The new EU migration pact is “not worth the paper it’s written on,” former immigration minister Robert Jenrick said on Friday as he pressured the government to be tougher on tackling illegal migration.
“For all their talk of ‘intensifying the fight against smugglers’ and providing a ’European response‘ to a ’European challenge,' the EU’s plan for tackling illegal migration is not worth the paper it’s written on,” he wrote.
Mr. Jenrick believes the EU’s plan to reduce the inflow of immigrants by boosting the capacity of neighbouring countries like Tunisia either won’t work at all or will take decades to materialise, saying “the deep-rooted structural weakness in the Tunisian state is not something that can be remedied by throwing millions of euros at modest development programmes.”
Meanwhile, the delivery of resources to the European Border Agency, Frontex, “is nowhere near commensurate with the scale of the problem, with over a million new asylum applications in the latest 12-month period—the highest since the last migrant crisis in 2016,” he wrote.
Mr. Jenrick also criticised the European Commission, saying it has refused to provide legal cover for individual states to seize these small boats.
“We have made progress bilaterally to seize equipment destined for the [English] Channel with allies like Bulgaria, but with no thanks to the EU,” he wrote.
Mr. Jenrick accused European leaders of resigning themselves to mass illegal migration and treating the symptoms instead of delivering the cure.
The pact “will simply see asylum claims logged and vetted before ’mandatory solidarity' provisions force states to accommodate them or pay others to do so across the bloc. There isn’t a credible plan to repatriate people to their home countries if their claims are refused,” he said.
“It amounts to little more than an audit trail of failure. And to think, Sir Keir Starmer said a Labour government would take the UK into such an arrangement.”
Failure to deal with illegal immigration will lead to a widespread insurgence of Euro-skeptic, right-wing populist politics across Europe, Mr. Jenrick said.
“Don’t expect [the Netherland’s] Geert Wilders to be the last insurgent to come to power on the back of public fury at lax border controls. His success is merely a foretaste of what is to come,” he said.
“The great irony is that by failing to do what is necessary they are bringing about the political conditions for the failure of the entire European project.”
Mr. Jenrick believes that the flow of people into Europe “will continue unabated” unless all EU states are able to defend their borders because “the demand to migrate is so high, and the business model of the gangs so lucrative.”
“And as long as EU politicians remain ideologically wedded to unfettered movement within Schengen—despite the clear, disastrous security flaws of doing so—migrant flows across the European landmass towards western European countries like the UK will continue.”
Mr. Jenrick said it “doesn’t necessarily spell disaster for the UK” if its near neighbours can enforce their borders with “zeal,” but neither France nor Ireland “possesses the political will or incentives to grip the crisis.”
Therefore, “while we must continue to engage and cooperate with Brussels wherever we can ... we must confront the reality that nation states must act unilaterally when the vital national interest of border security is on the line,” Mr. Jenrick said, urging the government to take “the most determined approach” and beef up the Rwanda bill, which is designed to underpin the policy to remove illegal immigrants to Rwanda.
Right-wing Tories believe the bill in its current form won’t stop the “merry-go-round” of legal challenges, calling for all routes of legal challenges to be blocked.
Mr. Jenrick said the policy can potentially break the business model of people smuggling gangs if it’s “implemented at scale” while “a few symbolic flights” would be “consigning us to many more years of small boat crossings.”
