Britain must follow Trump and embrace mass deportations

With Trump sweeping to victory in America and Europe lurching to the Right, Britain's Government is starting to look like the last Japanese holdouts after the Second World War.

The rest of the world has realised that many of the asylum seekers arriving in the West look a lot more like economic migrants than genuine attempts to flee war and peril; Sir Keir Starmer, meanwhile, is still mouthing worn-out lines about "smashing the gangs" .

Sir Keir's big speech on the importance of dealing with the issue was backed with about £75m in added funding for his Border Security Command; about 1.6pc of what we spend on supporting asylum seekers in the UK, or a little under four hours of NHS spending.

This isn't a serious commitment, because smashing the gangs isn't a serious policy; it's a slogan.

Small wonder people in the Home Office are sceptical about it: does the PM really think we'll disrupt networks operating in uncooperative countries across a continent with a budget of £150m over two years, and a hundred people in an office off Whitehall?

Will his pursuit really be so ruthlessly effective that gangs charging thousands for a place in a boat will dissolve without replacement? Or is the idea instead that a few announcements simply take the spotlight off the Government for a few days?

The gangs are not the cause of the problem, they're enablers of it. The fundamental issue is the UK's failure to address the factors that make the country so attractive to irregular migration.

The economics of this aren't hard to parse. People flow from areas where life is difficult to places where life is easier. The UK puts asylum seekers up in hotels, has a large and flexible labour market, a thriving shadow economy and exerts minimal effort to remove those with no right to stay here.

The result is a stream of people traipsing through safe, prosperous countries in Europe for a chance at claiming asylum in Britain.

And why wouldn't they? If you're sitting in France eyeing a journey across the Channel , you're likely to be well aware of two things.

The first is that if you dump your papers in the water and claim to be persecuted, you have an excellent chance of being granted asylum and the right to stay and work. In 2023, France accepted 31pc of the claims it received before appeals. Britain accepted 67pc, making 63,010 grants of asylum – 21,000 more than France, with 38,000 fewer applications.

No country in the EU with more than 20,000 total applications had a higher acceptance rate than Britain. Better still, with the Labour Party eager to clear the backlog, the direction of travel appears to be towards rubber-stamping claims in order to empty the asylum hotels.

The second thing you'll be aware of is that if your claim doesn't succeed, you can probably stay anyway.

The UK is believed to have the largest population of illegal migrants in Europe with up to 745,000 people living here without permission. If anything this number is likely to be a significant underestimate: it's seven years out of date and may have been low at the time; the Pew Research Center provided an estimate of up to 1.2m in the same year. Moreover, just 41pc of those turned down for asylum between 2010 and 2020 had been removed from the UK by 2022.

Better still, your chances of being caught working illegally are miniscule; we conduct roughly 11 illegal working enforcement visits a day across the entire country, against an old estimate of somewhere between 190,000 and 240,000 businesses employing illegal migrants.

Even if we had a list of which doors to knock on it would take us over 57 years to visit them all at our current rate. For every pound we spend on immigration enforcement, we spend £9 supporting and accommodating asylum seekers.

If Starmer and co actually want to smash the gangs, they should smash their revenue model. The best way of doing that is to take a leaf out of Trump's book and commit to a policy of mass deportation.

If you live here illegally or cross the Channel on a small boat, you end up on a flight home or to whichever third country will take you.

The long-term benefits could be significant. The Office for Budget Responsibility has calculated that low-skilled migrants arriving for work present a net cost to the taxpayer of £150,000 by the age of 65, £500,000 by 80 and over £1m by the age of 100.

Asylum seekers have no recourse to public funds, although are still accommodated by the taxpayer, given full access to state-funded healthcare, offered financial support for living expenses and enjoy full entitlement to education services. Once a claim is accepted, however, then entitlement to public funds flows with it, and the full set of expenses.

Meanwhile, people who originally came to Britain for asylum are far less likely to be employed than their UK peers — with an employment rate of 51pc compared to 73pc — and earn 55pc less per week, while reporting significantly higher rates of long-term health conditions.

In other words, we have a cohort of people uniquely positioned at the intersection of low fiscal benefit and high fiscal cost, coming across the Channel in significant numbers. The University of Amsterdam, for instance, has estimated that asylum seekers in Holland end up costing the state £300,000 over their lifetimes. Some will be genuine refugees and deserving of our support.

But even if it costs £100,000 to get one Channel migrant on the flight home before they retire, it would be more than worth it to deport those gaming the system.

Doing so may not be easy. The entire edifice of human rights law is essentially structured to strip control from politicians and ensure that the stream of people can continue to flow – see for instance Giorgia Meloni's recent judicial setback over her migration hub in Albania .

But the status quo is clearly intolerable. The will to reform a broken system designed to deal with the world as it was half a century ago is growing.