Alexander Bowen: Ten reasons why you can deport people to countries that won’t take them

Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

 I was asked recently, after the news emerged that Pakistan looked set to refuse to take back its nationals who were involved in the appalling grooming gang catastrophe, what is it that you could do, in practical terms, to force compliance with removals and more broadly what is it you could do to stop the small boats numbers going forward given we now know the role of illegal migration in facilitating these horrors. For it I compiled ten points and – without sounding like a WatchMojo.com list – I have listed them below.

1. I said before that you could copy and paste Australia’s 2024 Migration Amendment Act, a law introduced by Australia’s Labor Party, that allows Ministers to designate countries as a “removal concern country” banning almost all new visas for citizens of said countries. But you needn’t copy and paste anything – Sections 70-74 of 2022’s Nationality and Borders Act already give the Secretary of State the powers needed but seemingly nobody has been willing to use them. Starmer ought to use them as he hinted he might last week, and the Conservatives need to demand he uses all means possible to remove dual or foreign national perpetrators of the grooming gang catastrophe. It’s one of the clearest ways to apply pressure, targeted disproportionately at a country’s governing class, whilst having minimal impact on Britons and reduces new migration in the process.
2.  Though it’s likely to be less successful given Britain’s relative size, with Britain’s newly independent customs regime it could look at the recent American strategy of using tariffs to extract deportation cooperation. Afterall it worked virtually overnight with Colombia. Tying in foreign aid as Robert Jenrick has proposed could help but is unlikely to do much given the money is directed largely at good but superfluous projects. Ultimately then using a combination of existing anti-terror and anti-money laundering laws (anyone remember Landsbanki?) to limit remittance flows through targeted regulation of provider companies is likely to be far more effective. Now that so much of the cut foreign aid budget is spent domestically, the £10bn a year outflow in the form of remittances (with just UK outflows being worth 3 per cent of Somalia’s GDP, 2 per cent of Ghana’s and 1 peer cent of Pakistan’s) is perhaps the most powerful financial tool left. Coordinating with the EU here could genuinely offer value too given their experience in dealing with states like Gambia, where 9 per cent of its economy is remittances, and that routinely refuses to take back its citizens from Europe apart from when mass-pressure is applied. Pour encourager les autres, and to stop terrible precedents being set, a clear EU/UK example may need to be made of a state.
3. Forcing returns is one thing, but as anyone in health or climate circles would tell you “a pound of prevention is worth an ounce of cure” and that means dealing both with supply (the actual ability to come) and demand (the desire to). To start managing that desire, at least as it concerns illegal migration, doing what the UK has been told to do a dozen times by the French would be a good start – actually regulate the labour market and the gig economy in particular. Labour’s 200 page Employment Rights Bill does much to (poorly) regulate the labour market but nowhere in those 200 pages do they deem it fit to even mention the digital economy – yet resolving migration will require eliminating the exploitative practices like ‘account substitution’ that allow people banned from work to work. Deliveroo & Co of course say they are dealing with it, yet anyone who has been on one of the dozen or so Facebook groups where account rentals are advertised can see they have not. Until the gig-companies are made just as legally responsible for employing illegal workers as any other business, and the Facebook groups are used to scrape enforcement data, nothing will change.
4. Australia’s bipartisan scheme for managing illegal migration and small boats still remains the most effective policy devised globally. The Pacific Solution and Operation Sovereign Borders, that ensured as Kevin Rudd said that if you enter Australia by small-boat you will never under any circumstances be able to remain, eliminated in months the demand. As Sarah Gall demonstrated on this site, you can visually see and measure the policy’s success. 25,000 illegal arrivals to near 0 in just over a year. The UK tried its own version of this with the Rwanda scheme yet it ultimately never got off the ground after vexatious legal challenge after vexatious legal challenge – yet it could have and was starting to be a success. There is now a sort of inevitability to offshoring schemes and the Conservatives should commit to restoring and enhancing Rwanda but with a key difference – intercepting the boats and prohibiting them from docking in the first place. Immediate localisation to Rwanda not removals to. Opening up a limited asylum route, once the large backlog has been removed, that can be claimed only at embassies ought to go hand in hand.
5. Another Tory policy that needs amending is Section 19 of the Immigration Act 2014 which already regulates the use of Article 8 of the ECHR (‘the right to family life’ which in practice has been used to mean whatever the ECHR wants it to mean) through inserting a public interest standard (stating for instance that “the deportation of foreign criminals is in the public interest”) against which Article 8’s interpretation needs to be balanced. Yet two huge exceptions are carved into it for people in a relationship or who would find it difficult to integrate into the place they were deported to – these are the kind of exceptions that have led to ridiculous cases like not being able to deport a paedophile because paedophilia is stigmatised. Tightening up Section 19, and adding similar interpretational rules for Article 3 of the ECHR (degrading punishment) would be a practicable low-stakes resolution. Both would be in keeping with what France has increasingly been doing too. Providing some sort of ‘serious harm override’, like Finland has been slowly working towards, requiring the individual perpetrator’s welfare to be completely subordinated in the most serious cases – gang-rape for instance – could absolutely be inserted.
6. In a similar vein an amendment to the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 to make asylum and deportation claims based on unfalsifiable information automatically inadmissible could absolutely move ahead. Fear of stigma, cultural dislocation, mental health, threats, political opinions, or religious conversion (short of becoming a priest) are all unfalsifiable. That is to say they cannot be proven, nor can they by and large be proven wrong, and as any scientist could tell you an unfalsifiable claim is an irrational one. The law ought to be amended then making it clear that irrational claims have no basis in what ought to be rational judicial decisions – no more damascene conversions. Where falsifiable information like age or nationality is admitted it should only be where proven by the individual. Asylum claims have to be based on trust but it has become clear that trust is being abused.
7. On the same hand rewriting Section 80 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act to replace European rules on safe-country of origin lists (essentially a default preference for claiming asylum) with an unsafe-region of origin list (one aligned with the FCDO’s travel advice for instance) would be a good step forward. Until recently the average European country’s SCO list included only 15 non-EU countries (the UK’s equivalent includes only 1 non-European state) thanks largely to silly standards that in practice require states to be democratic and mean that for instance the US is not a safe country given the death penalty. The European Commission has expanded its list by 7 additional countries in the last few months, and member states are going further, yet the UK’s has not been updated since April 2024. Automatically updating it is not enough – replacing it with an opt-in not opt-out default and regionalising it (so not every region of every state is treated as equivalent) would massively reduce the ability of people to argue general persecution when they mean general poverty (which whilst terrible is not grounds for asylum). Joining this list up with FCDO travel recommendations could help rectifying the silly situation of Brits holidaying in places the Home Office would argue were deeply unsafe. In the same regard, joining up government data so that if someone is granted asylum then holidays in the country they ‘fled’ then their permit is automatically revoked.
8. Automatically prohibiting seeking asylum when on certain types of visas could have the same sort of effect. 40,000 asylum claims are filed a year by people who already have a UK visa – about half of which come from students – and are to any neutral observer obviously fraudulent or as former Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw termed it “a racket”. Yvette Cooper wants to introduce checks yet this sounds like more of the same – doing nothing. An automatic prohibition seems to be the only way to stop the kind of situation that Canada is currently facing where vexatious claims come in exponentially growing friend clusters and where claims seem to oddly track the end of their existing permits rather than changes in the country they are claiming asylum from.
9. It is often said that there’s no such thing as a pull factor or more bizarrely that people seeking asylum have no idea welfare systems even exist. This is typically supported by the same two sociologists who conducted a dozen interviews and present it as compelling evidence – yet we know this view is provably wrong. As I profiled for the ASI, Denmark ran its own experiment and found out just that. It created a policy called Start Help that essentially cut welfare in half for non-EEA migrants, then abolished it, then reintroduced it. As silly as this process was, it allowed us to prove something important. That a one per cent reduction in benefits reduced relevant migration by 1.53 per cent. Cutting non-citizen welfare and making ‘no recourse to public funds’ actually mean no recourse to public funds should be a priority – but it needs to cover benefits in kind including social housing which if provided in for example London can add up to a half million pound transfer at the expense of young Brits. For illegal arrivals that do still come, temporary aid should be conditioned on cooperation with removals enforcement.
10. Finally, though potentially controversial, a comprehensive agreement with the European Union seems to be the best way to not just prevent but pre-empt illegal migration. Historically, we’ve seen how closely correlated illegal entries into the EU have been with entries into the UK (a 0.75 correlation) but in recent years that correlation has broken down as Frontex has got a grip of its problem, recording 35 per cent cuts in illegal arrivals whilst the UK failed to deal with its own problem and is on track to break records (2024 saw a 0.4 correlation, and 2025 is likely to fall even further). With the UK incapable of controlling its own frontiers, having the EU do some of it may be the best step forward. A deal getting the UK a seat on the Frontex Management Board (like Switzerland, Schengen, and Ireland, non-Schengen have) and that creates a situation of full information sharing (joining for instance EUROSUR) so the UK could automatically block people who have had claims rejected in other states could help significantly. It’s likely something would have to be traded off for it, yes, but if the terms are more visas for high-skilled culturally similar overwhelmingly fiscally positive Europeans in exchange for stopping the channel crisis then that is a deal well worth taking. The biggest mistake of the last few years was treating all migrants, EEA and non-EEA, as fungible and it would be wrong to repeat that going forward.