EU: Asylum Seekers

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, let me move on from what people have said. I do not think that it matters very much whether we call them refugees, asylum seekers, or whatever. A lot of people want to migrate from where they are to where the economic prosperity is. That is not just a problem of Europe, where people are coming across from Africa or the Middle East; it is a global problem. There is the Rohingya problem; they are leaving Myanmar and ending up in Indonesia and Malaysia without any guarantee that they will be settled. If this is a global problem, it needs a global solution. It has to be tackled by the UN Security Council and the G20, because this flow of migrants will not cease. Even if we now share them equally and fairly, there will be the next share of a next wave of migrants because the world is very unstable, in both Africa and the Middle East, and people want to better their lives. They want to go where the prosperity is. The European Union should use its powers, especially the UK and France as Security Council members, to ask the United Nations to help us reach a global solution. There are countries that are sparsely populated—for example, Mongolia has only 2 million people. It could take 8 million and go up to 10 million. We should give them an economic incentive to accept refugees, because they are relatively less crowded countries. We have the problem that many people want to come here. It is a global and long-term problem that needs a global and long-term solution. The way we should do it is to make arrangements for people to be safely moved to countries that have agreed to accept them, and the countries that have agreed to accept them will get suitable aid. We can work on the short-term problems of adjustment, because these people are going to cost us a lot of money anyway, so we may as well transfer that money to Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, Outer Mongolia and Mongolia and so on. We can look at the map of horrendously sparsely populated regions. Even Australia has only about 20 million people—less than Mumbai—so you can imagine how sparsely populated Australia is. I know that Australia makes a lot of trouble about this issue. But we need to sit down and think of solutions in which the entire world takes part in solving this problem. It is not just a European problem, although it happens to be European because Europe is nearer to North Africa. But that is no reason why Europe should bear the burden of all these problems. I suggest that the Minister goes off and proposes this scheme, and maybe the Prime Minister can take a lead and we can get a global solution.