Foreign Affairs
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,