In a bid to pare down the UK government’s backlog of over 137,600 asylum claims, its Home Office will no longer differentiate between people who arrived illegally, such as those who crossed the English Channel, and those who took the legal route.
The move would allow the British government to speed up the processing of claims for about 55,000 people who have arrived from a safe country, such as France, since last June.
If their asylum claims are successful, instead of getting temporary permission to remain for 30 months, they would be allowed to remain in the UK for five years—under the same set of rules as immigrants who arrive the legal way—after which they will be able to apply for settlement. In addition, those who arrived illegally—usually by small boat—could also take advantage of the UK’s family reunification policies.
The so-called two-tier differentiation system, now effectively scrapped, as laid out in the Nationality and Borders Act, was the brainchild of former Tory PM Boris Johnson and his then home secretary, Priti Patel, and had as its express purpose deterring migrants from making the Channel crossing.
Under that new law, those who had come via small boats and successfully applied for asylum were to be offered a temporary status of up to 30 months, in the meantime enjoying limited rights and benefits that were under regular review.
Quietly dropped on Thursday, June 8th, the written statement announcing the change came from Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick.
On Parliament’s website, Jenrick wrote:
We will pause the differentiation policy in the next package of immigration rules changes in July 2023. This means we will stop taking grouping decisions under the differentiated asylum system after these rules changes and those individuals who are successful in their asylum application, including those who are granted humanitarian protection, will receive the same conditions.
While Jenrick still defended the old policy, on the ground of it having been the right approach to “disincentivise” Channel migrants from crossing, he said that since then, the “scale of the challenge facing the UK, like other countries, has grown.” To counter this, he added, the government had introduced its Illegal Migration Bill, currently being debated in the House of Lords.
That bill, he added, “goes further than ever before in seeking to deter illegal entry to the UK, so that the only humanitarian route into the UK is through a safe and legal one.”
If passed, the legislation would grant ministers powers to detain any migrant who arrives illegally and deport them to a third safe country such as Rwanda or their home nation.
Labour MP and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, however, pounced on the news of the changes made to the Nationality and Borders Act. “Total Tory chaos,” she wrote on Twitter. “Last year they shouted from rooftops that their new law would stop boat crossings. Today they quietly ditched it because it just increased chaos instead. The Tories broke the asylum system. Instead of fixing it they just make it worse.”
The move is unlikely to find much support among the Tory base. In The Telegraph, one senior Tory MP, left unnamed, was quoted as saying: “Losing the differentiation aspect between those who come through safe routes and those who do not does not look like getting a grip of the system.” The fast-tracking of applications, he added, “looks like a de facto amnesty.”
