EU, UK govts embrace dangerous 'externalising solutions' for migrants fleeing 'devastating crises'

1 year ago

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00:00From there to what is going on in the Channel Sea, it is one of the

00:04biggest challenges that the British government has vowed to get on top of.

00:08Successive British governments, as they come into power, stopping

00:11smuggling gangs from constantly profitable trade and ever-continuing

00:15trade of illegal boat crossings from France to the UK over the Channel

00:19waters. One that has seen the former Conservative party deeply divided

00:24over, its policies almost exploded internally within, plans to stop

00:29illegal stowaways, smugglers routes, claiming it would improve after

00:32Brexit. It didn't. The numbers increased. The Rwanda plan then became

00:35a thing. Sending migrants there, it didn't get off the ground. Huge

00:39legal challenges. The new Labour government are in power. The scale

00:42of that problem, the danger is ever-present. Eight people dying

00:46overnight, trying to cross from northern France in a poorly inflated

00:50rubber boat, packed with around 60 people. A familiar story now. We are

00:55going to speak to two people who know this issue deeply in just a moment.

00:59First, let's hear some of the promises, the rhetoric and the

01:02fallout with different British Prime Ministers over the last decade. We

01:08have already spent money erecting the border fence around the port at

01:12Calais. We are putting in place the border fence outside the tunnel. The

01:17French are sending an extra 120 police. Everything that can be done

01:21will be done to make sure our borders are secure. The point I would

01:25just make to people thinking of making this journey, one, it is very

01:29hazardous. You may think the weather looks great, but it is a very

01:32dangerous thing to do. The second thing is, we will send you back. I

01:35can tell people what I will do with them. I will put them on planes to

01:39Rwanda. 300 years? What will you do with illegal migrants who come from

01:43our country? What will you do with them? It is a simple question. What

01:48will you do with them? They need to be processed at the moment.

01:53Conversation that is still continuing. Labour is now, in fact, as we speak,

01:58the Prime Minister is preparing to go to meet Giorgio Maloney in Italy.

02:03Let's go and talk to two people who have looked at this issue on a wide

02:07level across Europe. Andrew Geddes is in Florence, director of the

02:11migration policy centre at the European University Institute in

02:14Florence. Great to have you on the programme, Andrew. Also on my left,

02:18we have Sally Hayden, journalist at the Irish Times in Dublin. All-World

02:22Prize-winning author, many more I know, Sally, including the prize of

02:27Ireland. My fourth time we drowned is the book, Seeking Refuge on the

02:32World's Deadliest Migration Route, which focused on the Central Med

02:36route. Let's start with you, Andrew. Just listening to that

02:41conversation, the outgoing, well, the last Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and

02:45Keir Starmer, where do you stand now on what you think Labour are doing and

02:50whether they have a sense of controlling the issue? Well, what

02:56they're proposing or what seems to be inflated at the moment is looking at

03:00the schemes adopted by Italy and what Italy is doing is intercepting people

03:04that see and sending them to Albania. Italy has not actually done anything

03:08to, no people have been sent to Albania at the moment, but what the UK

03:12government is continuing to look at is efforts to what could be called

03:16externalise the issue. So I think that that is, and we look across Europe

03:22and European governments have consistently sought this approach, which

03:25rather than granting territorial access to people who maybe need protection,

03:29is to look at externalising solutions, which essentially consign people to

03:34very dangerous conditions in non-EU member states. And so I think that

03:41seems to be the direction of travel with the UK government at the moment.

03:44Sally, when you listen to the rhetoric, I mean, we had a quick potted

03:48history of 10 years, I think we can go back to probably 20 years of Calais

03:54and crossings, but actually that increase, what do you make of the way

03:58the British government has, governments over the past have tried to handle

04:02the issue, having been there over the years yourself to Calais and wider

04:06routes around Europe too? Yeah, sure. I mean, I haven't reported so much

04:11in Calais since 2015, 2016, 2017. And at that time, I remember speaking

04:18to people who were trying to reach the UK, getting in trucks or getting

04:21in trains. And I actually asked people at that time, you know, what about

04:26boats? Like, would you ever consider trying to cross by boat? And they all

04:30said, no, it's way too dangerous. And so the fact that people are now

04:33making this journey by boat, I think shows how desperate they are and how

04:37impossible other routes have become. And yeah, I get frustrated, I have to

04:43say, kind of seeing the rhetoric around this as painted like a kind of UK

04:49French issue, you know, because actually we really need to look at the scale

04:53of the crises that are happening around the world. And I can talk about this

04:56for ages, but obviously we're on TV, so we don't have a lot of time. But I

05:00read that the survivors of this latest tragedy come from Eritrea, Sudan,

05:05Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iran. All of those countries have absolutely

05:09devastating crises happening right now, either regarding war, famine, or

05:14repression, you know, and crackdowns on opposition, crackdowns on freedom of

05:20speech. And without centering, without focusing this debate on the wider

05:24issues and the wider reasons why people are fleeing and the scale of the

05:28suffering and those crises, you're really missing most of the actual

05:32picture. And I think that's been one of the problems with these kind of

05:36political rhetoric, the way that politicians speak. It's not actually

05:40looking at the fact that the crisis doesn't go away just because you say,

05:44you know, we want to stop the boats or we want to tackle the smugglers or

05:49whatever. Like smugglers are fulfilling a need. They're fulfilling the need of

05:52people who have no other ways to get to a safe place.

05:57Andrew, is that a point that Sally raises there, the idea that this has

06:01just become, you know, a movable, flowing difference to a cat and mouse

06:06game? It started, you know, go back to eight years, 2016, when we were

06:10talking about the trains, you know, back of stowaway trucks as well, Euro

06:14Tunnel, that changed suddenly to the boats. Now that is a lucrative model.

06:18So the platform became Stop the Boats from the Conservatives and Labour

06:21talking about Stop the Smugglers Gang. That's their big thing. Now, if we

06:25look at it as a British-French issue, and Sally said it's far more

06:29complicated because of what's going on around the world, but to stop the

06:33gangs, when you hear that, is that a feasible method that the Labour

06:37government can actually find is achievable?

06:42Well, it's a powerful slogan and politics, the politics of immigration

06:46has been dominated by powerful slogans, which has often led to unachievable

06:50objectives. If we look at it, we can go back across the world, and the

06:55word, I think, summarises many of the attempts that we're seeing at the

06:58moment is deterrence. There's a continual doubling down on policies of

07:03deterrence. But what that often does is force people into more difficult and

07:07more dangerous routes. And so the problems, in a sense, become worse.

07:11The journeys become more life-threatening. The underlying root

07:15causes, the drivers of people seeking refuge across Europe remain powerful

07:20and constant. And so the rhetoric, in a sense, is significantly divorced

07:27from some of the underlying factors which are causing people to seek

07:31refuge in Europe. And I think that what's happening at the moment is

07:35evident on a global scale in the world's major destination countries,

07:39which are seeking to deter people. And effectively what they're doing is,

07:43through the policies that they're pursuing, is turning what used to be

07:47asylum-seeking pathways or people's right to seek refuge into forms of

07:52illegal or irregular migration. In a sense, we see this irregularisation,

07:56illegalisation of migration becomes more and more difficult to secure

07:59territorial access to Europe. But that doesn't mean that the problems go

08:03away. The people who find themselves subject to extremely difficult

08:07conditions in their countries of origin, who then try to move, find it

08:11almost impossible then to secure access to Europe and, in a sense, fall into

08:14the hands of the smugglers. Smugglers are really the symptom of a much

08:18deeper underlying set of issues. One thing that's worth saying, because you

08:23talked, Sally, about something that goes back to 2016, trains and

08:27stowaways. There was a sense, I think, at the time that there was some

08:30level of success, if that's the right word, that the British government

08:34had managed to ensure there was better policing to start to clamp down on

08:39that problem. I'll give you an example of just perhaps the scale but also

08:43the ease to France 44 viewers and those watching of actually some of the

08:49boats and the success they've had at the moment on the shores. Go back a

08:52few years, 2018. I was investigating this and, like Sally, I spent years

08:56doing documentaries on the problems in Calais. I went to a random beach,

09:02four o'clock in the morning, it's close to Dunkirk. By 4.30, I watched two

09:07massive boats coming to shore, 80 people on board, children on board,

09:11tiny children. We had a decision to make. We called the police because

09:15clearly if something happened, like we heard overnight, eight dead, what's

09:18going to happen? Within two hours went by, the police didn't turn up. There

09:22was no sign of them. So the argument sometimes from the British government

09:26is that this is also a policing issue. Yes, there are wider factors and a

09:29lot of people in the UK would probably think a similar thing. Both of you,

09:33and Sally first, from your experience of covering this, how much of a factor

09:37perhaps could improve with better coordination between policing? I mean,

09:43I think that generally when we hear the word success used by politicians or

09:48by authorities, that coincides with repression and abuse and human rights

09:54abuses of people who are trying to seek safety. And my reporting

09:58specifically has focused on the central Mediterranean. But there, too, we've

10:02heard politicians talking about success. And at the same time, they're being

10:05implicated in likely crimes against humanity when they force people back to

10:09Libya and back to places where they're tortured and locked up and starved and

10:14abused in many different ways. And I think, again, yeah, what we're lacking

10:20is safe and legal routes. And we're lacking empathy as well. And we're kind

10:25of basically dehumanizing people. We're silencing their voices, the people

10:30making these journeys. You know, even the term, even the word migrants, I think

10:34is kind of a distancing tactic so that we don't have to see the tragedy that's

10:38actually happening. And I'm really kind of exhausted by the fact that, you know,

10:43instead of we're talking about policing, instead of talking about the fact that

10:46in Sudan, for example, there's been war since April 2023 and more than 10

10:52million people are displaced.

10:55You're quite right. In al-Fashr at the moment, there's a big issue in the

10:59Sudanese armed forces accidentally shooting one of its own infantry bases

11:04trying to push off against the rapid support force there. But we talk about

11:09this often. We've had guests on this. The issues you quite rightly say are much

11:13wider than that. And I guess for the British government challenge and why we

11:16talk about policing, and I looked at this like you, Sally, in depth, is all

11:21their measures that allow for, yes, we can talk about the government and

11:26policies of legal routes, but to stop an illegal route, Andrew, is Sally right

11:31that you shouldn't look at policing or is actually, are they right to try to,

11:35for the sake of the lives of people trying to cross, try to improve that

11:38situation?

11:40I suppose there's a number of aspects to this, one of which is that I suppose

11:44one of the things that is very corrosive of the politics of immigration is that

11:47for many people looking at the events that they witness in the channel, they

11:50don't see a system. It appears chaotic. It appears that governments have kind

11:54of lost control and that's a very difficult position for governments to be

11:57in. So an aspect of this would be around coordination, which would try to

12:02involve some coordination around border security and border cooperation, but

12:06that cannot be the only aspect of cooperation that takes place. Cooperation

12:10needs to be on a much broader footing at the borders where people in vulnerable

12:14positions need to be protected. That requires some consideration of how the

12:18UK and France could offer some protection for those who are clearly in need of

12:21protection. Many of the people are coming from countries where they will have

12:25valid claims for protection and that does need to be recognised. That needs to

12:29be part of any response as well as the issues around cooperation on border

12:33controls, which probably are necessary if in relation to kind of public support

12:38and public consent for the policies that governments are willing to pursue.

12:41But only focusing on police cooperation is a very narrow way of looking at

12:46these issues. It is, and I think in the context at the moment where, and Sally

12:50picked up on it, you know, we're dealing with a lot of governments that are

12:53centre-right or right-wing or even further than that, where one of the

12:57biggest issues in Europe right now is migration, that conflation between

13:01migrants and problems at home, criminality, and these issues that become,

13:07well, we saw protests over the summer in the UK, at the centre of that, the

13:11places where people, migrants, were staying. Sally, you and I and Andrew can

13:16have these conversations over the years and you must feel like others do, like I

13:20do sometimes, that you can have these similar conversations but we're in a

13:24similar position, if not worse, later. How do you see to the prognosis of this

13:29migration situation in the Channel, particularly, and across Europe too, of

13:34the next six months to a year or so? Getting worse or do you think

13:37governments can start to get a handle on it? Are you optimistic about

13:41Kyostarma, for example? Yeah, I mean, again, the way that you're phrasing

13:46this is like you're saying that success is like stopping people or repressing

13:50people more or kind of causing a greater crisis. No, I think it's more

13:54stopping, it's stopping the deaths at sea and it's stopping problems of

13:58asylum centres, migrant centres being full, it's stopping that, the risk that

14:04people have to take to their lives, isn't it? I think success will be in

14:08terms of people not dying and the smugglers' routes, well, not profiting

14:13on people's lives, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I think until we recognise that

14:18there's a global inequality crisis that so many people are suffering and that

14:22you can't not feel the ripples of that suffering, even if you're in a

14:26privileged country or a rich country, even if you're in a country like the UK

14:30that's exploited a lot of the world for centuries, you know, now erecting

14:34borders and keeping people out, it doesn't work. And yeah, I'm a

14:39journalist, I don't propose specific policy, but I do say, you know, we need

14:43to actually look at what the reality of the situation is and only by looking

14:47at the channel and not by looking at the broader global situation, you're not

14:50going to see that reality and you're not going to really understand how, you

14:54know, spending money on securitisation and all of this, it's going to

14:58exacerbate the oppression and the suffering and the desperate measures

15:02that people will go to. Sally, good to talk to you. Sally Hayden and

15:06Andrew Geddes as well in Florence. Great to have you both on the programme.

15:10Thank you so much.

EU, UK govts embrace dangerous 'externalising solutions' for migrants fleeing 'devastating crises'

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