The immigration reforms announced this week must take effect immediately to prevent a “fire sale of visa applications,” former immigration minister Robert Jenrick said on Friday.
Mr. Jenrick, who resigned from Cabinet on Wednesday over the Rwanda bill, also insisted that the bill won’t end the merry-go-round of legal challenges that prevented the swift removal of new illegal immigrants.
The student dependant visa route, which Home Secretary James Cleverly said has allowed 153,000 people into the UK in the year-ending September 2023, will be removed next year. Mr. Cleverly said the new measures he announced on Monday would bring the total reduction to 300,000.
However, Mr. Jenrick suggested the government is not working fast enough to get the proposals approved by Parliament.
“The reforms I secured need to be implemented immediately via an emergency rules change to prevent a fire sale of visa applications and must be accompanied by further significant measures in the new year,” he said.
He called for a “comprehensive reform” of the graduate visa route, saying universities are “marketing low-grade, short courses as a back-door to a life in the UK.”
Mr. Jenrick and Suella Braverman, who was Home Secretary until last month, have both said the Conservative Party has to keep its promise on reducing immigration to avoid a massive electoral defeat.
Jenrick: Rwanda Promise ‘For The Birds’
Shortly before the government published the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Draft Bill on Wednesday, Ms. Braverman went as far as saying the party would face “electoral oblivion” if it introduced “yet another bill destined to fail.”She and Mr. Jenrick have since said they don’t believe the bill will be able to get deportation flights off the ground despite Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s promise that it will.
Mr. Jenrick insisted that the bill is doomed to fail, saying “the idea ... that this bill will guarantee all those arriving are detained and swiftly removed is for the birds.”
The controversial policy is the key part of the government’s plan to deter immigrants, including asylum seekers, from travelling to the UK on flimsy small boats across the English Channel from France, a safe country.
Under the plan, most small-boat arrivals, apart from unaccompanied minors and some exceptions, would be relocated to Rwanda, where they can claim asylum or settle via other routes.
Some opponents of the policy have misgivings about the Rwanda’s human rights record or believe the plan is too expensive or unworkable while some declared there is “no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker.”
The government has so far spent £240 million on the policy, with a further £50 million expected in the coming year, but the first deportation flight was grounded when the European Court of Human Rights emptied the flight with an interim injunction. The Supreme Court also ruled last month that the policy was unlawful.
The government introduced an emergency bill this week after upgrading its deal with Rwanda to a treaty that obliges Rwanda to treat relocate individuals according to international law and prohibited it from sending them elsewhere.
Ministers hope the steps would address the Supreme court’s concern that refugees may end up being departed to that countries of origin and suffer persecution.
The emergency bill bans counts tribunals from reviewing deportation decisions or allowing appeals against the decisions based on blanket claims that Rwanda would ill-treat asylum seekers or send them elsewhere, but legal challenges based on individual circumstances remain permitted.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said on Friday that the ground for legal challenges is expected to be “vanishingly narrow,” the Mr. Jenrick said he believes the exceptions will be exploited.
“By allowing individuals to make claims that their circumstances mean they cannot be sent to Rwanda, the ill invites each small boat arrival to concoct a reason to delay their removal,” he wrote.
“The small boat-chasing law firms will gladly assist them in this endeavour, and the smuggling gangs will quickly produce a well-tested narrative for their customers to deploy upon arrival.”
He also claimed that “the Supreme Court’s judgment, which criticised Rwanda heavily—and in many respects unnecessarily—means judges will be far more receptive to their personal claims, thereby compounding the risk that individuals are taken off flights in considerable number.”
Even if the challenges ultimately fail, the delay would overwhelm the Home Office’s capacity to detain more illegal arrivals, build up asylum backlogs, and increase the risk of abscondence, he argued.
Mr. Jenrick also hit out at Labour, which leader Sir Keir Starmer has labelled the Rwanda policy “gimmicks” and said he would focus on going after smuggling gangs, saying the UK can’t “arrest [its] way out of this problem.
“Their suggestion that an additional cross-border cell of officers can solve one of the great challenges of the 21st century would be laughable if it wasn’t such a serious matter,” he said.
Since 2o18, a total of 113,975 people have entered the UK on small boats, according to The Epoch Times’ analysis of Home Office figures.
Between January 2022 and September 2023, small boats arrives made up around 83 percent of all illegal immigrants detected during the period, although the number of undetected illegal immigrants living in the UK is likely to be much larger.
