Robert Jenrick, who resigned this week from his role as Britain’s immigration minister, has predicted that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s proposed legislation to save the scheme to send illegal boat migrants to Rwanda is doomed to failure and warned that the political establishment will face “red-hot furry” from voters if they fail to reduce immigration.
The illegal boat migrant crisis in the English Channel, spurred in large part by the European Union’s open borders agenda, has pushed the United Kingdom “beyond breaking point”, former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick has admitted.
The former government minister, who resigned this week in protest over the weakness of Rishi Sunak’s latest half-hearted attempt to get migrant flights off the ground to offshore asylum centres in Rwanda, echoed ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s criticism of the proposed legislation in an article for The Telegraph.
Jenrick warned that the legislation would still allow migrants to appeal to courts based on their individual circumstances as to why they should not be removed to Rwanda and therefore would only further incentivise “small boat-chasing law firms” in stymying the government’s efforts to expel migrants. The former immigration minister went on to say that the Supreme Court decision blocking the Rwanda scheme will be used as justification by left-wing judges to side with migrants seeking to prevent their removal to the African nation.
“Having done as much as I could to strengthen the legislation I concluded, regrettably, the answer is no. It was therefore clear I could not continue, in good faith, in my position as the Bill’s minister,” Jenrick wrote.
“The bleak reality is that there is every reason to suggest the outlook is deteriorating,” he continued, noting that there was a 30 per cent increase in illegal migration into the European Union’s borderless travel Schengen zone spurred by conflicts in the Middle East and Africa.
“So long as the EU cannot police its borders, the UK will be forced to grapple with the injustice of illegal migration,” the Tory MP said.
Jenrick argued that rather than the weak legislation put forward by his former boss, a bill should instead prohibit individual challenges to removals to be carried out “at scale, and within days of illegally stepping on to our shores,” adding: “Anything less than this and the boats will keep coming.”
He went on to criticise the legislation for failing to take power away from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to block removal flights as it did last year.
The Strasbourg-based court, which the UK is still a member of despite Brexit as it is technically a separate institution from the European Union, gave itself the power under “rule 39” after Britain joined the court, and therefore the UK has justification to not allow the foreign court to dictate its immigration policies, the Conservative MP argued.
“Having promised to do whatever it takes to stop the boats, the goal now seems to have been reduced to delivering some symbolic, half-filled flights, taking off in the spring of next year,” Jenrick wrote.
The former immigration minister said that the immigration system as a whole is in desperate need of reform, noting that the post-Brexit rules introduced by Boris Johnson have, rather than reducing migration, have seen record levels of migrants coming into the UK, with net migration hitting a record of approximately 1.2 million over the past two years, alone.
He said that because the UK is no longer under the heel of the EU, the government has the power to solve all of these issues, but it is currently mired in the “short-term expediency of cheap labour, an outdated orthodoxy on the economic benefits of immigration pushed by the OBR, and flawed assumptions about the social and cultural benefits of mass immigration peddled by people insulated from the trade-offs.”
Jenrick concluded: “Centre-Right parties across Europe have a choice: begin to deliver on the mainstream concerns of ordinary people when it comes to immigration, or face their red-hot fury at the ballot box.”
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