That this House has considered Government policies on migration.
I am grateful for the opportunity to debate this area of policy, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for finding time and granting this debate. Few policy areas generate as much unwanted noise as migration, and my aim in securing this debate is to have a reasonable, rational, evidence-informed discussion on the impact of the Government’s migration policies. Those policies are also looked at individually, whether that is Brexit and the impact of the end of freedom of movement, asylum, or other areas of immigration. I am grateful to the Father of the House and the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for co-sponsoring this debate. They both bring considerable expertise to this area, and I am looking forward to their contributions.
We are living in a world that is characterised by increased, near-constant movement. Goods, capital and services are increasingly unburdened by borders. One central pillar of the globalisation that we have been living through over the past 40 years or so is that human beings have to some extent also become units that can be moved around the world to enable profit. For decades, cheap labour and trained labour has been used here to lower costs and keep things going, and while we withdrew almost entirely from vocational training, we have seen increased immigration. For many working-class communities, their experience of immigration has been a form of wage suppression.
This is one of the most complex areas of policy that we encounter, cutting across several Departments and dividing public opinion. Specifically, we must begin to take a more focused look at the evidence of policy impact. Why has net migration hit a record high, and what will its impact be? According to the Office for National Statistics, net migration stood at 606,000 people in 2022, with 1.2 million people arriving. Of that number, 925,000 were non-EU nationals. Those numbers include refugees under the respective Ukraine and Hong Kong schemes, but that growth has slowed over the past few quarters as the impact of those two schemes decreased. Despite that record number, the Government continue to say that net migration will decrease. That is what successive Conservative Governments have said since 2010, but despite such promises, no decrease has ever been achieved. That huge gap between rhetoric and reality is borne out by the figures. Net migration stood at 256,000 in 2010, and is now 606,000. That is the reality of the situation.
The Minister will stand up and try to say that the Labour party voted against all the Bills that claim to address those increases, but the reality is that none of that legislation has achieved the Government’s stated aims. Net migration has increased, small boat crossings have increased, and the asylum backlog has increased, and all that is because the increased movement of people, and increased migration, is a reality of the modern world.
My hon. Friend mentioned the increase in boat crossings, but overall the number of people coming over the channel, not just in boats but in trucks and through other irregular forms, has actually decreased over time, has it not? The problem, partly, is that other regular forms of entry into this country are being tightened and people are prevented from them, which forces many people into dangerous forms of migration.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point and share his view on the need for legal and safe crossing routes to this country. I look forward to hearing other contributions on that point.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world are displaced from their homes because of climate, poverty, famine, drought and conflict. Many more seek a better life as economic migrants. We must acknowledge that reality and engage with communities here at home that have understandable concerns about the effects of that increase on their ability to buy a house and access health and education services as well as what those increases mean for the public purse.
It is impossible to understand the ruptures in our politics over the last decade without thinking seriously about immigration as a social, political and economic issue. One of the biggest causes of the Brexit vote was a response in many working-class committees to being told that nothing could be done about the forces of globalisation. The mass migration of people around the world will continue, but our immigration system can be managed more effectively, can be more efficient and can be more humane. I believe that our politics needs to put more emphasis on addressing the root cause of some of the concerns that people have about the impact of immigration on suppressing wages and placing pressure on housing stock in local communities, if we are to continue to live in the open, tolerant society that we all wish to have.
There are some areas that we can address to improve the migration system for all involved. I want to use my time to discuss three such areas: visa costs, labour shortages and backlogs at the Home Office. On visa costs, the total minimum cost of the current 10-year settlement route for an adult with indefinite leave to remain stands at £12,836.50. For families, that is extortionate, with fees paid for each individual, including children. Those punishingly high fees force many applicants into debt. While there is a clear need for the visa system to pay for itself, in some cases the cost of visas stands many times higher than the administrative costs of processing them. To take one example, the fee for in- country naturalisation stands at £1,330, yet Home Office figures show that the unit cost for facilitating naturalisation stands at just £372. While those eligible to apply for a fee waiver may do so, applicants cannot apply for a fee waiver for indefinite leave. That makes little sense, especially for those who come to work in our NHS or social care. I would appreciate the Minister’s views on that. Will he look at giving them the opportunity to apply for a fee waiver? The substantial visa cost does not include ancillary costs such as legal advice, translation services and the enrolment of biometric data.
The cost of housing asylum seekers is huge. There is no ability for local communities who might believe they could do it cheaper and better in alternative forms of accommodation to draw down money. The Home Office has paid huge amounts, often to corporate organisations, even though local organisations would be able to do it better. Giving asylum seekers the ability to draw down that money on an individual or a community basis, and allowing communities and councils to organise accommodation, would at least help to alleviate some of the trauma that people face in Home Office hotels.
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s point, and I hope that this debate is a space for exactly those kinds of ideas so that we start to see improvements in the system.
Delays seem to be worse in the asylum system, even as the Home Office chooses to be selective, applying service standards to other types of application, such as for naturalisation or further leave to remain. The backlog on so-called legacy cases has started to fall very slightly. However, the Prime Minister’s commitment to clearing the backlog will not be met at the “current pace”—not my words but those of the Home Secretary.
There have been smart moves to address the huge backlog. For instance, last week, the Government quietly dropped the two-tier refugee system introduced in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. That is a perfect example of the Government very quietly replacing a noisy, reactionary policy with one that has more chance of being workable. It is also illustrative of the desperate need for a coherent and honest long-term strategy in this area.
We all want a migration system that works for all our constituents, those seeking asylum and those wanting to work or visit our country. I am grateful for the time to put some of my thoughts on the record.
As a co-sponsor of the debate, I thank the Backbench Business Committee, and I echo virtually everything said by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden). We debate immigration quite a lot in this Chamber, but mostly the latest disaster or controversial piece of immigration legislation. Occasionally, it would be good to look at how we can fashion immigration policy that suits all of us, in the round and over the long term, in so much as it can.
Perhaps the title of the debate should be “Governments’ policies on migration”, because it is not just about this Government: all Governments have problems with migration. It goes up and down. This is an attempt at a measured debate on an issue where we often do not have measured debates, so I am grateful to the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton for starting the debate in a very measured way.
The subject is topical, but when is immigration not topical? The net figure of 606,000 people coming to the UK was recently announced, but it is always a mistake to be guided by a net figure, and it is certainly a mistake to have a net migration target. The problem with a net migration target is that we have control, in as much as we do, over only one side of the equation; we have no control over the number of people who choose to leave. If a Government are running the country so brilliantly that nobody wants to leave, clearly the number of people coming here is going to outstrip the number of people leaving. It is a something of a false figure, which I will come back to in a minute. We know the figure is so high because of certain groups of people who are here for very good reasons.
The latest figures on small boats are catching up with last year’s figures, as we discussed with the Home Secretary at the Home Affairs Committee yet again yesterday. Recent forecasts from Italy predict that 400,000 people will seek to enter Italy from Africa this year, which is four times the level of 2022. Some 80,000 people have entered so far this year, and that figure was from a few weeks ago. Obviously, that will have an impact on the rest of Europe, including the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister recently attended a European Political Community summit in Moldova, which discussed more transnational approaches to migration; we need to see far more such approaches.
I congratulate the hon. Members for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden), for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) and for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on securing this debate. I was pleased to support their bid to the Backbench Business Committee. I hear the call for reasonableness and rationality in this debate, but I hope they will understand if I also express a little frustration.
My office has dealt with more than 1,400 immigration cases in one form or another since 2015. I have sat in my constituency surgery while people have pulled out their biometric ID card that says “No right to work” and “No recourse to public funds.” That is humiliating, disheartening and inhumane, and it speaks to everything that is wrong with the Government’s policies in this area.
The Foreign Office spends millions of pounds a year on an advertising campaign proclaiming “Britain is Great” in glossy aeroplane magazines, expo pavilions, embassies and visa processing centres. Although the advertising says “Britain is Great,” the message from the Home Office is that Britain is closed: closed to the ministers of religion who want to come here to provide cover in parishes and faith communities while local ministers have a holiday; closed to the women’s rights activists from Malawi who are invited to speak at all-party parliamentary group meetings in this House on violence reduction and economic empowerment; closed now to the families of international research students at some of our finest universities; closed to German rock bands that just want to play a few gigs and meet their fans before going home.
Britain is closed to interpreters who supported UK forces and companies in Afghanistan. Sometimes it is even closed to people who hold UK passports and who worked in our NHS but, because they also happen to hold a Sudanese passport, have been told they are not allowed to come here. It is closed to students who have won Chevening scholarships; closed, unless people are willing to pay hundreds, and sometimes thousands of pounds in processing fees and ongoing costs for visa renewals and access to the NHS, whether or not their visa allows them to have a job and pay into the tax system.
Anyone who doubts that that is the Government’s position should just look at their obsession with setting arbitrary net migration targets and then the repeated failure to meet those. Where did they even come from in the first place? Who decided that we needed a net migration target of 100,000, rather than 110,000 or 95,000? Perhaps it was just picked out of thin air because it sounded good. Rather than make the positive case for growing our population and workforce, the Tories sought to play to the lowest common denominator, trying to out-UKIP UKIP or various other outfits on the hard and far right.
Meanwhile organisations in commerce and industry across the country are desperate for staff. Some days it seems that just about every bar, restaurant and retail outlet in Glasgow has signs up saying, “Staff wanted”. Crops are being ploughed back under the earth because farms cannot get enough help, and NHS backlogs are literally costing lives as staff leave to work in other countries. I hear from the academic and cultural sectors that people are put off even applying to come here because the attitude is so restrictive. All of this simply diminishes the UK in the eyes of those institutions and the wider global community. The Government proclaim, “Britain is Great” but then allow their outriders and Back Benchers to raise the prospect of the UK joining Belarus and Russia as countries that have withdrawn from the European convention on human rights.
It is also worth reflecting briefly that the net migration figure is just that: a net figure, which, at least in theory, counts the number of people who emigrate from the UK. For centuries, people have left these islands to make their homes overseas. Sometimes they did so violently, forcing indigenous communities off their ancestral lands and destroying ancient ways of life. Sometimes they did so as the result of violence: people were cleared from the highlands to make way for sheep, or they were in search of pastures where crops would not be devastated by disease and blight. Even today, people seek sunnier climes or different opportunities and experiences, and are often welcomed in a way that is not necessarily reciprocated on these shores. Brexit, of course, has made this so much more difficult now. The very process of getting through the airport in many European countries takes longer and can be more complicated, let alone the effort of studying or getting a job, or putting down roots, as generations over the past 40 years had been able to do so easily.
What an interesting choice. Aha! But there is no choice, as the first choice is always the Father of the House.
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Further, it is not just the substantial financial cost that presents a challenge. Repeat applications, which take an increasingly long time, must be made. Such applications are not subject to a service standard, and applicants are also subject to a default “no recourse to public funds” condition. That has an obvious detrimental impact on applicants, causing them stress and placing them in a form of bureaucratic purgatory. Surely it does not have to be this way.
A joint report by Praxis, the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, which are all organisations that do hugely valuable work in this area, highlights that if applicants had the option to apply for longer blocks of leave—for example, five years instead of two-and-a-half years—applicants’ stress and anxiety and Home Office caseworkers’ workloads would decrease. That would go a considerable way towards guaranteeing security for those who may have already lived and worked in the UK for a long period of time.
On costs, the Home Office could cap them at the administrative cost only, or grant an automatic fee waiver to those who have had their “no recourse to public funds” condition lifted. These are all little measures that could make a big difference.
I have heard the Immigration Minister say in this House on several occasions that the UK visa service is now meeting or exceeding every one of its service standards, but that means nothing if, as we currently see, many applications are not subject to those service standards. Will the Minister commit to introducing a service standard for all applications to improve performance? Will he also indicate what recent steps his Department has taken to simplify the visa application system and lessen the administrative burden on both applicants and caseworkers? It is clear that there is so much to be done in this area.
Labour shortages in areas such as health, social care and hospitality can only be described as hellish across the UK. Sector after sector tell us that they need more access to skilled staff and they simply do not have that access at the moment. The impact of the shortages is obvious. They act as a drag on our whole economy, holding back prosperity and reducing the quality of life for people across the country. Shortages affect productivity and public services and neither can be improved if we do not fill vacancies. The Recruitment and Employment Confederation estimates that, if labour shortages are not addressed, they will cost the UK economy a staggering £39 billion a year. That is a catastrophe and the Government must not allow their rhetoric on reducing net migration to act as a barrier in addressing that huge fiscal black hole.
Increasing access to skills training and education will go some way over the years to improving labour shortages, but we must also look to migration. Employers have long decried the onerous, bureaucratic and time-consuming nature of recruiting staff from abroad. While employers should make every effort to recruit locally, the Government should not act as a roadblock, stopping local businesses such as restaurants and other businesses across the hospitality sector, the NHS or social care from recruiting the staff they need from further afield.
Local businesses tell me of their frustration. They do not understand why, after Brexit, after leaving the EU and the end of freedom of movement, now we are in control of our own borders, we are not using that control to allow UK businesses to recruit to prosper and grow. It is clearly in the public interest to have a thriving visitor economy. For Liverpool, it makes up more than 50% of our economy. It is a matter of life and death that we have a properly staffed national health service and address shortages in social care. As it stands, the Government are sticking to their line that they must keep net migration down, but I think they should shift to look at how we can use migration policy to address the labour shortages. Many measures have been introduced in the form of a temporary exception to the skilled worker criteria under the points-based system and the introduction of a specific visa for seasonal agricultural workers, but workforce challenges are clearly not being solved. The Government must go further. I am aware that the Migration Advisory Committee recently launched a call for evidence on reform of the shortage occupation list. I urge the Government to heed its calls when they arrive.
Finally on labour shortages, why have the Government not moved to allow asylum seekers the right to work? There is support from both sides of the House for this policy change. Refugee Action highlights that the ban currently costs the public purse around £500 million a year. All available evidence, including the Home Office’s own leaked report from September 2020, refutes the Government’s argument that enabling asylum seekers to work is a pull factor. I have met many people residing in my constituency seeking asylum who also want to contribute to their new communities and are desperate for the right to work and to earn a living.
All these issues are made much worse by delays in the Home Office’s decision making. My caseworkers frequently encounter cases with almost indeterminate delay. Although they try to make progress through the UK Visas and Immigration hotline, often responses are non-specific, unhelpful and sometimes contradictory.
To give just one example, one of my constituents applied for asylum in January 2019. She completed her interview in the same month and was referred to the national referral mechanism, as she was identified as a potential victim of trafficking. In November 2021, a positive conclusive grounds decision was reached on the case—in other words, she was identified as a victim of modern slavery or human trafficking. The nearly three years of waiting for a decision were difficult for her and her children, not knowing where their future may lie.
In February 2022, my office was told by the Home Office that my constituent would receive a decision on the asylum part of her claim within six months. That created an obvious expectation from my constituent. But when six months had passed, she informed me that no decision had been forthcoming. After my office notified the Home Office of that, we were told there was no timeframe for a decision, despite the previous commitment. My constituent’s solicitor then issued the Home Office with a pre-action protocol. The Home Office committed to an asylum decision by 1 May. No decision came on 1 May. We wrote again to the Home Office, and I am still awaiting a response. Four and a half years have passed since the initial application, and nearly a year since the Home Office committed to making a decision. That case is not an anomaly; it is one of many I could have chosen to illustrate the point. I would appreciate it if the Minister’s office could reach out to mine to discuss just a few such cases that would greatly benefit from his intervention.
More widely, backlogs are now a well-known aspect of our migration system. They are a feature, not a bug. The Minister has hinted that a quick decision-making process would act as a pull factor again. However, among other issues, that ignores the huge cost of asylum accommodation in the meantime. I would appreciate it if the Minister could provide clarity on this point in his closing remarks.
Most of us would agree, alas, that the migration system is pretty broken, has been for some time and shows little chance of getting fixed any time soon. It has been largely characterised by a series of short-term crises: a record number of people on small boats coming across the channel; the overwhelming of processing centres such as Manston; the fact that 9,000 of the 15,000 Afghan nationals who were legally, and quite rightly, airlifted from Kabul almost two years ago are still inappropriately housed in hotels; the pressure on hotel accommodation; the shortage of labour in the hospitality industry, the care sector and other areas, which the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton mentioned; the Windrush scandal; and pressure on the Home Office, which is a fairly dysfunctional Department. All of that gets conflated into the single issue of an immigration crisis.
However, the issue is not just about irregular immigration, but about regular migration levels and about how we decide the skills we want, how we hand out those visas —I entirely concur with the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton about the overpricing of visas in many areas—and how we fashion our points system. We need workforce planning and we need to consider the sustainability of how we deal with the increased population, including the pressures on homes for people who have already lived here for some time. The whole sustainability issue and the availability of services is hugely complex.
I want to touch on three main areas: irregular migration, migration policy for planned migration and the global issue, which will probably be the biggest single challenge that we and many other western nations will face.
First, on irregular migration, we know the figures. We know there has been a move to small boats because of the huge success, frankly, of Border Force and British agencies, working with French agencies, around Eurotunnel, ferries and lorries. It is now very difficult to get across the channel covertly in the back of a lorry, which is why people have moved to using small boats. Whatever we think about migration policy—whatever we think about the number of asylum seekers we should or could be taking in this country—paying a people smuggler to cross the busiest shipping lane in the world is the worst possible way to gain access to the United Kingdom. We absolutely must do more to clamp down on it, which is why the Government’s policy, whether controversial or not, is singularly aimed at cutting off that dangerous and criminal supplier.
The first problem is this. We are continuing to subsidise the French police force, to the tune of, now, half a billion pounds, but although they are intercepting more migrants before they get into the boats—the interception rate is now about 54%, which is great—the trouble is that they do not arrest those migrants, they do not detain them, and they are there again the following night and the night after that, with a new boat every time, and they only have to get lucky once. Until we can reach an agreement with the French that they will detain those migrants and scrutinise their status in France itself and then take action, or that if migrants are intercepted in the channel by Border Force or air agencies they can be taken back to France if that is where they started, our problem will remain.
We have not been able to reach an agreement with the French, but there are ways in which progress could be made. Several of us have had discussions with French politicians who see some merit in such an agreement, and I think there are negotiations that could be had, but that is not happening, although it is the long-term, sustainable solution to the problem of the boats. Why would someone pay €4,000 to a people smuggler for what is effectively a round trip, ending up back in France?
Secondly, there is the issue of processing in the United Kingdom, which is far too slow. As we discovered yesterday in the Home Affairs Committee, even given the increase in resources and staff it will take longer than until the end of the year to deal with the legacy backlog, let alone all the people who have come in since June last year. We must become much more efficient. I am glad that the Minister mentioned various new schemes and projects that the Home Office is undertaking, but we need to double up on that; perhaps he will give some more details later.
Thirdly, there is the issue of returns agreements. There are those who think that everything was rosy before Brexit. I am not going to blame Brexit for any of this—indeed, I remain a fan of Brexit—but in the last year of our full membership of the European Union, under the Dublin regulations we attempted to return to the EU 8,500 migrants who did not have a case for being in the UK, and the EU accepted 105 of them; that is 1.2%. So it was not working in the first place, when we were in the EU. Last year, only 215 of the 45,755 migrants who came here irregularly were deported. We have to do a lot better, because we know how problematic it is when certain countries simply will not take back migrants who have left those countries and applied for asylum here.
The whole issue has been discussed ad nauseam in the House of Lords, and will be back in this House next month in the form of the Illegal Migration Bill. There is of course the controversial situation surrounding the Rwanda flights, on which we are expecting a judgment soon. It is an apparently extreme solution, but what else can we do unilaterally if we do not have the agreement of our neighbours to take people back? We know it can be a deterrent, because when the Select Committee went to Calais in January and spoke to many of the officials in charge of the operations there, they said that when the Rwanda scheme was announced there was a big surge in the number of migrants approaching the French authorities about regularising their status in France, because they did not want to risk being put on a plane to Rwanda; but it has not happened yet, so the deterrent effect has subsided. That is why the scheme is so important, controversial though it may be.
I think we should be doing much more—and I have supported cross-party amendments on this in the past—to make better use of the migrants who have come to the UK and are having their claims processed. It is a complete waste of time and labour that they are not allowed to work in a properly organised way, certainly after a few months here, when we have so many labour shortages.
Then there is the foreign aid issue. It annoys me when we are accused of being far less generous than other countries in granting asylum claims, when last year France had something like 150,000 asylum applications—more than this country—but granted only a third of them. They were much tougher; indeed, many European countries do not accept any asylum applications from Albania at all. The Committee has just produced a report asking why on earth we should be taking so many Albanian asylum applications, other than in, say, trafficking cases.
This country also has one of the most generous foreign aid programmes, which supports refugees closer to the homes from which they have had to flee, as any of us who have been to places such as the Zaatari camp in Jordan will know. At one stage there were 85,000 Syrian refugees there, and we were one of the biggest donors to the camp. Something like 90% of the children there were receiving an education in schools that were funded by our taxpayers, and that were often staffed by teachers from Britain or those trained by British authorities. Those people just wanted to go back to Syria as soon as it was safe to do so, rather than come to the UK or another European country, so we should always consider the huge number of refugees we support overseas, no less generously than we do those for whom it is more appropriate to come to the UK.
We have to decide what sort of immigration system we want—who we want coming into the country—now that we have the power to fashion our own policy more than we did when we were part of the European Union. Of the 606,000 net who came to the UK last year, 174,200 were from Ukraine. Nobody is going to argue with the merits of that. Some 160,700 were from Hong Kong. Again, most people would see a justified case for that. I fear, as somebody who has been sanctioned by China and knows a little more about this, that that number will only rise. There is a big Hong Kong Chinese population in this country. They are more easily assimilated through existing links—family links and others—they tend to be very entrepreneurial, setting up businesses after studying here, and they really add to the economic prospects of this country.
Then there are the 155,000-plus dependants who came in—largely Indian nationals—and the many dependants who came on the back of foreign students. Is that where we should be prioritising an increase in population? We want foreign students to come to this country. We want them to study successfully here and then perhaps stay successfully here, contributing to the economy, setting up businesses and, with their expertise and skills, adding to the UK economy, but are valuable places in our creaking infrastructure being taken up by the dependants who seem to come with them? The Government are now looking at that issue.
We must also recognise that we have a very varied workforce, and that is a good thing. Some 20% of the UK workforce was born abroad, and that figure is likely to rise. That is a good thing, as long as we can integrate, and sustain and provide services and employment for everybody to benefit from, but we do have problems. Some 45,000 seasonal farm workers have been brought into this country, and that figure has increased, but we still have a shortfall of 40,000. We have a problem with our own British citizens working in the rural economy. Only 8,000 British citizens signed up for the Pick for Britain campaign jobs. We have a million job vacancies in the United Kingdom. We need to have a grown-up debate about how we fill those vacancies, because surely we want people who will do those jobs well and are appropriate for them. They are going to earn, pay tax and contribute to the economic wealth of the country.
Germany is desperately trying to recruit graduates and blue-collar workers under its points-based system. The trouble is that that is taking a lot of skilled health workers from places such as Albania, which is making Albania less and less sustainable, as the economy collapses in that country. Canada wants 1.5 million more migrants by 2025, and South Korea is bringing in 110,000 lower-skilled migrants.
In this country we completely fetishise the numbers. For me, it is not just about the numbers, although the numbers have to be sustainable—I know there are big pressures on housing, particularly in the south-east of England, in my part of the world—but it is really about control. It is about making sure that we welcome the people who are most appropriately accommodated in this country and who can most contribute to the well- being and economic prospects of this country. It is about controlling who comes here, rather than just raw numbers.
The last consideration is the global context, because the problem, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, is that 19 countries are facing the highest number of ecological threats over the next 30 years. A total of 2.1 billion people live in countries that lack the resilience to deal with the expected major ecological changes over the next 30 years, and a large proportion of them are from sub-Sahel Africa, from countries that are among the most unstable and have some of the highest birth rates.
Those people are on the move. The birth rate in European countries, Japan and elsewhere is falling, so we have to decide what will be the long-term future of global migration. We can only do that in collaboration with other countries. Do we want African countries to thrive and to have economies that can sustain their own population and that can adapt to take advantage of climate change by generating energy, or whatever it may be? Can we invest in some of those countries, or will we see people increasingly coming to these shores? How would we deal with that?
Mr Deputy Speaker, I am sure you would like me to shut up now, but this is a hugely complex situation that requires a long-term plan and a long-term vision, in collaboration with our neighbours. Without that, we risk going from one crisis to another, and nobody benefits from that.
Britain is closed to Sana, the clinical psychologist I met at the Red Cross VOICES event yesterday. She is stuck in substandard accommodation and has been refused the right to work, while the NHS cries out for trained staff like her. It is closed, completely closed, to anyone—men, women and children—who might be fleeing war, famine or oppression, simply because they arrived here on a small boat when no safe or legal route is open to them.
The hostile environment is not just directed at refugees and asylum seekers; it pervades every aspect of the Home Office and the UK Border Force’s operation, whether it is the interminable waits for passport checks in airports, the chronic under-resourcing of application processing or even the delays our own staff members face in trying to get answers for constituents. It is all deliberately designed to drag things out, with the aim of making people just give up and go back to where they came from.
The Government’s mindset always seems to be that arriving on these islands is some kind of privilege to be striven for and that people who want to settle, or even just visit for anything other than a holiday, should largely be treated with suspicion and a working assumption that they are planning to abscond or overstay their visa.
I said during the debate on the Illegal Migration Bill that it might come as a bit of a surprise to some of the more excitable elements among the Government Back Benchers, who are obviously not represented here today, but the world is round—the Earth is a globe. There is no edge people can be pushed off in the hope that they will just go away. As the fantastic Glasgow charity Refuweegee puts it, “we’re a’ fae somewhere”. Immigration, emigration and migration, in all its forms, always has been and always will be part of the human experience. We cannot simply pull up a drawbridge. We have to be willing to welcome people who are seeking refuge or who want to contribute, not least because one day we, individually or collectively, might look for similar treatment from others.
That is certainly the vision the SNP has of an independent Scotland, where migration policy helps to grow our population and works for our economy and society. If the Government were willing to devolve powers, we could begin to do that immediately. But the Minister wrongly claims that Scotland is not taking its fair share of asylum seekers, or seems to expect local authorities to implement Home Office policies without Home Office funding, and then says that Scotland does not need to have a different immigration policy from the rest of the UK.
Ultimately, it will not be up to this Government to decide. People in Glasgow North and across Scotland want an asylum and immigration system that treats people with fairness and dignity. That is not what is being delivered by the current Tory Government, and there is little evidence that the pro-Brexit Labour party would do much to change things either. The actions of the two pro-Brexit, anti-independence parties make the case for Scotland to become independent, because by refusing to adapt the current regime or devolve powers to Holyrood, they show that only way for Scotland to have an immigration system fit for purpose in the modern world is with those full powers of independence.