UK Rwanda deal shows how the West will manage migration

The decision on 15 November by the UK Supreme Court to rule its government’s asylum deal with Rwanda unlawful has dropped a bombshell on British politics. It is debatable whether the Rwanda deal would ever have provided the deterrent effect the UK government desires for migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats.

But now the original plan is in tatters, with the British government scrambling to keep it alive by introducing new legislation to circumvent the court’s ruling. The new bill passed a crucial vote in parliament on 12 December, but with critics on the left and the right – and more votes due in the new year – its success is not yet guaranteed.

It has drawn predictable howls of rage from the governing Conservative Party, for whom the deal was a flagship policy – a necessary deterrent to bring an end to asylum-seekers crossing the Channel from France.

France’s legislature on 11 December rejected the reading of a bill to toughen up immigration controls, in a defeat for Macron’s government.

Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, made “stop the boats” one of five key pledges to voters at the start of 2023. It is debatable whether the Rwanda deal – through which asylum-seekers would be permanently exiled to Kigali to request asylum – will ever have provided the deterrent effect the UK government desires.

Just as important, though, is what the saga has revealed about Britain’s attitude to cooperation with countries in Africa – and, by extension, what that tells us about broader trends in how the West is choosing to manage migration.

Send them… back?

“We should just put planes in the air now and send them to Rwanda,” said the Conservatives’ deputy chair, Lee Anderson, shortly after the verdict. “We should ignore the laws and send them back the same day.”

Anderson, an influential figure on the party’s populist right, which has been ascending in recent years, raised eyebrows at his suggestion the government should ignore a ruling by the highest court in the land. But just as startling is his apparent suggestion that migrants be sent “back” to Rwanda.

Back? None of the people targeted by this deal come from Rwanda. They are, by and large, asylum-seekers from Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Indeed, it was in part Rwanda’s poor record in dealing with asylum claims from those parts of the world – according to evidence submitted in court by the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR – that led the Supreme Court judges to find that Rwanda could not be trusted to keep them safe. (The policy was ruled unlawful because of the risk that Rwanda would wrongly refuse asylum to refugees and send them back to their countries of origin, a practice known as refoulement which is prohibited under international law.)

Verbal slip or not, Anderson’s comment belies the underlying logic of the deal. It was conceived amid a xenophobic panic in domestic UK politics triggered by the spectacle of refugees reaching the UK by boat. (Previously, they did so by stowing away in lorries, a concealed method of travel that suited everyone, most of the time, to ignore.)

The government’s response was blunt: send these unwanted foreigners far away, to a place just as ‘foreign’ to Britain as wherever they came from. Where that is doesn’t matter.

That, for all the high-minded language around what London and Kigali officially term the “migration and economic development partnership”, is the heart of the deal. It’s based on the idea that a wealthy, powerful country like the UK can class people and export them to other parts of the world.

Rwanda the patsy

This has obvious historical resonances. Like other former imperial powers, Britain has a long history of forcibly moving populations around the globe. However, outsourced migration management has become an increasingly popular choice among Western governments who seek to retain the economic benefits of migration while keeping voters happy by projecting the image of tough border control.

Refugees, who form only a tiny proportion of the world’s international migrants – just 0.3% of the total, according to the Dutch scholar Hein de Haas – are often the focus of attention.

Outsourcing – whether for offshore ‘processing’ of asylum claims, as the EU promises to establish in Africa, or the UK’s more extreme option – is often presented as a clean, efficient and humane way of dealing with irregular migration. It rarely works out that way for the people involved: look at the humanitarian disaster of Australia’s Pacific island camps.

But it’s also humiliating for the countries at the receiving end, even if their governments don’t acknowledge that. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has made much of the fact that striking migration deals with the West shows African ‘leadership’. In his view, the deal burnishes Rwanda’s credentials as a modernised country that can punch above its weight internationally.

It’s certainly true that African countries have much to offer to support displaced people: after all, the principle of universal human rights – in this case, the right to asylum – only works if a collective effort supports it.

Rwanda’s generous offer to temporarily host refugees evacuated from Libya, even if that was partly a product of the EU’s desire to halt irregular migration at its borders, is a case in point. African states have also extended refugee protection, not least in the 1969 OAU Convention.

The UK-Rwanda deal isn’t about cooperation, though. It’s about one country using its power, influence, and money to get another to act as the patsy in a plot conceived entirely for domestic political gain.

Of course, there are advantages for the weaker partner, not least the fact that it has kept the UK quiet about the Rwandan government’s authoritarianism and its alleged role in atrocities in eastern DRC.

But by entering into the deal, Rwanda has put a crucial element of its own social policy at the whims of a fickle, unstable, foreign government. If the scheme were to work at the scale the UK believes it should, it would involve tens of thousands of people being sent to Kigali yearly.

The power imbalance here cannot be ignored. As more countries in the West seek to strike migration deals, African governments would do well to be wary.