December 10, 2024 - 7:40am
The last thing Labour needed, after a difficult few months, was an international development that thrust the spotlight onto the UK’s refugee system. But in the long-postponed collapse of the Ba’athist dictatorship in Syria, that’s exactly what Keir Starmer has received.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy has suspended asylum claims from the country, as have several other Western nations, citing concerns that the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government could spark a fresh wave of migration into Europe.
That is a real danger — at least until it becomes clear what the new government in Damascus looks like. While the Assad regime has consistently brutalised the Syrian people, there are some groups — most obviously the Alawites, who enjoyed a privileged position in Ba’athist Syria — who could be persecuted.
Whether or not Labour can sustain such a pause is another question. If the new Syria does end up sending fresh waves of refugees to Europe, the current immigration regime has no mechanism for refusing those it deems to have legitimate claims.
But another, even thornier question is what to do with the almost 30,000 Syrian refugees who are already here. Since the civil war broke out in 2011, the UK has accepted the vast majority of claims from people fleeing the country. More than 27,000 have arrived in Britain during the period, and last year a full 99% of all claims filed from Syria were accepted; as of the autumn there were just over 6,500 outstanding claims awaiting processing.
Under the official logic of the asylum system, the vast bulk of those claims will now be, as Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick has put it, “baseless”. They were fleeing persecution by the Ba’athist regime, and that regime has fallen. Work ought to, therefore, begin on building a pathway for their return to Syria. But will it? One can already imagine the objections, not least of which is that Syria may well remain a dangerous and unstable country even after Assad’s government is formally replaced.
Yet while that may be true, it dramatically lowers the threshold for claiming asylum. The original inspiration of the system underpinned by the Refugee Convention was the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews — i.e. the systemic and organised targeting of a particular people.
It was not merely that their country of origin was unstable, or poor. If the de facto test becomes whether or not someone would enjoy a higher quality of life in their home country or the West, the system effectively becomes what sceptics have always feared: a backdoor immigration pathway.
More compelling, although not necessarily less complicated, will be the situations of people who have built lives here. A refugee who arrived in 2012 has been in Britain for over a decade: many will have made friends and settled down. It would be understandable, on a human level, if leaving all that to go and “rebuild Syria” weren’t top of their Christmas list.
But, again, the difficult question of what the asylum system is for raises its ugly head. Refugees are granted access to this country — and to an awful lot of welfare support too — on certain conditions. They are allowed therefore to bypass the normal immigration system, with its (bare-minimum) requirements to support yourself financially and strict limits on recourse to public funds.
That is much easier to justify when it is a completely different, conditional, and ideally temporary arrangement. Indeed, creating a hard line between refugees and normal immigration would almost certainly help to maintain broad public support for taking in asylum seekers: only a very small share of the public is completely opposed to the UK admitting genuine asylum seekers, as the widespread support for the Ukrainian scheme showed.
The calculation has to change, however, if someone who comes in as a refugee can in fact simply bypass the normal immigration standards and settle here forever at public expense. But will Labour see that? If not, ministers should consider the example of Brexit: when politicians double down on an unreformed status quo, they just increase the risk of that settlement collapsing altogether.
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SubscribeEvery refugee whose protection is withdrawn (due to the reason for its having been granted falling away) and who is eligible to be sent home/removed from their current host country should have the right to apply for long-term residence or citizenship in the host country if they want – subject of course to the regular requirements that anyone else should have to go through.
Everyone else/the people who are rejected for long-term residence and citizenship need(s) to leave. Asylum was only ever meant to be temporary – western European nations have simply let it turn into a long-term possibility because there were no large-scale programmes to (for example) send home Chechens or Bosnians after their countries were deemed safe.
That omission was a big mistake.
Now we’ve seen what long-term integration problems that causes and now our own systems (health, housing, education) are creaking and overburdened, that state of affairs finally needs to end.
It’s going to be a bureaucratic nightmare to reassess asylum claims/applications for long term citizenship from former beneficiaries of international protection – but we have to be tough.
I read yesterday that 89% of Turks now want Syrian refugees want to go home now/soon and I rather suspect the levels of support for returns is about that high in other western European countries who have taken in a lot of them. When you have that support among the populace, returns programmes aren’t going to meet a lot of resistance.
I’ll tweak your suggestion slightly to say that all Syrians granted asylum on the ground of oppression by the Assad regime should be invited to apply for work visas, or be resettled in Syria.
While the U.K. has the Human Rights Act in place giving the ECHR rulings more authority than our own courts, any Syrian that has had a wife and child while in the U.K. will be able to stay under the “right to a family life”. That specific example aside, no-one who wants to stay will be short of other legal opportunities provided by the criminal (lawyer) gangs.
How many of these refugees are Christians.
Nobody should arrive in this country and claim asylum unless they have come directly from their country of origin. Should they arrive via another safe haven they have no legal right to claim asylum here. The only legal route is to apply for asylum either directly from the country of origin or a designated safe haven for refugees in a neighbouring country.
As a nation we take in legal asylum-seekers from across the world. We might take more; we could legally take fewer. We take more from countries with an historic connection to Britain, because we feel a responsibility to do so; we are also happy to help. Our country should welcome as many of those who are seeking asylum legally as are economically and socially reasonable; those who are not legal claimants, arriving without permission, should be made instantly to feel humanely, but clearly, unwelcome.
Syrians who have arrived legally should be assessed on their legal reasons for having claimed asylum; if it was persecution by the Assad regime then it is no longer viable; if it was was religious persecution by the majority population they may still have a valid claim. Thos who entered illegally have no claim at all and should be put on the first flight back, ignoring the legal-right crusaders who seem to be attempting to divide and destroy our ordered society.
“there are some groups — most obviously the Alawites, who enjoyed a privileged position in Ba’athist Syria — who could be persecuted.” The Alawites in Syria were always persecuted until the French took over and, using the good old divide et impera trick, gave them a prominent role in the security services, a role that continued after independence, but which ended last weekend.
So expect lots of Alawis in the rubber boats of the future. But at least the Alawis are allowed to drink alcohol, so they won’t be as miserable as other categories of immigrants that one could mention.
I hope asylum will be granted to the Syrian Christian, Druze and other minorities, and women, who will be targeted by al-Jawlani and his terrorist gang. Videos circulated yesterday showing the sharia-lovers mocking and attacking Christians. And, considering how many separate factions are battling for control in Syria, from those sponsored by Turkey to those armed by the Pentagon, bloody civil war may break out. The prospect of Syria turning into another Afghanistan, where women are now entirely without any medical care (Afghan males will not treat female patients; women have been thrown out of medical schools; women are not allowed to speak at all in public or to one another; so offering treatment would result in undoubtedly horrific public), or Iran, where women are murdered for not wearing hijab and gays are hanged from cranes, is all too possible. This is an incredibly unstable and fast-evolving situation – and of course, we need to protect ourselves from the ISIS-inspired criminals who seek to harm us from within, who may be heading our way.
Hard to imagine why anyone would downvote your comment.
In my opinion one of the most criminal acts of betrayal by our mainstream news media (broadcast and print) is how it has refused to focus in any depth – if at all – on the horrific, institutionalised abuse of women and minorities under many islamic regimes, most especially Afghanistan. They daren’t for it might betray inconvenient truths to the public who are already accused of being criminally “phobic” about the seemingly politically sanctioned and determined islamification of Europe.
It has always puzzled me why in an era of unprecedented progressive liberalism many European countries enabled the rooting of such a monolithically conservative, deeply illiberal and ultra patriarchal religious ideology into their societies with absolutely no demands made upon it that it should also change and evolve as our own cultures had been forced to. Blair famously claimed that he was determined to purge this country of the forces of conservatism – he clearly didn’t include islam in that remit, quite the contrary.
The other day I learned about the practice of Bacha Bazi. Please look it up. You will find an article was posted by the BBC back in 2010 when mainstream journalists still dared.
I took your advice on the Bacha Bazi practice and looked it up. I wish I hadn’t.
I’m so sick of the moral relativism performed by the MSM.
All cultures are not equal. And I’m growing ever more disgusted by those who play that game.
Of course this could go either way – a magnetic pull back to one’s home country, or a rapid deterioration after initial euphoria, like occurred in Libya & Iraq, with a slide in ever more violent sectional conflict with people fleeing. However given a key route out is via Turkey who supported the rebels, there is hope Jolani et al will be moderated and civil society given the breathing space it needs.
Author didn’t mention approach Denmark had recently adopted, which was on reading a surprise. Denmark revoked residency for an initial small Syrian cohort indicating it was safe enough for them to return, and this was before the recent events. The principle behind the Danish approach though had drawn both plaudits and critics. Much as one would expect. But they weren’t budging on the principle – asylum may be time-limited.
Any sensible politician will hold back for a while before pronouncing because if events in Syria moved that fast they can do so again. The UK ‘pause’ make sense. I suspect Starmer and McSweeney, will be hoping both a natural gravitation home and events support a move in direction of Danish approach.
I suspect now many will claim to be whatever minority you need to be in order to stay. In reality many asylum seekers are now economic migrants.
All, actually.
Could, should, won’t
People who had come here as refugees or asylum seekers have never been obliged to go back if their side won.
But anyone of Syrian origin who wished to live under anything like the regime of Abu Mohammad al-Julani and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham should be given every assistance to go to where that was now the order.
And we could take the Christians.
Syria ceased to be a one party Baathist state in 2012, as a response to the civil unrest and Arab Spring movement. . While other parties were permitted, no religious parties were allowed.
How about:
A person granted asylum often jumps the queue in an immigration system because he is (supposed to be) fleeing for his life and the country of arrival should be the first country that offers a safe place to temporarily stay. “Temporarily” could be a long time.
When the danger passes, the asylum grantee should return to his home country, or if it is not hospitable or practical, then residency becomes permanent. Naturally each asylum granting country would have its own rules regarding what is “hospitable” or “practical.”
I think I might be fair to require those who do not wish to return, to compensate the state for services (healthcare, accommodations, welfare and perhaps education) through increased taxes over a period of time.
An important caveat: Asylum grantees convicted of felonies get deported upon conviction.
Lololololololololol…..rotfalmfao….lolololololol
Of course not.
Great gag. Emphasis on “gag.”