UK Asylum and Refugee Policy

Lord Desai Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is genuinely a pleasure to follow the noble Lord because I have always listened to him and, while I have never agreed with him, he studies the problem thoroughly and I like that. I respect what he said and, in some cases, I want to follow him.

I am not a Christian and not only am I an atheist, it is much worse: I am an economist. The question I want to ask is: who gains from this policy that we have? We are definitely losing. There is no doubt that everybody knows that the UK, as a country, is losing its reputation and losing money, so who gains? It is the gangsters. As an economist, I ask myself: why is there clearly profit to be made from smuggling people here? Because there is a demand for coming to the UK and people are willing to pay a hefty price for what the gangsters charge. Why can we not have that money? Why do we not say this? “Okay, no problems, come to us. We may not accommodate you but we will not throw you out yet, and we will give you a temporary pass, perhaps for one or two years. Give the £2,000 you were going to spend to us, not to the gangsters.”

I say that because it is clear that the legal routes which people use for coming here are so porous that people have figured out how to game the law, so the law is clearly inadequate. We might appoint a royal commission to find out whether we can improve on that law, but the law is certainly not working. I welcome people who want to come here for genuine economic reasons; I think they are the only people who genuinely want to come here. Obviously, they may be pretending to be asylum seekers or refugees, or that they are stateless or being persecuted. The law is such that we have to have hearings to find out whether that is right. Some will obviously have lost their passports because they are not stupid; they know how to game the system.

We are being gamed by people who are perfectly capable of paying money to the crooks to come here, while we ourselves are losing money because we have to spend a lot of it accommodating these people. In some cases, as others have said, it takes months and years. As the right reverend Prelate also said, we do not allow them to work—and we should. Why are we losing money each week by our inefficiency in not being able to solve this problem?

The solution is very simple. They are going to stay here anyway, illegally, so why do we not allow them to stay legally and get the money ourselves? I have always wondered, I am sorry to say, whether there is a kind of perverse reputation to be made in politics. I hope I am wrong about there being a political career to be made by being hostile—by saying, “Oh, these immigrants are illegal and dirty”, and so on. But they are just people who have figured out that staying in the UK is a better bet than staying anywhere else. We should be flattered. We should tell them, “Okay, come here if you want to, but pay a price for that because you’re going to benefit from it and that will cost us something”.

In a sense, as many people have said, we need to rethink the whole question of immigration. First, we ought to clear up our statistics because, while everybody talks about there being so many crossings and so on, the bulk of the people who come here do so legally. They come regularly and there is no problem.

The headlines are about these boat people. We ought to seriously compete with the gangsters and offer a facility. We may set up an office in Calais, Tirana or wherever, and say to people, “There’s no problem, just come”. We will run the boats ourselves and nationalise the gangsters’ business. We should stop being absurd about this; we need some clarity. Without worrying about our reputation with the right-wing press, or whatever it is, we should say, “Who gains from what we do?” We are not controlling our borders; we are just losing money and our reputation. We are being made to look like fools. Stop being foolish; stop losing money; stop losing our reputation. Play the game better than they can.