Latest news with #migrationPolicy
Arab News
01-07-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Italy boosts legal work visas, as union says policy falls short
Meloni has sought to reduce the number of undocumented migrants to Italy For the latest updates, follow us @ArabNewsSport
Telegraph
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
France could take back Channel migrants under new deal
Sir Keir Starmer is in talks with France to return Channel migrants in a 'one in, one out' deal. Ministers are understood to hope that they can announce an agreement in principle when Emmanuel Macron, the French president, makes his state visit to the UK next month for the Anglo-French summit. Under the scheme, Britain would send back Channel migrants to France within weeks of their arrival in return for the UK taking asylum seekers from France. Home Office sources indicated that a returns scheme was a 'work in progress'. France has resisted such moves since the Dublin returns agreement was scrapped under Brexit and argued that any new agreement would have to be EU-wide. However, France opened the door to taking back Channel migrants for the first time after Bruno Retailleau, the French interior minister, said that it would 'send a clear message' to others planning to make the journey. France has also agreed to start intercepting migrant 'taxi boats' at sea for the first time after previously refusing to do so for fear of breaching maritime safety laws. The policy change driven through by Mr Retailleau is expected to be confirmed at the summit, which is taking place from July 8-10. The moves come after small boat crossings hit record levels with more than 18,000 migrants having reached the UK so far this year, up 43 per cent on the same point last year and the highest number since the first arrivals in 2018. The French have been open to a pilot, one-for-one scheme, which, if successful, could be extended EU-wide. The EU has previously rejected returns agreements that are only bilateral between two countries. A deal would be limited to the UK taking asylum seekers in France with family connections in Britain in exchange for a corresponding number of Channel migrants being returned to France. No 10 has, however, also been studying more ambitious returns schemes. Senior figures from the European Stability Initiative (ESI) have been invited to Downing Street twice in the past eight months to present their ideas. In their presentations, ESI proposed almost every Channel migrant would be returned to France within three to four weeks with very occasional exceptions for people with the strongest family connections to the UK. In return, the UK would agree to take in a capped number of asylum seekers from the EU of, for example, 20,000 a year under a time-limited scheme. They argued that without a near-100 per cent return rate, there would be no deterrent to crossings, predicting that as soon as it became clear there was no prospect of success, the incentive for migrants to make the dangerous, expensive journeys would evaporate. The ESI team argued that their scheme could be extended to a wider group of countries than just France. It also offered them a model for striking their own 'returns' deals with countries that were the source of illegal migrants. The EU has already backed the creation of return 'hubs' - temporary detention centres in non-EU countries where deported migrants would wait before being sent back. Sir Keir confirmed last month that the UK was also in talks with a 'number of countries' about return hubs for failed asylum seekers, which he described as a 'really important innovation'. Home Office sources said it was uncertain whether a deal would be formally announced at the Anglo-French summit. However, they will face pressure not to limit the number of migrants they can send back to France. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, warned that the scheme would fail unless all illegal migrants were denied asylum in the UK and removed from Britain. 'We pay the French half a billion pounds to wave the boats off from Calais, and in return we get a merry-go-round where the same number still come here,' he said. 'The French are failing to stop the boats at sea, failing to return them like the Belgians do, and now instead of demanding real enforcement, Labour are trying a 'one in, one out' gimmick. 'If Labour were serious, they would not have scrapped the returns deterrent the National Crime Agency said we needed – instead, they've surrendered our immigration system. Pathetic.'
Telegraph
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
French police fire tear gas to stop migrants boarding small boats
French police used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse hundreds of migrants in northern France before wading into the waters to try and prevent them from boarding boats off the Channel coast. The police operation off Gravelines, northern France, came just days after the French interior ministry confirmed it would aim to intercept boats within 300 metres of the beaches to stop them leaving for the UK loaded with migrants. Until now, the French have refused to intervene in the waters because they claimed maritime laws prevented them from taking action that could put lives at sea at risk. But government sources told The Telegraph ministers overseeing migration policy had given the green light to do so while 'respecting' the 'law of the sea'. Officers with riot shields waded waist-deep into the Channel on Friday morning to try and stop people boarding small boats that had come to collect them from further down the coast. Shortly before, they appeared to have let off clouds of choking smoke as the migrants rushed towards the water. Images showed several of them carrying children wearing orange life jackets treading through the waters to avoid the police. Despite the officers' efforts they were ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer number of people, according to reporters at the scene. Some 14,812 migrants have crossed the Channel so far in 2025 in more than 260 boats, up nearly 32 per cent on the same period in 2024. It represents a record high for the first six months of any year since the first boats arrived in 2018. On Wednesday, dozens of migrants reached the UK as people smugglers took advantage of the first good weather and calmer seas since May 31 when a record 1,195 people were intercepted. It is expected to push crossings past 15,000 for 2025. The Government has vowed to crack down on people smugglers and illegal migration with Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, announcing in Wednesday's spending review that the Border Security Command would be funded up to £280 million more per year by the end of the review period in 2028-29. The images of police entering the sea were in stark contrast to other occasions in 2024 when they were filmed standing by as migrants entered the water. France said in June that it intended to come up with a more interventionist strategy in time for the Franco-British summit, which begins on July 8, when Emmanuel Macron, the French president, will travel to London for a state visit. France is expanding its naval forces with six new patrol boats that will not only rescue migrants but could also intercept the 'taxi boats' before they leave for the UK. The first of the boats, the 46-metre long Rozel which can carry 20 paramilitary police officers, has already been put to sea. The EU border agency has warned that people-smuggling gangs are adopting a new tactic of simultaneous migrant boat launches to outwit French police. In an update Frontex, which has committed aerial surveillance and extra staff to the Channel, said smuggling networks providing the small boats were adapting to increase the number of successful crossing s. They have already switched to using 'taxi boats' where dinghies are sailed from inland rivers and waterways to pick up migrants in the shallow waters off the beaches. But Frontex said the smuggling gangs were also using 'simultaneous departures'. It said: 'This tactic puts more lives at risk in an already dangerous stretch of water as it hinders the search and rescue efforts of the national authorities.' The risks are compounded by the increasing numbers being crammed into the flimsy dinghies. There were 54 migrants per boat in the year ending March 2025, compared with 50 in 2024 and 29 in the year to March 2022, according to Home Office data.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Mass migration isn't Britain's lifeblood. It's an economic disaster
Within hours of stepping up as Reform chairman on Tuesday, David Bull triggered his first media controversy by remarking that 'immigration is the lifeblood of this country – it always has been'. As popular as this sentiment is with Britain's politicians, it isn't true today and it certainly wasn't in the past. From 1066 through to the end of the Second World War, the population of Britain has been marked by relative stability. As a crude illustration, as late as 1951 the total non-White population of Great Britain was estimated at about 30,000 people, or about 0.07pc of the population. Today it's roughly 20pc, and on course to pass 50pc by the end of the century. In other words, the population changes induced by migration over the past seven decades are essentially without parallel in 1,000 years of British history. Even within this modern period, however, it's not quite right to say that migration has been Britain's lifeblood. It would be more accurate to say it's been the default policy of a state that keeps repeating its mistakes. A brief summary of the last 70 years might fairly cast British migration policy as a mixture of blunders, unintended consequences, and myopic pursuit of short-term objectives, right from the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948. As other writers have pointed out, while the narrative promoted today is 'you called and we came', internal government communications show that efforts were made to dissuade Caribbean migration in ways that wouldn't imperil the precarious bonds with Britain's colonies. Shortly after the ship's arrival, Britain adopted a sweeping nationality act that permitted anyone with a passport issued by the British government to enter the country. This act, while 'never intended to sanction a mass migration', combined with policies aimed at attracting workers in specific fields to create a mass inflow. Now, where have we heard that before? Then, as now, policy revolved around the needs of the NHS – newly established in 1948 – which had outstripped training capacity and needed workers. Then, as now, the role of migration in propping up a state approach to healthcare which would otherwise have failed was indispensable. But while important to the health service, the proportion of total migration accounted for by this demand was relatively small. By 1958, 210,000 non-white Commonwealth migrants were living in the UK. In the same year, of 8,272 junior doctors in Great Britain 3,408 had been born elsewhere. Other figures, frustratingly only for 1965, suggest that there were about 5,000 Jamaican nurses and other workers staffing hospitals. Combine these figures, and you get an estimate of about 4pc of the new population working in the NHS. Allow for dependents and missing data, and you might hit 10pc. Either way, to claim that the entirety of mass migration was justified by the NHS was well short of the mark. Similarly, a narrative of labour shortages was constructed that took as granted a nationalised, unionised economy with rife overmanning, built to obtain full employment. Comparisons of vacancy lists to unemployment naturally resulted in the conclusion that labour was needed; the unwillingness of the Government to relax its grip on the economy or exchange rates meant that other routes to adjustment were difficult to follow. In other words, migration in the post-war period was in part essential to the state's ability to carry out its plans, and in other part an unintended consequence of those efforts. By 1962, the Government was taking steps to restrain the inflow, wary of the scale of the political backlash it had triggered. Usually, history doesn't repeat itself. Westminster, however, is gifted with a wonderful form of amnesia, and has managed to do so not once but twice. First we had the New Labour loosening of migration policy in pursuit of ill-defined fiscal goals, alongside an unwillingness to restrict movement for newly joined EU member states. Predictions that 13,000 workers a year would arrive from Eastern Europe turned out to be off by a few thousand percentage points, and eventually popular unrest again led to legal changes, this time in the form of Brexit. Yet almost the moment Boris Johnson took office he set about repeating the mistakes of his predecessors, implementing the greatest liberalisation of Britain's borders in decades. The reasoning is almost painful to read: worries over shortages of workers even as the ranks of the economically inactive swelled, issues with pay in care homes downstream of government cuts to local authority budgets, the need to prop up a university sector which had seen tuition fees frozen, the NHS trotted out as the symbolic argument for migration when just 3pc of the 1.2m inflow in 2022 consisted of doctors and nurses. And again, following vehement expressions of popular dissatisfaction, we find ourselves with a government promising long overdue action, and an opposition seeking to capitalise on this sentiment. There is a limit to how many times a country can repeat a mistake without doing lasting damage. Research from the Office for Budget Responsibility has made perfectly clear that staying on our current course is unaffordable. Without reforms to Indefinite Leave to Remain, the care worker element of migration from 2021 to 2024 could cost the exchequer a lifetime sum of £61bn to £84bn on its own. The sheer size of the failure means that it must be at least partly undone, and Labour has made some noises about doing so. But it would be a mistake to assume that everything before 2020 was good. Previous waves of migration have amply demonstrated how selecting the wrong migrants can lead to costs that linger for generations. Despite large flows of recent migration – which tends to be fiscally positive in the years before workers age – it is still the case that black and Asian households in Britain receive more in state benefits than they pay in taxes, suggesting that previous migrants and their descendants may not have had the economic success we might have hoped for. Similarly, certain groups remain highly dependent on social housing. The grand experiment of the post-war era is over. The results are in. Immigration might be the lifeblood of the British state, but it is hard to argue that it's been an unequivocal success for the British people. The efforts to make it central to our shared understanding of history are less about genuine interest in our island story than they are justifying the mistakes of generations of politicians, the forging of a US-style narrative of a nation of immigrants for a very different country. This isn't a game Reform needs to play. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Mass migration isn't Britain's lifeblood. It's an economic disaster
Within hours of stepping up as Reform chairman on Tuesday, David Bull triggered his first media controversy by remarking that 'immigration is the lifeblood of this country – it always has been'. As popular as this sentiment is with Britain's politicians, it isn't true today and it certainly wasn't in the past. From 1066 through to the end of the Second World War, the population of Britain has been marked by relative stability. As a crude illustration, as late as 1951 the total non-White population of Great Britain was estimated at about 30,000 people, or about 0.07pc of the population. Today it's roughly 20pc, and on course to pass 50pc by the end of the century. In other words, the population changes induced by migration over the past seven decades are essentially without parallel in 1,000 years of British history. Even within this modern period, however, it's not quite right to say that migration has been Britain's lifeblood. It would be more accurate to say it's been the default policy of a state that keeps repeating its mistakes. A brief summary of the last 70 years might fairly cast British migration policy as a mixture of blunders, unintended consequences, and myopic pursuit of short-term objectives, right from the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948. As other writers have pointed out, while the narrative promoted today is 'you called and we came', internal government communications show that efforts were made to dissuade Caribbean migration in ways that wouldn't imperil the precarious bonds with Britain's colonies. Shortly after the ship's arrival, Britain adopted a sweeping nationality act that permitted anyone with a passport issued by the British government to enter the country. This act, while 'never intended to sanction a mass migration', combined with policies aimed at attracting workers in specific fields to create a mass inflow. Now, where have we heard that before?
