Refugees (Family Reunion) (No.2) Bill

Debate between David Warburton and Angus Brendan MacNeil

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 16th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[David Warburton]

No, I am not entirely comfortable with that. We need to look closely at how the Dubs scheme is now being run and what has happened to it since the Government accepted the amendment, because it has not necessarily been fully adopted, and councils have not taken it on in the way that they perhaps should have done.

I am not sure that secondary movements really do improve lives. There are examples that we can look at. In 2015, Germany’s asylum seeker intake increased by 155% as a result of people reacting specifically to policy change. Interestingly, more than 20% of the people who sought asylum in Germany that year were from the Balkan countries, which have been conflict-free for more than 20 years, so those people were not seeking refuge—they were seeking opportunity.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

Just to be clear, what we are doing is putting under-18s in the same category as over-18s. They are already here and we are just giving them the right to family life. If we ask the refugees who are watching us today, they will say that that is what they want. They are people like us and that is what they want to make their lives better. Some would argue that under-18s need their family even more than over-18s. We give this right to the over-18s, and we should give it to the under-18s who are here.

[David Warburton]

As I am sure no one would disagree, it would only be in the interests of people traffickers—no one else—for children to be encouraged to leave their families and undertake perilous, difficult, dangerous journeys in the hope that their relatives might be able to join them in future; and how much worse if they found themselves forced to do that?

My experience in chairing the inquiry by the all-party parliamentary group on the British Council into resilience to extremism in north Africa and the middle east has shown clearly that there are an appalling number of criminal gangs looking to exploit vulnerable people in the region. Our role must be first to provide support in the region, upholding, for all the reasons we have heard, the principle that those who need international protection should be able to claim it in the first safe country they reach.