The British Government's migration policy was left in ruins yesterday after the Court of Appeal ruling that it was illegal to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. In fact, not only immigration policy, but the very Administration led by Rishi Sunak, who has made forced deportations to the African country the linchpin of his election platform and the main candy for the large bloc of inclined voters xenophobic and far-right. It's like buildings with structural problems and deep cracks that undermine their foundations and one day they collapse in the middle of a huge landslide.
The Court ruled in favor of human rights groups, lawyers and the United Nations Commission for Refugees, and ratified their argument that Rwanda is not a safe place where the rights of asylum seekers would be respected. On the contrary, he considered that there was a possibility that they would be returned to their countries of origin arbitrarily without attending to the circumstances of each case. The decision was taken by two votes to one, and overturns a previous one from the High Court of England and Wales.
But the Government says that it does not plan to give up, that it will continue to explore legal ways to proceed with the forced deportation of immigrants who arrive "by unauthorized routes", and in particular those who arrive by crossing the Manèga channel on pasture. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, announced that he will take the case to the Supreme Court in the coming days, "because our immigration policy cannot be dictated by the mafias that traffic in human beings". For some time, the head of the Interior, Stella Braverman, has been pushing for the United Kingdom to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and be able to do whatever it wants with asylum seekers.
Labor opposition leader and likely future prime minister Keir Starmer said the ruling "shows that the idea of sending immigrants to Rwanda is madness that has no head and no feet, not from the point of view of legally, because Rwanda is not a safe destination with enough guarantees, nor from an economic point of view, because processing asylum claims in Kigali and placing people there would cost more than doing it in the United Kingdom itself, nor from morality".
But for a British Conservative Government against the ropes it is not a question of money, but of giving the impression to its potential voters that it is doing something to reduce the arrival of foreigners, even if it is a mirage It doesn't want those who arrive on foot (almost all asylum seekers fleeing persecution or miserable living conditions), nor those from the European Union, but instead it does want those from Commonwealth countries and former colonies
Sunak believes that his only chance of winning the elections at the end of next year is a substantial improvement in the economy, the recovery of growth, the elimination of inflation and a drastic reduction in the number of immigrants. legal But for now it is suffering nothing but setbacks, it is not on track to fulfill any of its promises in this regard, and Labor has extended its lead in the polls to 27 points, enough for an absolute majority.
The ruling came the day after the Lords defeated the bill for deportations to Rwanda, and returned it to the Government to revise it with more guarantees for immigrants. A study has indicated that sending a person to the African country would cost taxpayers around two hundred thousand euros, much more than housing them in Great Britain while their cases are processed (the State currently pays nine million euros per day to have them in hotels).
What Sunak needs, at all costs, is a hook for all the far-right-leaning voters who see foreigners as an enemy that dilutes national identity, takes away their jobs and saturates social services, in instead of seeing them as help to do the jobs the natives don't want and pay the pensions. And that they blindly believed the promise that Brexit would "return control of the borders". After thirteen years in power, with asbestos and aluminosis problems, the Tory house collapses.
