It’s time to scrap the asylum system

Whatever you think of the blizzard of executive orders howling from the White House, at least the new President doesn’t succumb to the seductive gravitational pull of the status quo. This is therefore a fitting juncture at which to not simply think outside the box, but in some cases to chuck the box. For example, Donald Trump wants to chuck the US Department of Education. Yet can’t he set his sights higher? Like, set an example for the rest of the West: chuck the asylum system.

Having long ago predicted that the subject would dominate this century, I’ve written about immigration for 35 years. Although repeatedly approaching the radioactive issue with a certain frankness has incurred considerable reputational damage, I’ve no regrets. It’s been exasperating to watch as, in defiance of the wishes of western electorates, the cultural make-up of our countries is radically transformed. Meanwhile, our governments act helplessly hogtied. Runaway mass migration won’t be staunched by tweaky policy tightening. Because the problem is the box.

I’ve suggested scrapping the entire postwar asylum apparatus before, if only in passing, and Patrick O’Flynn concluded an article for the Spectator website last week with the same recommendation. So let’s take up this proposal in earnest. Unlike (largely theoretical) gatecrashers in China or India, absolutelyanyone can enter the US or Europe and claim to be persecuted, and then the government is immediately obliged not only to take this often-spurious assertion seriously, but to grant the foreigner access to expensive judicial, welfare and healthcare systems – to which this stranger has never contributed and may never contribute. For the developing world, the offer of such refuge is irresistible. For western taxpayers, it is ruinous.

It’s blithely accepted that asylum is widely ‘abused’, an eye-popping understatement. The preponderance of folks who claim ‘credible fear’ of political persecution are economic migrants coached by smugglers and gormless NGO worthies on what to tell the authorities. Hence we have scores of Muslims who’ve ostensibly converted to Christianity, whole cadres from socially conservative countries who are purportedly gay and entire boatloads of heavily bearded males who say they’re 15 years old. Why are we committed to this farce? Why should a sovereign country abdicate control over who enters its territory and usurps its resources?

Why should a sovereign country abdicate control over who enters its territory and usurps its resources?

The scandals are legion. An activist judge has determined that a family of six from Gaza can claim asylum through a programme established by Britain’s parliament to shelter Ukrainians. Oh, grand. Someone tell Trump. Clearing the Strip for luxury hotels? Just send all 1.7 million terrorist-indoctrinated Gazans to Stoke-on-Trent. Infamously, a criminal Albanian can now remain in the UK because his son will only eat British chicken nuggets. Likewise, a Pakistani imprisoned for sex offences gets to stay in the UK because deportation would be hard on his children – whom he’s legally forbidden to see without supervision anyway, since he’s a paedophile. In the US, millions of the credibly fearful who crossed the southern border under Joe Biden were provided immigration appointments up to a decade in the future – at which point they’ll claim to have made a home in the US and will never be forced to leave. Meanwhile, stories about disgruntled asylum seekers ploughing vehicles into crowds in Germany are becoming practically ho-hum.

In the UK, a Nigerian woman was denied asylum eight times in a row, but just won her case on the ninth try because she’d joined what’s regarded as a terrorist organisation in her home country. This is despite the judge’s acceptance that the woman had only joined Indigenous People of Biafra ‘in order to create a claim for asylum’. But never mind the sly ploy. What leaps from that story is the number of appeals she was allowed – and plenty of UK immigration cases entail the same multitude of foot-dragging court appearances. How much does trial after trial cost the public, including the asylum seekers’ taxpayer-funded lawyers?

Moreover, western jurisprudence enjoys no access to official records or forensic evidence in distant, chaotic countries. If an Eritrean who’s destroyed his passport says his father was murdered by his government, an immigration judge has to take his word for it.

Yes, yes, the Allies should have welcomed more Jewish refugees in the 1930s. But times change. Born of never-again resolve, the UN Refugee Convention and the ECHR evolved when international travel was costly and rare; there was no such thing as a frequent flyer programme. No one had invented the smartphone, with which villagers in Mali could hear from their brethren in Birmingham about their lovely free hotel thanks to the Home Office, or with which customers and people-smugglers could arrange journeys that now enrich criminal syndicates worldwide. Besides, if the West torched the asylum system, nothing would stop individual nations from exercising their discretion by expressly inviting, say, Ukrainians or Hong Kongers. After all, these same countries might also have invited Jewish refugees to seek protection during the 1930s and 40s, even without the formal international obligations we now seem stuck with.

We’re not stuck with these obligations. Employing the same independent agency that facilitated signing up to the asylum regime in the first place, sovereign nations can renege on asylum once the open-ended commitment has grown self-destructive.

Without asylum, would a few legitimate refugees fleeing political persecution be turned away? Doubtless. But countries that have suddenly gone from nearly zero to 20 per cent foreign-born in a couple of decades could build a sound moral case that they’ve already done their part. Why, the US has done its part many times over.

Granted, withdrawing the offer of unlimited asylum doesn’t sound very nice. Yet a functional state puts its citizenry first. Overwhelmingly, Americans and Europeans want to curtail mass immigration. Droves of poorly educated, low-skilled arrivals are diluting social cohesion, increasing criminality, depressing GDP per capita and costing the public hundreds of thousands of dollars, pounds or euros over their lifetimes. Why don’t our governments be nice to us? And if that means would-be righteous politicians feel less warm and fuzzy, there’s nothing warm and fuzzy about being a sucker.