We learn this week the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has plans to let community groups, universities and other organisations sponsor refugees to settle in Britain. This would be in addition to the existing direct “resettlement routes” which have already allowed over 360,000 asylum seekers to travel to Britain via so-called safe and legal routes since 2005 – as previously reported by Migration Watch in 2022.
She claims the scheme will “save the asylum system for a generation,” based on evidence from a similar scheme in Canada. That country’s sponsorship scheme has enabled more than 390,000 refugees to settle in the country since 1979, including more than 30,000 in 2024 alone. Ministers should look harder at that model, because Canada’s own record exposes the flaws they are choosing to ignore.
Take the central boast, that this is a “controlled, needs-based route”. In the Canadian model, sponsorship is driven by personal connection. When one Canadian agency in Winnipeg briefly opened its sponsorship waiting list, it received more than 7,000 applications in a single week: every one of them linked to a relative the applicant wished to bring over. Ministers may call this compassion, but it is just chain migration by another name; each arrival acts as a foothold for the next. Indeed, academics have found Canada’s refugee sponsorship scheme was used as a de facto route for family reunification.
Then there is the bond between sponsor and sponsored. Canada found the risk of refugees being pressured to repay or work off a “debt” to their sponsors real enough that it specifically attempted to ban the practice outright, a tacit admission that obligation and dependency are built into the model. The Home Office suggests Britain will adopt a similar approach. But, given the rampant abuse already present in the asylum system, does anyone have any confidence that this ban will be policed? A system in which a person’s foothold in Britain is tied to the goodwill of the group that brought them in a recipe for exploitation, strife, and grievances that will ultimately land on the British taxpayer.
And land on the taxpayer they will. Sponsorship in Canada typically lasts only a single year. After that, the huge costs of the asylum system – housing, benefits, healthcare, legal support – revert to the government. Essentially, the Home Office is hoping the enormous long term net costs of asylum can be hidden by getting third parties to pay for the claimant’s warm welcome to Britain.
Details are sparce, and the details the Home Office has deigned to reveal are concerning, but perhaps most curious of all is the announcement that the route will be capped. Why not (as Migration Watch has repeatedly called for) cap other visa routes, and perhaps the entire visa system altogether?
Ms Mahmood is trying to project strength, even as she proposes plans which fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The Canadian model is clearly ripe for abuse and will act as yet another pipeline for spurious migration to Britain. And, once here, the risk of exploitation (either by unscrupulous community and religious groups, or the migrants themselves) remains high. The strongest move Ms Mahmood could make is to dump these proposals and focus on enforcing our existing border laws.
