If immigration issues present increasingly acute and complicated global challenges, these challenges would undoubtedly gain in clarity if governments of all kinds avoided exploiting their dark sides for political and electoral purposes. Let’s just take the recent news in Great Britain, France and the United States. Three countries whose governments cloud the debate and cultivate xenophobic mistrust by giving in to the sirens of populism.
To the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, armed with an alarmist slogan (“ Stop the boats “), takes the prize for the dehumanization of migrants for its project to transfer asylum seekers to Rwanda. Based on an agreement signed with the authoritarian Paul Kagame almost two years ago, the bill adopted on January 18 by the conservative majority in the Commons aims to discourage migrants from crossing the Channel – there were around 30,000 to do so in 2023, at the risk of their lives. Sunak intends to proceed even though the British Supreme Court has disavowed the project, ruling that Rwanda can hardly be considered a “safe country”.
Besides the fact that it is far from certain that expulsions would slow down arrivals by “small boats”, the figures show in black and white that the crusade of Mr. Sunak, who is largely handcuffed by the right wing of the party, is delirium. The fact is that between June 2022 and June 2023, migration has been essentially legal in the UK, responding to urgent needs in the jobs market, particularly in health. Irregular migrants represented 7.7% of the total 682,000 entries. No matter: lagging behind in the polls against Labor, Mr. Sunak has not only decided to make his “Rwanda project” the basis of his policy against illegal immigration, he also intends to make it one of the main drivers of his campaign strategy for the legislative elections in January 2025.
In France, months of controversy surrounding the new immigration law followed similar small calculations, ultimately allowing Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally, to claim a “great ideological victory” — at least until ‘the Constitutional Council censored a large part of the legislation last week. This is how, as a Trojan horse, the concept of “national preference”, so dear to the far right, imposed itself in an unprecedented way in a French legislative text, with the support of the traditional right (Les Républicains ) and the Macronist majority. Result: the French will have lived through a saga where Emmanuel Macron will have sought less to think of a reformed migration policy with clairvoyance, protected from excesses, than to record legislative success at any price, he whose presidency will not go nowhere six months before the European elections.
In the United States, Donald Trump is currently working to sabotage a proposed migration agreement between Democratic and Republican senators to prevent its conclusion at all costs from making President Joe Biden look good in this presidential election year. Fundamentally, however, the project is based on narrowly punitive measures and entirely to the taste of the Republicans. Under this agreement, the powers of manual expulsion available to border agents would be significantly expanded. In the short-sighted hope of boosting his popularity, Mr. Biden finds himself playing the game of the anti-immigration hard right. He is all the more trapped by this dynamic as the Trumpist clan in Congress links the increase in military aid to Ukraine, the centerpiece of its foreign policy, to the adoption of radical pushback measures at the Mexican border. -American.
In Europe as in the United States, against a backdrop of legislative stagnation, “migratory pressure” is not decreasing. There were 267,000 migrants who landed at the southern borders of the European Union last year and 2,800 who drowned in the Mediterranean; There were 300,000 of them knocking on the door of the United States during the month of last December alone. Record numbers. Years of containment policies and externalization of controls have changed nothing, quite the contrary, in the same way that the closure of Roxham Road – it was written in the sky – has not resolved anything.
To pretend that there are simple answers to complicated problems; to ignore facts and let falsehoods flourish; investing too little, upstream of migration movements, in the development of countries in the South; in the United States, having always ignored a reform of the immigration system, we too often find ourselves leaving reflection on the issues of migration geopolitics, which nevertheless have a crucial impact on the life of societies everywhere. in the world, to conclude on political decisions taken on a small-time basis.