The Labour government has announced that asylum seekers will be forced to repay up to £10,000 of their hotel, accommodation and benefit costs before being allowed to settle permanently in Britain.
This is not the tough policy that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood would like to think it is. In reality, it is yet another example of this government tinkering around the edges while refusing to confront the real crisis.
Mahmood says that immigrants must “repay the generosity of the British people”. But the British people did not ask for their generosity to be extended in the first place. They did not vote for billions of pounds to be spent housing asylum seekers in hotels - in fact, they have repeatedly voted in favour of reducing immigration and tightening the borders.
Even the repayment scheme itself looks weak. The money is expected to be recovered in a similar way to student loans, with immigrants paying back a portion once they are earning above a certain threshold. But if many refugees are not working or are earning very little, how much of this money will actually be recovered? The Migration Observatory has warned that the impact on public finances is likely to be “relatively small”.
The scale of the problem is so much bigger. The asylum accommodation bill has reached billions of pounds by now. Hotels alone can cost more than £50,000 per asylum seeker per year. The total bill last year for accommodating and supporting the 107,000 asylum seekers was £4 billion. Tens of thousands of people are housed at public expense, while ordinary British taxpayers struggle with rising rents, mortgages and bills.
The plan is that migrants whose asylum claims are rejected and who are removed from Britain will be prevented from returning unless they pay their debt. But this assumes that the British state is capable of deporting people in the first place. We know that deportations are routinely delayed or blocked by human-rights claims and legal challenges. Even when removals do happen, they are often complicated, slow and expensive - almost £50,000 per person.
Clearly, this new policy will do nothing to stop the boats, or even disincentivise people from attempting to enter the UK illegally. It certainly does not deal with the core problem - that rejected asylum seekers are able to essentially squat and remain in this country with either few, if any, consequences.
Reform UK is the only party that understands what has to be done to actually stop this chaos. This means ending the legal merry-go-round that allows illegal immigrants and rejected asylum seekers to remain in the UK through repeated human-rights and modern-slavery claims and appeals. A Reform UK government would leave the European Convention on Human Rights, scrap the Human Rights Acts, establish a dedicated Deportation Command and detain and deport those with no right to be here. The British taxpayer deserves better than to be stuck footing the bill for this broken system.
This is not the tough policy that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood would like to think it is. In reality, it is yet another example of this government tinkering around the edges while refusing to confront the real crisis.
Mahmood says that immigrants must “repay the generosity of the British people”. But the British people did not ask for their generosity to be extended in the first place. They did not vote for billions of pounds to be spent housing asylum seekers in hotels - in fact, they have repeatedly voted in favour of reducing immigration and tightening the borders.
Even the repayment scheme itself looks weak. The money is expected to be recovered in a similar way to student loans, with immigrants paying back a portion once they are earning above a certain threshold. But if many refugees are not working or are earning very little, how much of this money will actually be recovered? The Migration Observatory has warned that the impact on public finances is likely to be “relatively small”.
The scale of the problem is so much bigger. The asylum accommodation bill has reached billions of pounds by now. Hotels alone can cost more than £50,000 per asylum seeker per year. The total bill last year for accommodating and supporting the 107,000 asylum seekers was £4 billion. Tens of thousands of people are housed at public expense, while ordinary British taxpayers struggle with rising rents, mortgages and bills.
The plan is that migrants whose asylum claims are rejected and who are removed from Britain will be prevented from returning unless they pay their debt. But this assumes that the British state is capable of deporting people in the first place. We know that deportations are routinely delayed or blocked by human-rights claims and legal challenges. Even when removals do happen, they are often complicated, slow and expensive - almost £50,000 per person.
Clearly, this new policy will do nothing to stop the boats, or even disincentivise people from attempting to enter the UK illegally. It certainly does not deal with the core problem - that rejected asylum seekers are able to essentially squat and remain in this country with either few, if any, consequences.
Reform UK is the only party that understands what has to be done to actually stop this chaos. This means ending the legal merry-go-round that allows illegal immigrants and rejected asylum seekers to remain in the UK through repeated human-rights and modern-slavery claims and appeals. A Reform UK government would leave the European Convention on Human Rights, scrap the Human Rights Acts, establish a dedicated Deportation Command and detain and deport those with no right to be here. The British taxpayer deserves better than to be stuck footing the bill for this broken system.
