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The pathetically limp, ‘one in, one out’, Starmer-Macron wheeze got underway this week (5th August). Not only will the scheme not work and not stop the boats but it will have the opposite effect – once its abject failure becomes apparent, for the scheme is utterly unworkable.
How will those to be returned be selected? Will some nationalities be exempted? Will France even have to agree to take them? How will those who want to come here be chosen and who will do the choosing?
We have been given to believe that initially, the aim is to remove 50 per week and gradually increase the number. At such a pace, it will take around 10 years to return the 25,000 or so that has already arrived this year alone. And at the end of it all, we would be left with the same number of migrants as we started with.
Let’s be clear, this plan has about as much chance of working and of stopping the boats as there is of President Trump rolling out the red carpet for Sir Sadiq Khan.
The only plan which will work is one that involves detaining and rapidly processing illegal arrivals and removing them whence they came, returning them to their country of origin or to a safe third country (like Rwanda). This means pulling out of the ECHR and increasing detention capacity.
None of this is about to happen. That’s why the boats will continue coming and the numbers crossing will go on increasing. Meanwhile, legal migration (10 times the number coming illegally) will remain at catastrophic levels, with little in the government’s proposed (weak) white paper likely to bring it down.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every week as soon as it is released.