Guy Dampier
Mass deportations. That is what Nigel Farage has promised, taking to the stage to announce his new plan next to a huge prop of an airport departures board showing deportation flights to Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iran among others. Operation Restoring Justice, as Reform UK are calling this, is intended to remove hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants.
As the accompanying handout says, the number of those with no lawful right to remain here ‘almost certainly stands above 1,000,000’. Of course, nobody quite knows because for a long time the Home Office has refused to look into it. The reputable Migration Observatory has collated the various attempts to estimate the number, most of which agree that by 2017 there were between 600,000-750,000 illegal immigrants. During the eight years since, this must have breached 1 million. The true number may be much higher.
The handout sets out the structure of a five-year emergency programme. At its core would be a series of major legislative changes, with Reform leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act and passing a new Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill. The Bill itself would seek to disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture and the Council of Europe’s Anti-Trafficking Convention for a period of five years. Questioned about the feasibility of this, Farage said that leaving the ECHR would necessitate a renegotiation of the Belfast Agreement, but that this was possible, as argued in a recent Prosperity Institute paper co-authored by Suella Braverman and myself.
The Bill would also create new detention powers, which would not be constrained by the Hardial Singh principles. These refer to a case which ruled that the Home Office could only detain somebody if they were likely to be deported soon. In practice, due to the lengthy legal and appeal process, this has often allowed illegal immigrants to get bail and then disappear, frustrating efforts at deportation.
The Home Secretary would be put under a legal obligation to remove illegal immigrants. Any person who came to Britain illegally would automatically be made ineligible for asylum. As their cases could not be considered, this would mean that they would not be able to seek remedy in the immigration tribunals or other courts, allowing for their speedy deportation. Those who re-enter Britain after deportation would be guilty of a criminal offence, as would those who deliberately destroy their identity documents, which most small boat migrants do. These crimes would be punished by up to 5 years in prison.
Anybody deported as an illegal immigrant would be banned from re-entering Britain for life. This has been a crucial part of the US plan to increase voluntary deportations, with people who admit they are there illegally being assisted back to their home country. In return, they have the possibility to apply to come to America as a legal immigrant. As in Reform’s plan, those who are involuntarily deported, however, are permanently barred from applying.
All this would be managed by a new UK Deportation Command, which would include an Illegal Migrant Identification Centre. Reform says this will utilise ‘cutting-edge data fusion’, possibly modelled on plans in the US to use the tech company Palantir to identify illegal immigrants through data. This new Centre would share data automatically between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and the Police. Although the Civil Service has a history of failure over large database projects, there is no reason why this should not be possible, and this sort of data-sharing should already exist.
Illegal immigrants who are identified would then be sent to secure immigration removal centres. Reform plan to create detention capacity for up to 24,000 people within 18 months, including through modular accommodation and pre-fabricated rooms. Nightingale hospitals were mentioned in the press conference and Zia Yusuf pointed out that the United States was able to build 3,000 beds for detention purposes in Florida in only eight days. At that rate, over 24,000 beds could be available in slightly over two months.
As a carrot, there would be a six-month window for illegal immigrants to apply for assisted voluntary return, with a financial incentive to self deport, and an app to facilitate this. This obviously draws on the CBP Home app in the US, which already does this. After this six-month grace period, Reform say they would begin large-scale raids. Although this window is likely necessary to develop the infrastructure and recruit the manpower needed for such raids, this is a short grace period: in the US there is no time limit.
Up to five deportation flights would take off every single day, with a spare RAF Voyager plane made constantly available, in case a commercial charter flight breaks down. The Foreign Office would be tasked with securing return agreements with the main illegal migrant source countries, as their highest priority. Those countries that cooperate would get aid, while those which refused would face a ban on new visas or even sanctions. To get around those countries who continue to refuse, deals would be negotiated with third-party countries so that illegal immigrants could be sent there. As a final fallback, British Overseas Territories, such as Ascension Island, would be used.
Reform claim their plan would cost around £10 billion over five years, which they argue will be a saving, considering that the current cost of asylum is around £7 billion a year. What was most noticeable from the questions afterwards is how the journalists barely queried the idea of mass deportations. Even the Guardian was mostly critical of the proposed costs.
The mood in Britain has changed so sharply in the last few years that Labour’s response has been to Tweet about their own efforts to deport illegals, rather than criticise the necessity of mass deportations. The political class are clambering to catch up with a public opinion – indeed, even Nigel Farage has been criticised in recent months for not embracing this stance earlier on. It’s now clear that securing Britain’s border and removing those with no right to be here is now the centre-ground of British politics.
Source: https://capx.co/welcome-to-the-age-of-mass-deportations
