According to expert opinion, Rishi Sunak’s plan to deport incoming migrants to Rwanda in exchange for international payment may not work as well as he intends.
The policy was intended by Sunak to act more as a deterrent against migrants, rather than a measure to contain and house migrants.
With the news that despite opposition from Members of Parliament within his own party, the Safety of Rwanda bill managed to pass through the House of Commons, the bill seems more likely than ever to be put into legislation.
We spoke to Dr Peter William Walsh, a Senior Researcher at The Migration Observatory and a Departmental Lecturer in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford about the knock-on effects of what this plan could look like.
He stated that the department “just produced a report on this, it was an update of a QnA, the available evidence suggests that current policies don’t have a big impact on asylum applications, people generally aren’t aware of policy changes.”
He stated that other factors are “more likely to influence them, such as conflict or their choice of country.”
He theorised that there are two main drivers of this, the presence of family and whether or not they speak the language.
Though he admitted that there is one caveat to this, which is that “the evidence on this comes from less radical countries than Rwanda.”
We asked him if the plan did pass how prepared would Rwanda be, in light of the Supreme Court denying Rwanda was a safe enough country to send asylum seekers to due to the migrants facing ill-treatement, as the bill lacked insufficient guarantees against refoulement, also known as the forcible return of refugees to a country where they may be liable to persecution.
“The success will depend on point how many small boats are actually sent, Rwanda’s capacity and accommodation is in the low hundreds, which they say they can scale up. The likelihood is that only a few hundred migrants could be sent in per year, which is an extremely small share.”
The UK has seen a net migration of 745,000 in 2022, an increase of 184,000 migrants before the pandemic, this does not show signs of slowing either, with statistics being “unusually high” according to the Migration Observatory.
He went on to say that “asylum claims would be more involved more with the Rwanda than the UK, as it is on their land” this means that if the Supreme Courts were able to find a way to prevent the policy from coming into effect after it had already started “the route might be made that much longer for migrants. People are extremely divided, there’s no clear majority on this issue.”
The bill was passed through the House of Commons despite talks of large-scale opposition from members across both benches.The bill, which exists to prevent legal challenges against sending those seeking asylum to Rwanda, passed by 320 votes against 276.
The rebels “said the law doesn’t go far enough, leaves possibilities of human rights violations, and challenges in courts. They could rule on the scheme as a whole, and if they find it unlawful, all asylum seekers would have to be brought back from Rwanda.”
With this in mind, what will the knock on effects of the Safety of Rwanda bill be?
Will we see a large scale crisis develop from this if the flow of migrants does not slow, due to the insufficient housing supplied by the Rwandan government?
Earlier this week, former immigration minister Robert Jenrick rebelled, bringing an amendment to the Safety of Rwanda Bill, that was not supported by Prime-Minister Rishi Sunak, nor the majority Conservative party members.
There were threats of rebellion from many members of the house, with some, like Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith stepping down to vote for amendments to the bill.
In their joint resignation letter, they stated “whilst our main wish is to strengthen the legislation, this means that in order to vote for amendments we will therefore need to offer you our resignations from our roles”.
In a statement, the government told the public they aimed to get planes off the ground by spring this year, with the current biggest opposition being the House of Lords.
Since the bill was able to bypass the second reading, the stage where debate may commence, and a bill is most likely to fail.
Afterwards, voting on whether the bill should continue as writeen occurres in it’s third reading, where any amendments to the bill can be suggested and voted on.
This was where the original Rwanda bill halted, due to the Supreme Court’s November ruling that the landlocked African republic was not safe as a country for ayslum seekers.
This kickstarted the need for the Prime-Minister’s Safety of Rwanda bill, which, if it did not pass, meant that Sunak’s flagship Rwanda policy would not be able to go ahead.
While Sunak intended for his Safety bill to pass without amendment, one was drafted by former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, though the amendment was rejected with a large majority of 536 to 65 votes.
If the bill did not survive the third reading, it would have dealt a major political blow to Sunak, who’s Rwanda bill was considered his flagship policy.
With £140 million having already been spent on the scheme, Sunak told Parliament in November that he was ready to finalise a formal treaty with Rwanda and would be “prepared to revisit our domestic legal frameworks” in a bid to revive the plan.
Now, it has come to reality, with only the House of Lords remaining to deny the passage of the bill.
With only 11 Memebrs of Parliament opposing the bill, some who voted along party lines despite voicing concerns about the legitimacy of the policy and its longevity, did not rebel so as to give an impression of stability and shore up the image of the Conservative government ahead of the 2024 general election. With the bill facing stiff opposition ahead of the House of Lords, whether we see the bill come into law, remains to be seen