People smugglers aren’t terrorists, and “smashing the gangs” won’t work

Contrary to the impression you might get from Keir Starmer, smugglers are not the root cause of irregular migration. The reason people take small boats in the Channel is they have escaped from situations of danger and hopelessness in unstable, dangerous countries. The cause of irregular migration is the instability, wars, repression, persecution and total lack of opportunity that pushes people to need to escape. Smugglers are a feature of that journey being made impossible through formal means, and of every safe, rich country attempting to foist responsibility for asylum seekers onto its neighbour. Smugglers will continue to exist as long as there are things to flee and a series of closed border to cross before finding safety. Moreover: in the fantastically unlikely event all the people smugglers are detained, people will continue to try to smuggle themselves to the UK. All it takes is a dinghy and heartbreaking desperation.

This is because the UK immigration system might as well be deliberately designed to support the smuggling economy. The legal route of getting here is expensive beyond belief. Did you know, for instance, that if you marry a Briton you need to somehow obtain £63k in savings? Or make sure you marry a Briton who works a job that pays above market average. Or that it takes 5 to 10 years and at least £10,000 in fees to get a secure status here?

If you lack the above but need to find safety in a place where you already have family or speak the language (hi, British Empire), you may not have any options but irregular travel. That travel, facilitated by networks of smugglers that are sustained by Home Office policies, may costs much more than a plane ticket, but no flight company will let you board unless they’re sure you’ll be allowed to enter the country of destination. And often as not, this hefty fee can be paid through pooling the savings of families and friends, or through debt. This squeezes the resources of entire communities, desperate to send their loved ones to safety, while feeding the same networks that government after government claim to want nothing more but to smash.

“The UK immigration system might as well be deliberately designed to support the smuggling economy”

None of this seems likely to change under this Labour government. Treating smugglers like terrorists, as Starmer has declared we should, may sound impressive as a Daily Express headline, perhaps. As policy, it doesn’t and cannot achieve much.

But it does cause damage. It ups the ante, feeding the perception that thousands of asylum seekers per year - a minuscule proportion of the number of passengers legally arriving into UK airports every hour - is a serious security threat, rather than a totally manageable humanitarian issue. Even the Home Office civil servants tasked with setting up new “border security command” units are leaking to the press that they are as mystified as the rest of us as to what this is all actually likely to achieve. There has, after all, been an array of different initiatives and specialist units formed and disbanded in the Home Office to address this issue in recent years, and there seems no reason to believe this latest iteration will be a game changer.

At its best, Labour’s approach amounts to nothing much more than a rebranding of existing, failed policy. The problem is that refugees didn’t disappear then and are unlikely to do so now.

At its worst, this approach is likely to further erode civil liberties, victimise asylum seekers wrongly branded as smugglers, and provide an absolute godsend of a legitimacy boost for much more dangerous people than smugglers - the ascendant Far Right. This is becoming even more of a danger now, as centrist commentators appear bent on drawing all the wrong lessons from the role immigration played in the Trump victory stateside.  

It is true that immigration, and the perception that it is out of control, was a major factor in the US election. Trump won in part based on promises of mass deportations, egged on by outright racist lies and crude demonisation of asylum seekers, as criminals, rapists and murderers (of pets as well as people). This approach is already being picked up by the increasingly MAGA-styled political candidates and pundits of the right in the UK. It might work for them, to an extent. But it would never work for Labour, who will never seem credible when pilfering far-right talking points, and will always be easily outflanked by authentic nationalists. And either way, learning from Trump’s victory is not remotely as useful or applicable to Labour as learning from the loss of Kamala Harris - who likewise preemptively gave up on presenting her own, alternative, positive vision of immigration, and ran on a more anaemic version of Trump’s.

The Biden-Harris administration was carrying out deportations “24/7” under an “asylum crackdown” that was announced in June, and toughened yet further in September. A hard limit on border crossings enforced by the administration saw migrants, including families, no matter how desperate, summarily ejected without the chance to apply for asylum. Biden’s administration locked up tens of thousands of migrants per year in largely privately run immigration detention camps. Despite Biden and Harris dropping the long-term Democratic position of a pathway to regularisation for undocumented migrants, and focusing to the exclusion of all else on enforcement, the Republicans blocked his borders bill because nothing short of Trump’s mass deportations agenda  was ever going to be enough.

If both Labour and Conservatives run on a tough-on-migration message on 2028, who will come across as more committed? Who would you believe?

On the campaign trail, Harris promised not only to maintain, but to further expand Biden’s hardline approach, which human rights groups call an “asylum ban” – just like we called Suella Braverman’s Illegal Migration Act that barred people entering on small boats from having their claims processed here the same. Harris vowed to increase criminal penalties for border crossers, increase resource for the justice department to pursue smuggling gangs, bolster ranks of border enforcement agents, and introduce yet more drastic limitations on the right to asylum at the border. She lost on this platform. Labour’s platform is currently barely distinguishable from hers.

The US electorate did not reject an open, welcoming and positive campaign towards immigration in favour of Trumpist deportations. They never had that choice. They chose between two brands of politicians offering sealed borders, detention camps, and high-speed deportations – they just believed one side meant it more and was more likely to deliver. Now cast your mind to the UK. If both Labour and Conservatives run on a tough-on-migration message, who will come across as more committed? Who would you believe?

In the US, voters reached the obvious conclusion. The lesson here is that if Harris was right on immigration, then Trump was more right. If the border had to be sealed, migrants prevented from claiming asylum, and more funds spent on detention and smashing smuggling gangs – then Trump would do it better. Starmer’s Labour needs to accept that they will never be the face of the harshest possible border controls. Like Biden and Harris, they will find that, no matter how hard you crack down, people will always move and smugglers will always adapt, and the politicians to your right will always say that you haven’t gone far enough.

So, is this issue unwinnable for Labour? Not at all. It’s true they  cannot out-scream the Tories and certainly not Reform on this issue. But they still have two options.

The first is their approach in the two years before the election in July: downplay it. Talk about anything else, keep it in proportion, focus on public services and the cost of living where they are on more comfortable ground. That tactic made sense for a while, but it has become untenable. Especially since Trump’s win, the right will set the agenda on migration and the issue is simply not going away.

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The second option is harder, but it is the only one with a chance of success: Labour has to change the conversation about immigration and change the asylum system, radically.

We all can all agree that the asylum system is broken. A version of it with another expensive unit treating smugglers like terrorists in the Home Office simply isn’t going to cut it. Labour needs to offer radical change on this issue by the time of the next election. They have to change the story. Labour will always be seen as the party of higher immigration and more humane responses to refugees – why not maybe argue in favour of that, then? What if we heard as much positive about immigration as we do negative? What would the UK election debate - and our country -  look like in 4 years if Labour gave up the suicidal tussle with Conservatives to stop migration and build an immigration and asylum system that was safely accessible and demonstrably, actually worked. 

Thank you for reading. Our mission in these unpredictable four years will be to ensure democracy is tangibly rewarding to voters, and that Labour doesn’t repeat the Democrats’ mistakes. Please consider subscribing, or upgrading to paid if you are subscribed.