No right to remain

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 7th of May, 2024. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

First up on The World and Everything in It. The U.K.’s response to illegal immigration.

SOUND: [Doors slamming on vans]

Last week, the U.K. government said it rounded up a group who entered the country illegally. Their next stop? The Central African country of Rwanda.

EICHER: Britain’s Conservative government introduced the Rwanda asylum plan in 2022, but spent several years fighting legal challenges at home and in the European Court of Human Rights. Parliament eventually okayed the plan last month.

Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak:

RISHI SUNAK: If people come to our country illegally, but know that they won't be able to stay, they're much less likely to come.

MAST: It’s a sort of “Remain in Mexico” program, only it’s Rwanda. The plan is for asylum claims to be processed there with resettlement offered to the tens of thousands who make a *dangerous journey across the English Channel each year.

Critics of the plan say Rwanda is unsafe for refugees but the Rwandan government says it can protect them with help from the U.K.

EICHER: Joining us now to talk about the plan is Simon Hankinson. He served as a foreign service officer at the State Department, and now is a senior researcher on Border Security and Immigration at The Heritage Foundation.

MAST: Simon, good morning!

SIMON HANKINSON: Good to be with you.

MAST: Well, let’s start with this: why Rwanda?

HANKINSON: Well, you know, it doesn’t matter that it’s Rwanda, it could be, it could be anywhere. Australia did the same thing about 20 years ago, and they used the islands of Nauru and an island off Papua New Guinea, where they set up processing camps. The key thing here is to deprive illegal crossers of what they most want, which is the opportunity to disappear into the community, get a job, and send money home. Now, they don’t really care if their cases are going to be approved or not. Most of them know that they’re not actually going to qualify for asylum, but they’re looking for a job. So they figure as long as they can get in the pipeline, things will be so slow. The UK’s rate of processing asylum applicants is as abysmal as ours. There were like 100,000 illegal arrivals, as of like, this is about August of last year, of which 98% I think were still in the UK as of a couple months ago. So you know, they're backlogged just as we are in the U.S., where we’re talking about maybe almost 3 million backlogs in the asylum system and waiting times of five or ten or even more years.

MAST: Some say that this plan could violate international asylum law. The UN’s refugee agency and others say that when people claim asylum from political or religious persecution, they must be protected until their case can be heard. So by relocating asylum seekers, some of whom came from dangerous parts of Africa to a country that’s also in Africa, Britain may put vulnerable people back in harm’s way. What do you make of that argument?

HANKINSON: I’ve met officials from Rwanda in the last year, and what I know of the country is that ever since the, you know, the the awful genocide in the mid-90s, it is one of the more prosperous, stable countries in Africa. And if the government promises that they’re going to treat people with respect, I have no reason to not believe that. We’re not talking about the the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or, you know, a country in the Sahel that’s undergoing a coup and all kinds of militant activity. So there are absolutely some legitimate asylum seekers out there, and their cases should be heard, and they should receive protection, but they are drowned in the sheer volume of economic migrants. So that’s what the Rwanda plan is trying to weed out. And I think it would be very effective if they could get it going.

MAST: Simon, you mentioned Australia’s plan to do something similar. How did that work out in that instance?

HANKINSON: It was amazingly successful. You now have a majority of Australians on both political sides who support this program, because it works. People no longer drown at sea because they’re trying on leaky boats to make it to Australia, because they know that 100% of the time, if you arrive illegally by boat, you will not be given asylum in Australia. Period. In the beginning, it was a little hairy. They had a few hundred people in camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea. By the time they closed the last camp, they had three people in it. So the word got out, and in the final years of the camps, they had nobody attempt to cross into Australia, like zero, going down from like 50,000 a year. So it was highly effective for the Australians, and which is why they’ve kept it in reserve. They pay about $350,000 a year to the government, I think it’s in Nauru, to keep that camp on standby, just in case they need it. Because you need to have that that threat possible in order to discourage people from trying again.

MAST: So what do you think it would take for the U.S. to do something like what Australia and the U.K. are doing?

HANKINSON: Well, we had it. We did it under the the migrant protection protocols, also known as “Remain in Mexico,” where for a couple of years, it got off the ground and there was never mass scale, but what we did is we required people who wanted to claim asylum in the U.S. to wait out the process in Mexico. And what it did is it discouraged all the people who were simply economic migrants looking for a job, if they knew that they would have to wait in a camp. The majority of people just just left because they had no intention and they would tell reporters and anybody who asked, “Yeah, I’m not going to wait in the camp because I’ll probably never get asylum.” So it’s it was a tremendously effective disincentive program. And it worked. And as for the mass deportations, you know, there’s gonna be a lot of labels put on that and there’s gonna be an awful lot of scare-mongering. 

But just to give you a couple of figures, there are already 1.2 million people in the U.S. illegally here who judges have ruled after due process, that they should be deported. So they have a final removal order against them. There’s also 400,000 convicted criminal aliens with removal orders. So think about that. I mean, you know, maybe you can spin people up about mass deportations, but if you tell them that half a million people are here who’ve already committed serious crimes in our country, and have no right to remain, under what basis should they be allowed to remain? So you know, it’s a little difficult to gin up sympathy for people who’ve had every advantage to take the system all the way to conclusion. They’ve had their case heard over many years, but the decision was, “I’m sorry, you have to go home.” You could at least start with those people, and then work your way down the list.

MAST: Simon Hankinson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Thank you for your time!

HANKINSON: Happy to be with you.

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