With the British Tories promising to “Stop the Boats” by implementing their Rwanda policy, the Irish government leaving open such a possibility and the far right in Ireland agitating for a similar policy, Stewart Smyth, analyses examples of the policy in other jurisdictions. He shows the policy is a continual failure, but hugely profitable for private companies, and allows governments whip up anti-migrant sentiment.
Newly elected, far right agitator, Gavin Pepper’s first statement to mainstream media was a line he’d been working on: “In my opinion there’s two types of politicians here – there’s the Gavin Peppers and the Gavin parrots, because whatever I say, they say the following week”.
Landlord supporter and partitionist, Pepper was talking about what is commonly referred to as a Rwanda policy. This is the policy being pursued by the Tories in Britain, where asylum seekers are to be transported to Rwanda, while their claim is being processed.
Officially the Tories say this policy is a deterrent, to stop the small boats crossing the channel from France. In reality, they are using migration as a distraction from their disastrous domestic policies, including the catastrophic premiership of Liz Truss.
The Tories have been in power now for nearly 15 years. In this time, workers’ real wages have actually fallen by £4.50 per week; the number of food banks have gone from less than 100 to 2,800; child poverty has increased by 700,000, to 4.5 million children. I could go on – huge increases in the working poor, increased homelessness and rents, raw sewage in the waterways and on the beaches, increased waiting lists in the NHS, and on and on.
Faced with this litany of policy failures, Rishi Sunak turned to anti-migrant rhetoric and a pledge to “stop the boats”.
What is the Rwanda Policy?
The Tories announced this policy in April 2022, with an agreement with the Rwandan government that certain migrants who entered Britain through dangerous routes and had previously been in a safe country, could be moved to Rwanda and have their claim for asylum processed by the Rwandan government. The asylum seekers would be held in centres in Rwanda while their claim was being processed, all paid for by the British government.
The first flight leaving Britain for Rwanda under this policy was set to go in June 2022, with just seven people on it. In the end the flight never took off due to an injunction issued by the European Court of Human Rights.
Then last year, the British Supreme Court upheld a decision that the policy was illegal, because Rwanda is not a safe country. The specific grounds for the decision were that Rwanda’s poor human rights record; including serious and systematic defects in its asylum processing; and that similar agreements had led to asylum seekers being deported back to their country of origin, thus putting them at risk of the circumstances from which they originally fled.
Undeterred, earlier this year, the Tories went and changed the law, deeming Rwanda to be a safe country and restricting the basis for appeals against that law in general. But even with this draconian approach the Rwanda policy has still not been made effective. In part because a High Court judge in Belfasthas ruled that the policy undermines human rights protections guaranteed under post-Brexit arrangements.
From the EU to Israel to Australia
However, it’s not just the Tories in Britain who are up to these sorts of schemes – Israel had a similar policy with Rwanda between 2013 and 2018. However, it was cancelled in April 2018, after international criticism, domestic protests and a number of asylum seekers were illegally moved across the border to Uganda.
The EU are in the process of adopting a new Asylum and Migration Pact, as Niaṁ Ní Mháille wrote about on Rebel earlier this year. This pact will make Rwanda-style policies much more evident, but the EU already has similar agreements in place with Turkey and with Libya. These agreements are aimed at maintaining the walls of Fortress Europe, and paying for migrants to be held outside by regimes who have a history of human rights abuses (see Turkey and Libya). Amnesty International reported on Libya, stating
Refugees and migrants, including those intercepted at sea by EU-backed coastguards and armed groups, were subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, extortion and forced labour; thousands were forcibly expelled without due process.
However, it is the experience in Australia that is probably closest to what the Tories are proposing. Between 2013 and 2021, the Australian government detained an estimated 3,000 refugees in the Pacific Islands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the policy as abusive where “Individuals and families with children spent years living in substandard conditions in these centres, where they suffered severe abuse, inhumane treatment, and medical neglect”. HRW estimated that the “annual cost of detaining a single asylum seeker in Papua New Guinea or Nauru is A$3.4 million (US$2.5 million).
Numbers and Costs
All this brings us to the question does the policy work? On the basis that the aim of the policy is to reduce the numbers of migrants and asylum seekers – the answer is no. UNHCR shows the number of displaced peoples across the globe continues to increase, with the numbers of refugees under its mandate increasing by 50% in the past 5 years.
Does the policy deter the use of dangerous routes – here there is little evidence one way or the other. The experience in Australia was that the use of “pushbacks” for boats arriving in its territorial waters significantly reduced the numbers coming through that route – only for the numbers arriving by air to increase by almost exactly the same amount.
What is more certain is that the policy is hugely expensive. In Britain it is estimated that the Tory government has already spent £240 million on the policy and not one person has been moved to Rwanda. This is expected to rise, over the next five years, to £370 million. We have already seen the huge costs involved in the Australian scheme.
However, there is a group of people who are very happy with this exorbitant expenditure – the shareholders in the private companies that run the detention and off-shore processing centres. Take Paladin, an Australian company who ran the Manus Island centre. The company which previous to being awarded this contract had an income of less than $1 million a year, ended up with a contract worth over $500 million.
Alongside the questionable securing of that contract, Paladin presided over appalling conditions on Manus Island, leading one campaign group to state,
Between May 2018 and October 2019, Paladin was fined 5,484 times with penalties upwards of $5.8 million for performance failures. In 2019, substantial evidence of some staff abusing detainees, including children, came to light. Over 70 detainees also reported suicide attempts or incidents of self-harm.
Other companies that benefit from locking up innocent people include Canstruct, Serco and US prisons operator, MTC.
This highlights the very essence of capitalism that there are groups and companies who are willing to profit from the most vulnerable – those fleeing war, poverty and persecution – whether they are human-trafficking gangs or multi-national corporations.
Protests
Amidst these horrors, those detained in the offshore processing centres have sometimes organised resistance including protest. In 2014, there was three days of rioting on Manus Island, with left one refugee dead and 77 injured. However, the spark for the rioting was a brutal attack by the local police. For the previous month detainees had been holding daily protests calling for the processing of their asylum claims to begin.
The night before the police attack over 30 asylum seekers broke out of the centre, which led the PNG police to deploy a mobile attack unit. This is but one example of the resistance the detainees in these centres have organised.
Diverting the Anger
What we can say about Rwanda-style schemes is that everywhere they have been tried, they have failed. Further, they do nothing to address the causes of migration, are hugely expensive and represent a big transfer of public money to private shareholders. This is money that could be spent on building homes, employing healthcare workers and special needs teachers.
All a call for a Rwanda-style policy does is divert working class people’s anger away from our own failed government and onto people seeking refuge from the horrors that exist in too many parts of the world. We need to challenge this strategy and expose it as a sham.
Socialists need to be clear and principled arguing that refugees are welcome here and that we need to evict FF/FG from government.
