“Societally Destructive Immigration Policy”

In his influential 1939 treatise against utopian thinking in foreign policy, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, E.H. Carr made an analogy with domestic politics that seemed so obvious at the time it needed neither elaboration nor justification. “It is not the ordinarily accepted moral duty of a state to lower the standard of living of its citizens by throwing open its frontiers to an unlimited number of foreign refugees,” he wrote, “though it may be its duty to admit as large a number as is compatible with the interests of its own people.” That the same principle might apply to economic migrants was presumably too self-evident to merit stating.

Has Keir Starmer’s Britain become the softest touch in the West for illegal migrants? In a week when another 12 people drowned in the Channel and ministers squirmed under scrutiny about their still leaderless Border Command, attention turned to the Continent. “Rwanda’s back – but it’s Germany planning to use it,” screamed a tabloid headline on Friday. Tory leadership candidates fell over one another to claim German endorsement for their now defunct scheme.

Joachim Stamp, Berlin’s migration commissioner, had indeed floated the idea of processing asylum seekers in Rwanda, using facilities now sitting idle since Labour abandoned the policy as their first act in office. The irony of this turn of events will not be lost on British taxpayers, who paid hundreds of millions of pounds for these facilities in Kigali. And if the Germans are so eager to go ahead, where does that leave all the legal objections and moral outrage of our own liberal establishment?