Belonging in Britain: Rwanda asylum plan forces reckoning with UK's racist immigration policy

Bryn Evans • May 7, 2024

Chapter Tags: Law, Politics

This article builds on a 2020 piece written by the author for the Palatinate newspaper.

Over the past several months, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has handheld his Rwanda asylum plan through a legal obstacle course and into operation. First devised in April 2022 under then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the highly criticized plan allows the Home Office to ship some individuals identified by UK authorities as illegal immigrants or asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing. None would be permitted reentry to the UK, even if asylum claims were eventually successful. Prime Minister Sunak, whose parents were born in India and immigrated to Britain after living in East Africa, explained that the Rwanda asylum plan would both directly reduce numbers of illegal immigrants in the UK and indirectly act as a strong deterrent for potential “small-boat migrants”—a term that denotes groups of migrants who often arrive in the UK via the English Channel in undersized boats, 75% of whom come from Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Eritrea, or Albania.

Since its inception, the asylum plan has been firmly opposed by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, which posited refugees “should not be traded like commodities and transferred abroad for processing.”

In November 2023, a unanimous UK Supreme Court judgment found the plan was unlawful: shipping migrants to Rwanda would put them at real risk of being returned to their respective home countries and subjected to human rights violations, an outcome known as refoulement. This could put the UK in breach of its international and domestic law obligations of nonrefoulement. The Supreme Court also expressed concerns about conditions in Rwanda itself, noting that as recently as 2021 the UK government had criticized Rwanda for “extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture.” However, the UK Supreme Court does not hold the same constitutional powers as its American counterpart to strike down legislation, meaning this judgment only placed non-binding political restrictions on Parliament.

In March and April 2024, the House of Lords, England’s upper house of Parliament, repeatedly refused to sign off on the asylum plan’s implementing legislation without further safeguards in place. After the legislation ping-ponged between the two houses of Parliament for months, the House of Lords eventually withdrew its objections under pressure from Sunak's Conservative Party leadership. In late April 2024, the government pushed through its legislation to operationalize the Rwanda asylum plan.

A history of racist and exclusionary policy

It is not the first time that the Conservative government has foregone a court judgment in the name of deporting people. In February 2020, the UK Home Office—the government department responsible for immigration, security, and law and order—ignored a Court of Appeal judgment, deporting 17 foreign nationals to Jamaica on the grounds of public safety. The deportees were deemed a threat to the public on the basis of their criminal records, which range from offences against the person, to drug-related crimes, to manslaughter. The Home Office threatened dozens more with deportation between 2020—2023, but cancelled many of the flights after further legal action and public backlash.

The February 2020 deportations were particularly inhumane because of the deep, longstanding relationship most deportees had with the UK. In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Michael McDonald, one of the individuals who was removed from the initial flight due to a last-minute legal challenge, talks of his arrival in the UK at age nine and how his entire family now lives in the country. On his crimes, he explains: “It’s true, I committed a drug-related crime for which I was sentenced to 20 months in prison. But although I made a mistake, I’ve served my time in prison. I shouldn’t be punished for ever.”

Almost all Jamaica deportees called the UK home and had lived in the country since childhood. Whereas the Home Office labelled them foreigners in the UK, Jamaica was the foreign country to them, especially for those who, like McDonald, no longer have family there. Having served their sentences, many questions arose as to why the government chose 2020 to revoke their settlement rights and deport them as aliens.

Partial answers to these questions are found in the UK establishment’s basic approach to British identity. Use of divisive ‘British’ and ‘un-British’ labels by the UK government spans centuries, taking root in early colonial years, when a deep belief in British supremacy informed the UK’s leading role in slave trade, Indigenous genocide, and the systematic erasure of foreign cultures. Although major strides have been made on the integration of non-white people into British society since the peak of colonialism and imperialism, a pervasive ‘us’ and ‘them’ narrative still imbues immigration policy.

The Windrush Scandal is a recent manifestation of past exclusionary and racist policy. Throughout 2018, hundreds of Caribbean-born British subjects who had arrived in the country as children were repeatedly denied state benefits, detained, and in 83 cases deported due to the Home Office’s mismanagement of their landing cards. Although invited to the UK from the Caribbean to supplement the depleted workforce following World War II, when it came to evaluating belonging after 65 years of living in the country, British authorities chose again to label the Windrush generation foreigners.

In the years following Windrush, evidence has surfaced that British post-war immigration law was intentionally exclusionary. An unnamed Home Office historian recently wrote a 52-page paper analyzing a damning government report that officials repeatedly attempted to suppress, explaining in the paper: “during the period 1950—1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK.” The historian continues that British officials in the 1950s held a “basic assumption that ‘coloured immigrants’, as they were referred to, were not good for British society,” and that today, the “politics of Britain’s borders, which have been administered for more than a century by the Home Office, are now inextricably connected with race and with Britain’s colonial history.” Indeed, even come 2021, a freedom of information request showed that rates of deportation from the UK following the commission of a crime were significantly higher for Nigerian, Ghanaian, Vietnamese, Albanian, and almost all Caribbean individuals than the average.

The cruelty of the Rwanda asylum plan, in context

In 2022, then-Home Secretary Priti Patel said the Home Office was working to become “a more compassionate and open organisation.” In practice, more compassion and openness seems to have meant a shift in the Home Office’s focus, from vilifying long-standing BIPOC residents to harshly deterring new immigrants under its Rwanda asylum plan. After all, if BIPOC people are not allowed to establish a relationship with the community in the first place, there are arguably less practical and emotional arguments against sending them away.

However, the Rwanda asylum plan presents a fresh and troubling gamut of problems for the Home Office. Firstly, as the Supreme Court found, Rwanda cannot be relied upon to honour the international obligation of nonrefoulement. While cozy with Western leaders, Rwandan President Paul Kagame is an autocrat who restricts both political and media freedoms, meaning assurances that Rwanda will stringently uphold its end of the bargain by protecting the rights of refugees and asylum seekers are far from written in stone.

Moreover, Rwanda has its own pressing political controversies that threaten deportee safety—not all of which are intimately understood by British politicians—such as an ongoing war with forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When pressed on how the UK government would ensure that a DRC national seeking asylum in the UK is not deported to a hostile military environment in Rwanda, UK Minister of State for Crime, Policing and Fire Chris Philp did not even know whether Rwanda and the DRC were separate countries.

The economic side of the asylum plan has equal concerns. In addition to a one-time payment of up to £3,000 per person that the UK government will pay only to voluntary deportees, British tax dollars will also fund food, housing, and healthcare for both voluntary and forced deportees for up to five years after their arrival in Rwanda, costing up to £139,874 per person—an estimated £63,000 more per person than keeping migrants in the UK. The UK government plans to send 5,700 people to Rwanda in the first year of the scheme, which could result in a bill of nearly £800 million, all to keep people out of the country. By contrast, the Conservative government committed £640 million in 2023 to support the unhoused population within the UK.

Lastly, beyond human rights and economics, a third dilemma faces the Rwanda asylum policy: hardline immigration policy is unlikely to be an effective deterrent for migrants. After studying numerous real-world examples, Oxford University’s Migration Observatory and development thinktank ODI concluded that deterrent-based immigration policies have “small” or “no” effects on migrant behaviour. In fact, even the Home Office in a 2020 internal report expressed skepticism of deterrent policies and acknowledged that “many asylum seekers have little to no understanding of current asylum policies.” When a family has spent months and thousands of pounds travelling countless miles to escape persecution or other difficult circumstances, it is unlikely that a policy change at their destination will have them turn around. Simply put, to subject migrants to detention and an intercontinental transfer following such a harrowing journey is cruel.

What lies ahead for the government and its asylum plan

So why is the UK government going forward with the Rwanda asylum plan in spite of a condemnatory Supreme Court judgment and evident flaws? In short, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has staked his leadership on this anti-immigration plan working. Despite expressing reticence towards the plan two years ago while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunak now needs a political win in his new position. Haunted by the ghosts of three other scandal-ridden Conservative prime ministers in the last two years, and facing major losses in May 2024 local elections, Sunak has rid himself of past moral quandaries and chosen to double down on his Tory leadership campaign promise to “stop the boats.”

It remains to be seen whether the Rwanda asylum plan can redeem Sunak and the Conservatives in the public eye. Historical sentiments of British supremacy over foreigners have transformed into modern fear and mistrust of foreigners, which often manifests in support for protectionist policies; Sunak’s Conservatives believe that their asylum plan, like the Brexit "leave" campaign, will palliate that public fear. Still, although 52% of the population believes immigration should be reduced, Sunak may have overestimated the lengths to which Britons feel comfortable going to reduce it. Polling suggests that public opinion is now staunchly divided on the Rwanda asylum plan, a shift from the general support when the plan was first announced in 2022. Recent mass arrests of potential Rwanda deportees have sparked protests, including the blockading of buses carrying deportees, while numerous human rights groups have initiated legal challenges to the plan’s legislation.

Ultimately, what becomes clear is that despite a change in focus from deporting long-term residents to deterring new migrants, British immigration policy has not become more compassionate, as the Home Office suggested it would. Political rhetoric is littered with the notion that immigration threatens the British way of life: in April 2023, then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman, herself a second-generation Briton, suggested that small-boat migrants were “at odds with British values.” Yet, these “British values” she quotes undeniably include justice, tolerance, and compassion. Perhaps it’s time that government officials took a page out of their own book and adhered to the values they so cavalierly throw around on press day.