To analyse. “You are very pregnant, you run away with your only clothes on your back, you are a criminal. “You are a grandmother, you have difficulty walking and you are trying to join your family, you are a criminal. » Facing the camera, Meryl Streep, Sylvester Stallone or even Emma Thompson recites these shocking phrases in a video posted in March on social networks by the Refugee Council, one of the main British NGOs helping migrants.
These celebrities are hoping to roll back Downing Street, as an iconic Johnson government bill, the Nationality and Borders Bill, is set to pass through the UK Parliament. But the hope is slim: certainly the House of Lords, on April 4, tried again to soften the text, but, in the Commons, the Conservative Party in power has a sufficient majority to impose it. The text should be adopted by the beginning of May.
Under the guise of reforming the right to asylum, the text actually aims to limit it very strongly: it creates two classes of asylum seekers, those who would have obtained a visa before coming to the United Kingdom, the “good” sort of, and the others, who arrived without visas, “illegally”, on British soil (crossing the Channel in inflatable boats, for example).
The latter are likely to be deported to centers located abroad, while waiting for their application to be processed. They even risk up to five years in prison. The law also introduces “push backs” : the British coastguard is authorized to push back migrant boats in French waters. Interior Minister Priti Patel, an early Brexiteer, defends this highly controversial law with conviction, despite its origins. His parents, Indians from Uganda, fled the repression of dictator Idi Amin in the early 1970s. “We want to increase fairness in our asylum system, to better protect those who really need it. The law will break the economic model of smugglers,” she assures.
Withdrawal
Yet, even in the Conservative Party, MPs privately admit that this shocking text will not achieve its goal. Imprison migrants who arrived “illegally”, when, in the first quarter of 2022, around 4,500 people managed to cross the Channel on makeshift boats? British prisons would soon be overcrowded. Deport asylum seekers? So far, no country in the South has agreed to host centers against payment. Even the Daily Telegraph find the idea stupid: “it would be more expensive than housing asylum seekers at the Ritz,” highlights the right-wing daily in mid-February.
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