UK to start returning some migrants to France within days under new deal
Under the new deal, France has agreed to accept the return of undocumented people arriving in Britain by small boats, in exchange for Britain agreeing to accept an equal number of legitimate asylum seekers with British family connections.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron announced the 'one in, one out' pilot scheme on migrant returns last month.
More than 25,000 people have come to Britain on small boats so far in 2025, and Starmer has pledged to 'smash the gangs' of smugglers to try to reduce the number of arrivals.
Starmer, whose popularity has fallen since winning an election landslide last year, is facing pressure to stop small boats from Nigel Farage's Reform UK party, which leads national opinion polls.
In recent weeks in England, there have been a number of protests around hotels housing the asylum seekers who have arrived on small boats, attended by both anti-immigration and pro-immigration groups.
French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said on X that the new agreement between the countries has a 'clear objective' to break up the people-smuggling networks, although British interior minister Yvette Cooper would not say how many people would be returned under the scheme.
'The numbers will start lower and then build up,' she told Sky News on Tuesday, adding that the people returned would be those who had immediately arrived on small boats, rather than people already in Britain.
Government sources previously said the agreement would involve about 50 returns a week, or 2,600 a year, a fraction of the more than 35,000 arrivals reported last year.
Critics of the scheme have said that the scale will not be sufficient to act as a deterrent, but Cooper said that the agreement with France was just one part of the government's wider plan.
The government has also targeted people smugglers with sanctions, clamped down on social media adverts and is working with delivery firms to tackle the illegal work that is often promised to migrants.
A treaty on the scheme was signed last week but not previously announced ahead of Tuesday's ratification. Britain said the European Commission and European Union member states had given the green light to the plan.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
3 hours ago
- CNN
Hungarian Foreign Minister on his Country's Agenda and Ukraine's Bid to Join the E.U.
"Hungarian people have been paying the price of this war for too long time now, although we don't have any kind of responsibility." Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó on Hungary's agenda, and Ukraine's bid to join the E.U.
New York Post
3 hours ago
- New York Post
The dam is breaking on Britain's illegal immigration crisis — and the results could be ugly
Britain's Labour government is in trouble: Its program of massive third-world immigration from places like Pakistan and Somalia is wildly, overwhelmingly unpopular. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that despite the best efforts of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his leftist captive media, Britons themselves have discovered just how unpopular it is. Advertisement You might think that's absurd — if mass immigration is unpopular, how can everyone not know it? Everyone doesn't know it because the government has been policing speech about immigration. Any criticism of open borders, lax enforcement or — worst of all — immigrant crime has been punished as 'racist' and 'hate speech' by the Starmer regime. Advertisement The point of this isn't to reduce racism or hate (heck, the censorship likely make that worse), but to make it harder for people to realize just how many of their fellow citizens feel the same way they do. For years, Britain has stifled reports of immigrant rape gangs in places like Rotherham and has persecuted those who have called attention to them, even jailing some. And as the government gives light sentences to child rapists, it's imprisoning moms for tweets on grounds of 'inciting race hatred.' It's all to construct and maintain something known as 'preference falsification,' a move usually practiced by authoritarian regimes. Advertisement The trick is, you make citizens pretend that they believe what the government says, and fake their approval of what it does. You promote marches and demonstrations and speech in favor of the government's preferred positions, and you severely punish marches and demonstrations and speech that oppose the government's favored positions. You give excuses, like 'stopping counterrevolutionary activity' or 'fighting hate speech,' for shutting down any opposition. You may even have informers to ferret out wrongthink and report it to the authorities, or to employers, or to third parties who will engage in extralegal (but government-supported) harassment. Advertisement If you do it right, you can have upward of 90% of your population hating you and your policies, but doing and saying nothing about them — because everyone in that 90% thinks they're part of a tiny minority. Resistance will seem to be futile. This works. Until it doesn't. The problem with preference falsification is that sooner or later some event or development can make people realize that what they've been told is popular is, in fact, very unpopular. When this happens, as Duke University scholar Timur Kuran writes in his book 'Private Truths, Public Lies,' the result is a 'preference cascade.' When large swaths of the population realize their dissident views are in fact widely held, they become less afraid of the government — and less hesitant about sharing their true sentiments. Advertisement And that's what's happening now in Britain, after a string of cases in which migrants sexually assaulted local girls and women. Across the United Kingdom, people — including large numbers of middle-aged and middle-class women, not the 'far-right' skinheads that Starmer and his ilk claim stoke all anti-immigrant sentiment — are protesting outside the hotels where the government is housing illegal migrants, shouting 'Send them home!' and 'Protect our girls!' The demonstrations in the last two weeks — featuring thousands of people carrying St. George flags, the traditional symbol of England — are too big to hide, and they're cropping up in every corner of the nation, organized largely on Facebook and other social media. Starmer has gotten the government-controlled media to present its spin and to black out or soft-pedal most bad news. Advertisement But news gets out in other ways. In particular, Elon Musk's maintenance of X as a free-speech zone has made it much harder for the ruling elites to keep people in the dark. Now the government is scared, alternating between overweening demands and ignominious retreats. After London police tried to ban protests outside migrant hotels, authorities walked it back with a 'clarification' that the ban applied only to specific protesters. Advertisement Questionable groups of masked, thuggish 'counterprotesters' have been allegedly delivered to marches in police buses — only to find themselves outnumbered and pushed back by the throng. Sometimes preference cascades presage major political changes; other times, as in the famous case of Nicolas Ceausescu's communist Romania, they produce violent revolution. (One thing about preference falsification is that it often keeps the government in the dark, too — Ceausescu genuinely believed his people loved him, until shortly before he was hauled out and shot.) Advertisement The British establishment would have been better served to let its citizens debate the immigration question openly and fairly. It didn't do so because it knew it would lose such a debate. Instead, it foisted open borders on a nation that didn't want them, then tried to silence opposition. Now we're watching as the regime's strategy collapses. Will it end in Starmer's ouster — or worse, in violence? Either way, the aftermath will be ugly. Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the blog.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Germany should consider Israel sanctions, senior lawmaker says after trip
By Markus Wacket BERLIN (Reuters) -A senior lawmaker in German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's coalition on Monday said Berlin should consider sanctions on Israel including a partial suspension of weapons exports or the suspension of a European Union-wide political agreement. The call by Siemtje Moeller, the deputy leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) parliamentary faction, reflects a sharpening of rhetoric from Berlin against Israel which has yet to yield any major policy changes however. Moeller, whose SPD joined a coalition with Merz's conservatives this year, wrote a letter to SPD lawmakers after returning from a trip to Israel with Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul last week. "My assessment is that the Israeli government will move little without pressure. If such concrete improvements fail to materialize in the near future, there must be consequences," she said in the letter, seen by Reuters. Recognition of a Palestinian state should not be "taboo", she said, adding that Israeli statements that there were no restrictions on aid to Gaza were not convincing. At the same time, Moeller demanded the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages held by Hamas. She said Hamas must no longer play a role in a political future in Gaza. "It must be disarmed, its reign of terror must end." Western nations have intensified efforts to exert pressure on Israel, with Britain, Canada and France signalling their readiness to recognise a Palestinian state in Israeli-occupied territory at the United Nations General Assembly this September. Israel has criticised France, Britain and Canada, saying their decision will reward Hamas. Critics argue that Germany's response remains overly cautious, shaped by an enduring sense of historical guilt for the Holocaust and reinforced by pro-Israel sentiment in influential media circles, weakening the West's collective ability to apply meaningful pressure on Israel. The Gaza war began when Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and took 251 hostage in a cross-border attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, according to Israeli figures. Israel's air and ground war in densely populated Gaza has since killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to enclave health officials. A growing number of civilians are dying from starvation and malnutrition, Gaza health authorities say, with images of starving children shocking the world and intensifying criticism of Israel over its curbs on aid into the enclave. Israel blames Hamas for the suffering in Gaza but, in response to a rising international outcry, it announced steps last week to let more aid reach the population, including pausing fighting for part of the day in some areas, approving air drops and announcing protected routes for aid convoys. (Writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Alex Richardson) Solve the daily Crossword
