Donald Trump can show Keir Starmer how to stop the boats

Times

a day ago

When Keir Starmer meets Donald Trump in Scotland on Monday, they will have an obvious topic of discussion: how to control illegal border crossings. Both came to power on a wave of public anger over asylum seekers. Both vowed to take back control but the results couldn't be more different. Britain's small-boat arrivals have hit record highs, with migrant hotels full and protests spreading. In the US, illegal crossings from Mexico have collapsed and are 97 per cent below their Biden-era peak. As Trump likes to say: 'Promises made, promises kept'.
It helps explain why, in spite of tariff chaos and the Epstein drama, Trump's approval rating remains one of the highest among the leaders of major countries. Starmer's, by contrast, has fallen with Liz Truss-style speed to a level from which no prime minister has ever recovered. He will find much to disagree with in Trump's approach to border control. But he'll also find lessons: in what works, what doesn't and what voters expect.
It's hard to understand Trump's re-election without grasping the depth of feeling about illegal immigration under Joe Biden. 'The border is closed; the border is secure,' declared Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden's homeland security chief, in 2021. An unprecedented 2.2 million illegal arrivals the next year proved him wrong. 'There is no word to describe this except 'invasion',' said the governor of Montana, a state 800 miles from the southern border but already feeling the ramifications.
Authorities were overwhelmed. Those apprehended, children included, were often kept in appalling conditions. Then came the deaths: 53 found suffocated in a people-smuggling truck in Texas. Then the crime: theft, assaults, fentanyl and meth-smuggling — each example used by Trump's supporters as a parable of national collapse. By the start of last year, 78 per cent of Americans agreed that the border situation was in crisis or, at least, a major problem. Cue Trump.
He declared a national emergency on day one, deploying thousands of troops to the Mexican border. Then came the shock and awe. Some 10,000 refugees who had been approved for settlement in the US had the offer rescinded, their entry denied and their flight tickets rendered worthless. Police were told to detain everyone, rather than release people who would then start their asylum case. It caused outrage — but, to Trump, helpful outrage. It sent out a message: best not try your luck. The results were almost instant and spectacular. Monthly figures for border 'encounters' collapsed to the lowest level since the 1960s.
Had Trump left it there, all might have been well. But ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, started to go after those who had been in the US for years, using what critics regard as stormtrooper-style tactics. Masked officers raided workplaces; flash grenades were used against Californian protesters. Under Biden ICE had, in effect, been told to stand down. Trump sent ICE to war. The recent clashes in Los Angeles offer a taste of this new normal.
I was in Washington recently and saw a side to ICE that's rarely glimpsed from this side of the Atlantic: its speed, its success and its sense of a moral mission. 'The American people deserve a federal government that chooses to put them first,' I was told. 'We go after the worst of the worst: gang members, murderers and rapists.' But it's also going after law-abiding Venezuelans who have suddenly been recategorised as illegal. With almost 1,000 arrests every day, it's proving a bit much even for Trump's supporters.
The prime minister will be appalled at this. But what should really haunt him is a phrase that was doing the rounds in Washington under Biden: 'If liberals won't control borders, fascists will.' It's hyperbolic: Trump, for all his flaws, is no fascist. But the warning very much applies here. If centrists can't restore order, populists will be put in power to do it instead.
Starmer's current methods are failing as badly as Biden's. His 'smash the gangs' strategy is going nowhere; his deals with the French have no effect. Small-boat arrivals have risen by 50 per cent so far this year; far-right protesters will be outside a migrant hotel in Epping this weekend. Nigel Farage, safely ahead in the polls, is doing his own ICE-man-cometh routine, saying that he'd send even British prisoners to El Salvador.
The small-boats debacle is a daily outrage, an ever-renewing symbol of government failure. To see young men couriered over and checked into hotels and served hot meals will obviously anger those struggling to put food on the table. The situation could be designed to cause outrage, erode confidence in the government and drive voters towards the angry right.
But even now, Starmer has plenty of time to act. What if he were to cut a deal to send every small-boat arrival not to an Essex hotel but straight to Rwanda or Kosovo, where they would have to stay even if their claim was upheld? If all 1,000 arrivals were deported on a Monday, then all 700 on a Tuesday, how many might still arrive on the Friday? We'd likely see a US-style collapse in numbers.
It need not be a rerun of Tory policy as Starmer could also bring in a one-out, two-in policy. For every small-boat deportee he could fly in two vetted asylum seekers from the (many) UK-funded refugee camps, with a bias towards women and children. It would be a question of how, not whether, Britain discharges its moral duty to the world's dispossessed: using our rules, not those of the gangs. He could use his legal background to write a new framework, replacing the 1951 Refugee Convention which has descended into a people traffickers' charter.
Yes, deportation is cruel. But far less so than today's system of criminal gangs, deaths in transit and, perhaps worse, the collapse of public support for the asylum system.
Trump embodies a simple point: when borders get out of control, voters will press the Godzilla button and call in the big beasts. Labour has always seen immigration as a question of values: compassion, duty, international solidarity. It still can be, but only if control is restored. Without it, the issue becomes a test not of moral character but of basic competence. On that score, Labour is failing spectacularly.
For years, the left has warned that populists thrive when institutions fail. The asylum system, in its current state, is just such a failure: chaotic, cruel and politically toxic. Fix it, and Starmer could offer Britain an alternative to Farageism. Fail, and the electorate may soon conclude that only Reform UK is serious about solving the problem.
Starmer can still avoid this fate. He just needs to stop acting as the clerk of a broken system and, instead, become the author of a new one.