Why is Rwanda so important to British immigration policy?

Given the 1,954-mile length of the U.S.-Mexico border, Americans watching British politicians attempting to govern an island nation may wonder why immigration is such a difficult issue. This week, Parliament approved the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, which will allow the government to transfer illegal migrants seeking to enter the United Kingdom to Rwanda instead. Partly this is in order to reduce the costly process of assessing migration claims and accommodating those applicants are successful. But it is also, explicitly, intended to “prevent and deter unlawful migration, and in particular migration by unsafe and illegal routes.”

Essentially, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hopes that those who consider seeking asylum or migrant status in the U.K. will decide against attempting entry because of the risk that they will be deported to Rwanda in central Africa instead. There is no evidence that this deterrent effect exists: as a rule of thumb, a “fact” which has to be asserted in legislation to make it in any way “true” is a dubious fact to begin with.

We know there is no proof of the deterrent effect. Two years ago, when the plan to deport potential migrants to Rwanda was still being drawn up, then-Home Secretary Priti Patel was told by her senior official, Sir Matthew Rycroft, that he could not say with certainty that the policy represented good value for money. He is required to do this as the accounting officer for the Home Office. “Evidence of a deterrent effect,” he wrote, “is highly uncertain and cannot be quantified with sufficient certainty to provide me with the necessary level of assurance over value for money.”

Under the rules of the British civil service, he asked Patel to instruct him in writing to carry out the policy, so that he had written authorization to act in a way he could not say represented money well spent. Patel issued him with what is called a Ministerial Direction, and her words were revealing: “It would be imprudent in my view … to allow the absence of quantifiable and dynamic modelling … to delay delivery of a policy that we believe will reduce illegal migration.”

Patel adduced no evidence, offered no explanation, but simply repeated her belief that the policy would deter potential migrants. That article of faith has now passed into statute.

Why Rwanda? The truth is, the tightly controlled republic of 14 million people was the partner who said yes. The Times of London reported that there were talks with Costa Rica, Armenia and Botswana; Tanzania, Sierra Leone and Angola were on the reserve list; Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil were approached; and Morocco, Tunisia and Namibia declined an invitation to discuss the idea. Rwanda, 30 years after it was shattered by genocide, was happy to take hundreds of millions of pounds from Britain in an “economic transformation and integration fund.”

The Safety of Rwanda Act is a bad law and it knows it is. The policy to deport migrants to Rwanda was found to be unlawful by the Supreme Court in November 2023, on the grounds that Rwanda was not a safe country for deportees. Specifically, there was a significant risk that those sent by the British government to Rwanda might then be sent back to their countries of origin by the Rwandan legal system, a process known as “refoulement,” which infringes international humanitarian laws. They might then “face persecution or other inhumane treatment, when, in fact, they have a good claim for asylum.” The court concluded “In that sense Rwanda was not a safe third country.”

Instead of making good any real deficiencies, the government drew up the Safety of Rwanda Act, which is an exercise is declamation over fact. It sets out “the judgement of Parliament that the Republic of Rwanda is a safe country”; states that international law cannot override acts of the Parliament; instructs that “every decision-maker must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country”; and disallows any challenge to deportation on the grounds that someone might be subject to refoulement.

Essentially, the legislation says that Rwanda is safe and deportees will not be subject to refoulement. It does not mean either of those things are true, but states them in law. That, objectively, is an odd approach to making policy.

What underlies this? Politics. Immigration is regularly cited by voters as among the top two or three issues most important to them, and the net migration figures into the U.K. are startling. Official figures suggest that 672,000 more people entered than left in 2023, while 745,000 did so in 2022. That is like adding 1 percent of the existing population, bigger than any city except London or Birmingham, every year. It is understandable that voters feel “something must be done.”

These are, however, legal migrants. They are not desperate and impoverished men and women making dangerous and illegal attempts to enter the U.K. In the year ending June 2023, 52,530 people were caught trying to get into Britain illegally, a much smaller figure. It is only a proportion of those whom even the government can claim the new law will deter. And remember, it makes that claim on no evidence. More than that, it sets aside a number of international obligations and conventions to try to make that happen.

The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 is a dismal and tawdry political law. It pretends to tackle immigration, which matters to people, but it addresses a small subset of migration, and it introduces measures that have no guarantee of working. Voters have the right to say Britain cannot take in a tenth of her population in new arrivals every decade: this does nothing to make a serious change to that. It’s all for show, as the government heads into an election later in the year.

Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.