Labour are introducing a golden ticket for migrants

It is hard to think Britain’s asylum system could become ever more dysfunctional. And yet, not content with sticking with a broken system that should be entirely swept away, the government has discovered a way to make it worse. 

In keeping with Burnham’s new “safe and legal routes” as an alternative to Channel crossings, the government will soon allow communities, universities and employers to sponsor refugees to come to Britain.

The community and student sponsorship routes are opening first. So, approved NGOs and other “community groups” will be able to identify refugees they wish to bring over here. Because what our immigration system really needed was a bring-a-friend scheme.

Under the traditional Community Sponsorship Scheme, introduced in 2016, refugee families were identified for resettlement by the government and the UNHCR. Local communities could then volunteer to receive and support them. That at least distinguished between the decision of who should enter the country and helping those that had already been selected.

Now, as unveiled by Shabana Mahmood in June and fleshed out at Labour’s party conference last month, community groups will themselves be able to nominate individuals for admission. The Home Office will (in theory) have the final say, but the initial choice —and, with it, considerable influence over who enters the country — will rest with these groups.

The right to decide who enters Britain belongs to the British state, not to whichever charity has the Home Office’s ear

This is madness. The right to decide who enters Britain belongs to the British state, not to whichever charity has the Home Office’s ear. The opportunities for favouritism, nepotism and corruption are obvious. A well-connected individual with well-placed supporters will secure nomination over others facing greater persecution. Dodgy intermediaries may well demand money from families seeking sponsorship. Charities could become vehicles for bringing over relatives, associates or even political allies. It risks creating an entire system of private patronage. Britain’s borders are not a charity raffle with prizes for whomever knows the person dispensing the tickets.

And what are these ill-defined community groups? What if a mosque sympathetic to a hardline Islamist movement overseas sought to sponsor someone associated with that movement, presenting him as a refugee fleeing persecution? Would the Home Office investigate the sponsoring organisation’s ideological affiliations, overseas connections and relationship with its nominee? What if the individual had extremist sympathies but no criminal convictions? Let us leave aside the fact that the government couldn’t even properly vet Lord Mandelson before taking up our country’s most sensitive and important diplomatic post, and ignore their inability to vet Alaa Abd El-Fattah despite lobbying ceaselessly to bring him to Britain. Assessing the competence, finances, and ideology of thousands of sponsors will impose a potentially huge administrative burden and create a dispersed system the state is forced to supervise.

Where has this harebrained idea come from? Predictably there has been an energetic NGO campaign behind it. Citizens UK is one of the charities which has spent years lobbying ministers and parliamentarians to institute such a scheme. Charming hypothetical sponsors it lists for illustration include “a sports club welcoming an athlete displaced by conflict” and “a company employing displaced skilled workers” (aren’t these people meant to be here for their safety rather than a job?). It will be interesting to see how many of those given the golden ticket are those suggested by “a church supporting persecuted Christians” rather than Palestinians with a hearty dollop of anti-Semitism. 

Interestingly, Citizens UK launched its refugee sponsorship initiative in 2017 at the East London Mosque Trust. A natural choice, perhaps, given the mosque shares with Citizens UK a mutual trustee in Dr Mahera Ruby. Dr Ruby might wish to streamline her extracurricular commitments, given the East London Mosque Trust was last year served with an Official Warning by the Charity Commission for “failing to responsibly manage charity funds” following the loss of £1 million. But more to the point, suppose the mosque sought to sponsor named refugees under this new scheme. On what conceivable basis should an individual’s chances of admission to Britain be improved on account of enjoying the backing of a well-connected mosque? What is to say a sponsor’s interests do not diverge from the interests of the refugee? An NGO sponsor might want a compelling campaigning story that will make for good copy on the charity’s website. That does not necessarily correspond to greatest humanitarian need. If nothing else, it is morally grotesque. The #BeKind brigade is bringing in a system in which the desperate have to patiently queue while the sponsored get a side entrance into the country.

There are myriad other unanswered questions, including as relate to the ability of companies to sponsor. Aside from the obvious question of why the government is introducing economic selection criterion into a system meant to be all about humanitarian protection, what happens when employment ends? Does the individual — purportedly in desperate need of humanitarian protection — retain permission to remain here, or is their immigration status tied to the employer? Could unscrupulous businesses exploit it as an alternative to conventional work visas? Chicken shops and Turkish barbers have never had it so good.

And what of sponsor dependence? Someone whose entry into Britain has been facilitated by a particular organisation may feel beholden to it. What safeguards will be in place to prevent pressure to provide slave labour or political loyalty? I could go on. 

What is motivating this? The government argues that sponsorship will provide safe alternatives to dangerous Channel crossings, improve integration and reduce the financial burden on the taxpayer by transferring some responsibilities to private sponsors. But Shabana Mahmood has betrayed her suicidal empathy and ideological fervour in her pronouncements on the subject: “We want to provide sanctuary to those in danger. We want to be a Greater Britain, not a littler England”. Community sponsorship is, she says, her “preferred model” for the future.

We should be dismantling the entire rotten asylum system and starting again. That is, of course, too much to hope for from this Labour government. But one would think that at least they would hold true to the idea that the strength of your humanitarian need, not the quality of your contacts, is what dictates your ability to come here.

Instead, by creating a system in which admission to Britain depends less on the desperation of one’s plight than on the strength of one’s connections, the government has managed to undermine the entire moral case for asylum. And if sanctuary is in fact no longer about protecting those in greatest need, but rather just about whom a well-connected charity or prospective employer happens to favour, why are we doing it at all?