{"id":608432,"date":"2022-04-16T10:51:28","date_gmt":"2022-04-16T10:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2022\/04\/britain-rwanda-migration-asylum-seekers-offshore-patel\/"},"modified":"2022-04-16T10:58:59","modified_gmt":"2022-04-16T10:58:59","slug":"britain-is-planning-to-outsource-its-refugees-to-rwanda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/04\/16\/britain-is-planning-to-outsource-its-refugees-to-rwanda\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain Is Planning to Outsource Its Refugees to Rwanda"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

This week, Britain announced an inhumane and unworkable plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda \u2014 permanently. It's a cruel effort to outsource border control at the expense of refugees' well-being.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Britain will send migrants and asylum seekers who cross the English Channel thousands of miles away to Rwanda under a controversial deal announced Thursday. (Daniel Leal \/ AFP via Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

In a grotesque new turn for British refugee politics, Home Secretary Priti Patel has this week officially announced a plan to deport an unlimited number of refugees in the UK to Rwanda. The policy has been something of an open secret \u2014 Patel has supposedly been working \u201cday and night\u201d on it for eight months. But the impossibly cruel scheme doesn\u2019t have a hint of originality in it. Some of the wealthiest governments on earth came up with this bad idea years ago \u2014 Patel has simply repackaged it.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

Deported to Hope House<\/h2>\n \n

On Thursday, Patel held a press conference in Kigali justifying the proposal. The British asylum system, Patel said, is collapsing due to \u201cevil people smugglers, profiteering by exploiting the system for their own gains.\u201d Flagging recent deaths and dangerous human trafficking in the English Channel, she hailed her plan as \u201cthe biggest overhaul of our immigration system in decades,\u201d and pitched it as a life- and tax-saving \u201cnew and innovative\u201d solution.<\/p>\n

She explained that, from now on, asylum seekers arriving in the UK will be relocated to Rwanda. If found to be refugees, they will be funded by the UK for up to five years to resettle in the desperately poor African nation. Privately owned Rwandan hotels \u2014 including the ill-named Hope House<\/a> \u2014 will be leased to accommodate the deportees. The UK will provide an initial \u00a3120 million to Rwanda to finance education and skills training for those resettled. Most details of the scheme, however, remain secret. Patel explained this secrecy as a weapon against people-smuggler adaptation \u2014 but in reality the plan is riddled with shortsighted holes.<\/p>\n

Patel\u2019s choice of President Paul Kagame\u2019s Rwanda as the destination for asylum seekers isn\u2019t random. Kagame has a brutal record of silencing dissent<\/a> at home, and a proven (but volatile) commitment to cold diplomatic reciprocity abroad. The Financial Times <\/em>has openly called Rwanda<\/a> a \u201cmollycoddled client regime\u201d of the West, which for geopolitical strategic reasons \u201cadds trappings of legitimacy to Rwanda\u2019s contemporary form of one-party rule, in which incumbents use patronage, oppression and control of electoral machinery to maintain power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patel described contemporary Rwanda as a model of African development, though this is an incomplete picture of her party\u2019s relationship with Kagame. While the president has been an honored guest at Tory party conferences, some of his behavior \u2014 like sending assassins<\/a> to try to kill politicians in the UK \u2014 has also seen him (lightly) shunned by them. It is perhaps no coincidence that he is now back in the Tory government\u2019s good books; aside from loan repayments, a great deal of recent UK aid money to Rwanda has a troubling recent pattern of ending up in non-Rwandan pockets<\/a> and projects<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That Priti Patel\u2019s own family were victims of Britain\u2019s divide-and-rule machinations<\/a> in colonial Uganda adds a further layer of cynicism to this already dismal picture. To get a sense of how Patel\u2019s plot will go wrong, it\u2019s instructive to look at some of its inspirations.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

\u201cYou Scratch My Back . . . \u201d<\/h2>\n \n

Patel\u2019s plan is not the first time Rwanda has agreed to act as a dumping ground for the West\u2019s refugees in exchange for money and favors.<\/p>\n

Through the 2010s, the Israeli government ran a vicious campaign<\/a> against African refugees, famously labelling them \u201cinfiltrators\u201d and \u201ca cancer in the nation\u2019s body.\u201d Kagame struck a quiet deal in 2014 with then prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow the Israeli government to fly Sudanese and Eritrean refugees to Rwanda.<\/p>\n

Testimonies from some of those sent back paint a grim picture<\/a> of zero support, violence, theft, and human trafficking. Most immediately left Rwanda and attempted to reach Europe. Netanyahu promoted and supported<\/a> Kagame’s diplomatic initiatives internationally as thanks, but the deal still embarrassingly fell apart<\/a> when Israel tried to scale up the deportations in 2018.<\/p>\n

That same year, the nominally social democratic opposition in Denmark proposed<\/a> establishing refugee reception centers outside Europe. The party rose to power on the back of its anti-immigrant campaign a year later.<\/p>\n

Then, in 2021, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced<\/a> Denmark too had reached an agreement for Rwanda to take virtually all of its asylum seekers in exchange for more development aid, stronger diplomatic representation, and exchange programs. The Danish immigration minister Mattias Tesfaye has cynically tried to promote<\/a> the refugee deportations as a kind of class struggle, arguing that the working class should not have to pay for refugees. Tesfaye knows this is a bogus argument \u2014 offshore detention costs far more than simply processing and resettling refugees, and does not stop the movement of refugees to Europe. And for all its triumphant anti-immigrant populism, the Danish agreement with Rwanda \u2014 like Israel\u2019s and the UK\u2019s \u2014 is secretive and completely nonbinding. It simply expresses a wish for Rwanda to host a reception center<\/a> for asylum seekers from Denmark.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

Antipodean Inspiration<\/h2>\n \n

All these schemes share the same original source of inspiration. Twenty years ago, the Australian government was responsible for introducing the so-called Pacific Solution. This rotten legislation excised thousands of islands from the Australian migration zone, and saw the Australian Navy throw asylum seekers from Australia into detention centers in countries like Nauru and Papua New Guinea. These camps were run by for-profit companies for billions of dollars.<\/p>\n

Alexander Downer, the former Australian foreign minister in government when John Howard\u2019s conservative government was engineering the Pacific Solution, recently became one of Patel\u2019s advisors<\/a>. In addition to the plan itself, much of Patel\u2019s rhetoric is taken from the handbook of Downer\u2019s government. In fact, her emphasis on saving lives and stopping crime is lifted almost word-for-word from Downer\u2019s government\u2019s early 2000s soundbites around asylum seekers.<\/p>\n

Writing in support of Patel\u2019s scheme, Downer wrote<\/a> that \u201cto solve a migration crisis, you have to smash the business model . . . a highly profitable criminal racket being run by unscrupulous gangs.\u201d He neglected to mention his preferred solution is just a different business model: a highly profitable legal<\/em> racket run by unscrupulous groups like Serco<\/a>, G4S<\/a> and Wilson<\/a>. In Australia, the average taxpayer now funds this business model \u2014 in which the horrific mistreatment of refugees<\/a> has become normalized \u2014 to the tune of more than AU$1.2 billion per year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Downer became notorious for his strong-arming of poorer countries into accepting rotten deals that benefited large corporations. As one former US ambassador working in the Pacific bluntly put it<\/a>,<\/u> \u201cthe Howard and Downer government were shills for the corporations.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the arrangements didn\u2019t always go smoothly. Australia\u2019s relationship with Papua New Guinea partly soured in 2016, and its Supreme Court found the Manus Island detention centers to be illegal. Thousands of the deported detainees subsequently brought a class action against the Australian government, which paid out a settlement<\/a> of tens of millions of dollars to avoid an embarrassing airing of its misdeeds.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

The Grim, the Botched, and the Costly<\/h2>\n \n

Aside from their general moral repugnance, all the precursors to Patel\u2019s scheme share the same features: the effort to outsource border control to poorer client states is always violent, it inevitably falls apart, and it is enormously expensive. Sold during election campaigns as tax-saving initiatives to put a stop to evildoers, they quickly become money-pit enablers of rotten regimes and multinational<\/a><\/u> tax dodgers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This model of outsourcing settlement programs only benefits right-wing populist politicians and corporate profiteers. For this reason, it stands to remain popular, despite the model’s cruelty\u00a0 and the greed and incompetence behind it. In the face of this, it\u2019s up to the Left to seize back the terms of the debate. This means fighting the catastrophes and inequalities facing so many and refusing to allow the rich decide who gets thrown on the global trash heap. Until it does, refugees will continue to pay for the worst crises of capitalism with their lives \u2014 and the working class elsewhere will continue to bankroll their suffering.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a grotesque new turn for British refugee politics, Home Secretary Priti Patel has this week officially announced a plan to deport an unlimited number of refugees in the UK to Rwanda. The policy has been something of an open secret \u2014 Patel has supposedly been working \u201cday and night\u201d on it for eight months. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608432"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":608433,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608432\/revisions\/608433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}