From Britain and Italy to Tunisia and Pakistan, our leaders crave being seen to be tough as a distraction from their failures at home
On Wednesday, the UK supreme court will give its verdict on the Rwanda deportation scheme. The decision will clearly have a major impact on those who face deportation. It will have an impact, too, on the political debate about immigration, with government supporters either hailing a victory or bemoaning the treachery of the liberal elite.
But, whatever the decision, it will have little bearing on the “immigration crisis”. The government itself has acknowledged that, even were the court to deem the scheme legal, and deportation flights to Kigali take off, Rwanda could take only “small numbers” of deportees, possibly 300 a year across the four years of the trial period. Given that there were almost 46,000 people crossing the Channel on small boats last year, and that by August this year the asylum backlog stood at 175,000, the deportation scheme amounts to little more than performative policy – the desire to be seen doing something and doing something cruel – rather than a serious attempt to tackle a problem.
Performative policymaking has become commonplace in immigration management, and not just in Britain. Last week, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, announced an arrangement under which undocumented migrants and asylum seekers will be kept in specially built detention centres in Albania.
The details remain sketchy, but the scheme appears to be a form of offshore processing – rather than straightforward deportation, as Britain envisages in its Rwanda plan – whereby those heading for Italy but intercepted in international waters are to be detained in Albania and their cases heard there. The judges overseeing the cases will, however, be Italian and, to provide a legal fig leaf for their decisions, will sit in courtrooms deemed to be under Italian jurisdiction. If found to be genuine, asylum seekers would be free to move to Italy. Those who lose their cases would face deportation. Given that in many cases Albania would have no deportation arrangement with migrants’ countries of origin, there is a prospect of many people being indefinitely detained – possibly back in Italy.
Why not simply hear the asylum cases on actual Italian soil? Because to do so would deprive Meloni of the glory of being seen acting tough on immigration. Italy, like Britain and many western nations, is turning immigration policymaking into a public performance.
The irony is that the same countries wanting to be seen as being uncompromising on immigration are also desperately reaching out for new workers from abroad. When, earlier this year, the Italian government opened an online application system for employers to obtain visas for non-EU workers, the entire quota was used up within an hour. In response, Italy is opening the door to more workers from outside the EU, issuing up to 425,000 work permits over the next two years.
Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is among the most vociferous European opponents of immigration, is also quietly turning to non-EU countries to address its labour needs, with plans to accept up to 500,000 “guest workers”. Greece, too, is desperate to augment its labour force even as it locks up tens of thousands of undocumented migrants in its notorious detention camps. Such contradictions arise because, as the Dutch sociologist Hein de Haas observes in his new book How Migration Really Works, liberal democracies face a trilemma of reconciling three distinct aims: the economic need for migrant labour; the political desire to be seen to be controlling immigration; and the moral need to treat migrants and asylum seekers as people with rights and dignities. The seeming impossibility of achieving all three has led governments to pursue an overt policy of being tough on immigration, an often covert policy of increasing net immigration flows and a willingness to sacrifice the rights of migrants and asylum seekers to economic and political needs.
For more Guardian journalism follow this channel
De Haas deftly fillets the myriad myths in which our contradictory attitudes to immigration are rooted. Immigration out of control? The number of people moving around the globe has certainly increased, but as a proportion of the global population it has remained constant over the decades at about 3%. Despite the almost universal perception that we live in a more conflict-ridden world that is generating an unprecedented mass of refugees, de Haas shows that there has been no long-term increase in refugee numbers and refugees constitute just 0.3% of the global population. Nor, he shows, is immigration responsible for lower wages, higher unemployment, increasing crime rates or a lack of affordable housing in host countries.
What the obsession with immigration does, de Haas observes, is make it easier to turn questions about social policy at home – from stagnating wages to a lack of affordable housing – into a debate about an external threat to the nation. It turns immigrants into scapegoats and allows politicians to absolve themselves of blame, casting themselves as crusaders against that outside foe.
This is not just a European or western phenomenon. From Tunisia to South Africa, from Kenya to India, politicians are all too keen to whip up xenophobic hostility to immigrants to distract from domestic issues. Pakistan has said it will deport all undocumented Afghan refugees – up to 1.7 million people – potentially provoking one of the largest forced deportations since the 1950s, though, in the shadow of the war in Gaza, the world seems barely to have noticed.
The unfolding catastrophe shows how, for all the western panic about facing “floods” of asylum seekers, it is the poorest countries in Africa and Asia that already host the vast majority of the world’s refugees. It shows, too, how refugees are as easily demonised in the global south as they are in the west. Facing a cascade of crises – economic disaster, political instability and a wave of terror attacks – Pakistani leaders are, in the words of one analyst, following a well-establaished strategy of “deflecting blame”.
When it comes to Pakistan (or India or South Africa), many people can see through politicians manipulating fears about external threats to swerve blame for domestic failures. In Europe and America, though, claims about the immigration crisis are too often taken at face value, and policies such as the Rwanda deportation scheme or the Italy-Albania deal viewed as serious attempts to address a problem. They are not. They constitute performative policymaking in which cruelty to migrants and asylum seekers becomes the means to obscure social problems at home. It’s time we called them out.
• This article was amended on 12 November 2023 to correct a misspelling of Giorgia Meloni’s first name.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
