May 17, 2024 - 7:00am

Late last month, Rishi Sunak made headlines by insisting that his government would not accept the return of illegal migrants from Ireland until the United Kingdom had secured a similar deal with France. It has now been reported that, just months previously, the UK took back 50 migrants who had been intercepted by the Irish police.

Sunak’s comments in April were in response to a growing row with Dublin, which alleged that the advent of the Rwanda scheme had brought a huge increase in immigrants crossing the land border from Northern Ireland into the Republic in order to avoid the prospect of deportation.

It was always an open question as to whether or not this would actually happen. The Conservatives’ recent history is not convincing when it comes to successful stands in negotiations with Europe in general and Ireland in particular — as the recent unravelling of Sunak’s promises about the vaunted Windsor Framework attest. Further complicating matters, it turned out, is that Ireland wasn’t asking for a new returns agreement, like Britain is with France, as the country already has one.

This week’s news isn’t an insurmountable barrier. As the Government pointed out when the Prime Minister made his pledge, the current deal isn’t legally binding. In theory, London could pause it at any time.

But having it already operational, with all the procedures and bilateral connections in place, will make it that much harder in practice to do so. Civil servants cannot force ministers to sign a new treaty, but we have seen time and again that they are more than capable of outmanoeuvring their political masters when it comes to the detail of implementing immigration policy.

According to MPs I’ve spoken to, for example, that is exactly what happened with Tuesday’s awkward report from the Migration Advisory Committee on the graduate visa, which the Prime Minister is under growing pressure to crack down on.

The MAC has been consistently scathing in its assessment of this policy. The Committee advised against introducing it at all in 2018 and as recently as its last annual report, in December 2023, was saying that “we expect that at least a significant fraction of the graduate route will comprise low-wage workers. For these migrants, it is in many ways a bespoke youth mobility scheme.”

Yet this week the MAC came out against scrapping the graduate visa — much to the delight of the university and immigration lobbies, which were quick off the mark to say that “the MAC has changed its mind about the international student route”.

But it hadn’t. The reason it gave a different answer is because it had been asked a different question. The parameters of the review ordered by Home Secretary James Cleverly explicitly included maintaining the current number of international students; the MAC’s chair has said that had it been asked instead about whether the graduate visa brought in highly-skilled people, the answer would have been different.

Given that this review was ordered with the intention of creating political space for the Government to act ahead of a general election, it’s an extraordinary misstep to have set its terms in such a way that it could only do the opposite.

But as one MP explained it to me, the “centre has been outmanoeuvred on this”, both by Whitehall forces that back higher numbers and the university lobby, whose concerns over its bottom line dominate the MAC’s report.

This is not a promising start, given that it now falls to Cleverly, no hawk on immigration, to order and then enforce any ban on accepting migrant returns from Ireland.


Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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