘world-leading asylum offer’ that was ‘ driven by our shared humanitarian impulse and made possible by Brexit freedoms’ which would ‘provide safe and legal routes for asylum, while disrupting the business model of the gangs, because it means that economic migrants taking advantage of the asylum system will not get to stay in the UK.’
The reference to our ‘Brexit freedoms’ was aimed at a very particular British voter, that always regards the UK as a ‘soft touch’ for refugees, and sees most refugees as ‘bogus’, especially when they are people of colour. Thus Johnson insisted that
Our compassion may be infinite, but our capacity to help people is not…We can’t ask the British taxpayer to write a blank cheque to cover the costs of anyone who might want to come and live here. Uncontrolled immigration creates unmanageable demands on our NHS and our welfare state, it overstretches our local schools, our housing and public transport, and creates unsustainable pressure to build on precious green spaces.
‘Controlling our borders’
These dog trumpet calls for ‘full sovereignty over our borders’ and appeals to ‘our’ beleaguered services owe more to Goebbels than they do to Orwell, but Johnson’s references to ‘compassion’ and humanitarianism were intended to make a policy that is distinctly punitive and unhumanitarian look as if it was dreamed up by Mother Theresa and Santa Claus.
As all British prime minister do, Johnson attacked the ‘vile people smugglers (who) are abusing the vulnerable and turning the Channel into a watery graveyard’.
He described the Rwanda policy as part a broader attempt to ‘break the business model of people smuggling gangs, step-up our operations in the Channel, bring more criminals to justice and end this barbaric trade in human misery.’
The UK is by no means the only government to resort to pseudo-humanitarian and moralistic language when describing punitive policies towards refugees. The United States, the European Union, and most European governments have all done the same thing.
All of them have implemented ‘deterrent’ policies at various times that have made it more dangerous for refugees to cross their borders, while simultaneously insisting that these policies are aimed not at refugees but at the smugglers who facilitate their journeys.
All of them claim to want to ‘save lives’ even as they harden the bureaucratic and physical obstacles which make it more likely that refugees and migrants will suffer and die trying to get through them. All of them talk of ‘controlling’ and ‘managing’ their borders in response to catastrophic crises that cannot be controlled or managed in the way they pretend.
Few politicians ever openly reject the universal right to refugee protection that they observe in principle, or admit that they regard certain categories of refugees as less deserving than others.
Both left-of-centre and rightwing governments have engaged repeatedly in performative acts of ‘toughness’ that are aimed at convincing domestic audiences that ‘something is being done’ about ‘illegal’ immigration while also insisting these efforts are designed to help refugees themselves.
The UK has been in this game a long time, but the Rwanda partnership represents a new low in our national descent. It’s not just the cruelty and unworkability of the policy itself, which has already been demonstrated in Israel’s semi-secret ‘voluntary’ scheme, introduced by Netanyahu in 2015, to transfer asylum seekers to Rwanda and Uganda.
Before Israel abandoned this policy in 2018, thousands of mostly Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers had been sent to Rwanda and Uganda, few of whom stayed in these countries. In 2018, researchers from Oxford University’s Law Faculty interviewed 14 Eritreans who left Israel and later returned to Europe.
They found that these migrants had never been given the opportunity to apply for asylum in Rwanda, that their lack of ID had left them vulnerable to robbery and extortion, leading them to make new migratory journeys across the Sahara and the Mediterranean.
So much for attacking the ‘vile’ business model or ‘enhancing’ the protection of refugees. As a deterrent, the Israeli policy failed to work even in its own terms. Of the more than 4,000 migrants the Israeli government sent to Rwanda and Uganda from 2105-2018, Ha’aretz newspaper found that nearly all of them had left by 2018.
The UK government must be aware of these precedents, just as it must know of the legacy of death, suicide and maltreatment on Manus and Nauru that was part of Australia’s similar ‘Pacific Solution’ refugee off-shoring.
In July last year the UK government itself criticised Rwanda last July for its treatment of refugees from neighbouring countries, and for rejecting its recommendation to ‘conduct transparent, credible and independent investigations into allegations of human rights violations including deaths in custody and torture’.’
Only nine months later, Johnson insists that ‘Rwanda is one of the safest countries in the world, globally recognised for its record on welcoming and integrating migrants’ and that sending migrants there is the ‘morally right thing to do’. Quite the turnaround for Rwanda, though we don’t know what its government has done to deserve it.
The reality, as always, is bleaker and harsher, according to a government source who told the Telegraph what will happen to migrants who cross the Channel in the coming months:
You are going to be met by the Army. They will drive you to the airport and send you straight to Rwanda. That is where you are going to end up in the hope that would be enough to deter migrants. That is why the military comes in, so you don’t have battles on the quayside.
These is not much that is moral or humanitarian about any of this. But the government has nevertheless roused its legions to defend the policy, whether it’s the Daily Mail or the Ipswich MP Tom Hunt, who tweeted:
Hunt may not be the sharpest instrument in the Tory box, but the tweet and the headline that accompanies it reveal more about the political context of the Rwanda policy than the policy itself. Some of Johnson and Patel’s critics have described the policy as a ‘dead cat’ to distract from Partygate, but policies like this can’t simply be pulled out of a hat to suit any given moment.
It seems more likely that the timetable was already established to suit a policy intended to appeal to the basest instincts of the Tory Party and the British electorate, and reinforce Johnson’s appeal as a prime minister who is as ‘tough’ on illegal immigration, as he is dishonest and useless on almost everything else.
Once again, his government is not the first government to do this, but Johnson is operating in the new terrain of culture war, in which he can portray himself as the populist defender of the common man against ‘lefty’ or ‘politically-motivated’ lawyers, the Church of England, the House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights, all of whom are facilitating the immigrant hordes.
To some extent its the old Brexit war in a new disguise. And this is why an upwardly-mobile buffoon like Tom Hunt responded to Archbishop Welby’s criticisms of the Rwanda policy with the following tweet:
Johnson also criticised the Church, adding another institution to the long list of targets that the Tory Party once supposedly supported, but which the new GOP-style Johnson version no longer has any use for.
It’s here, in this battle, that the Rwanda policy has political traction, even if it is very unlikely to produce a positive result on its own terms, let alone for the men and women on the receiving end of it.
In the months to come, the government will fight battle after battle in order to push this policy through, and it will use every battle to hold onto its core vote and its more marginal ‘Red Wall’ seats.
In doing so it will attempt to toxify British society even more than it has already, and use immigration as a political battering ram, just as Johnson did during the Brexit referendum.
These efforts may not succeed. It’s up to us to those of who believe in a different vision of Britain to this Poundland dystopia to ensure that they don’t, and prove that we aren’t as bad as the government clearly thinks we are.
And we could start by saying no to this travesty of a policy that, like Johnson himself, perverts the meaning of words and lies to us even as it breathes.
I really am sick of hearing the endlessly repeated lie about our ‘proud history of welcoming people from overseas,' when the opposite is true. Like the equally endless tropes about how "Britain leads the world" (supposedly) in absolutely everything, it is just not true - yet Johnson and his speak-your-weight ministers keep parroting it.