cross-posted from: https://fedinews.net/m/ImproveTheNews/t/6769
- The UK government has reportedly paid a failed asylum seeker approximately £3K ($3.7K) to leave the country and relocate to Rwanda voluntarily. The Sun
- The unnamed individual was flown to Kigali via a commercial airline on Monday as part of a voluntary scheme. This is the first time the UK has relocated a failed asylum seeker to a third country. Independent (LR: 2 CP: 3)
- The news comes after the UK parliament passed the Safety of Rwanda Bill last week, enabling the deportation of asylum seekers — who have arrived illegally in the UK — to the East African country. Verity
- Though the UK Supreme Court ruled that the Rwanda policy was unlawful, the UK government passed the bill declaring Rwanda a "safe third country" for asylum seekers. BBC News (a)
- The UK Home Office has confirmed that the first set of illegal migrants intended to be removed to Rwanda have now been detained, with deportation flights expected to begin some time in the next nine weeks. GOV.UK
- In 2023, over 29.4K people reportedly attempted to illegally enter the UK via small boats crossing the English Channel, down from a record high of nearly 45.8K in 2022. So far in 2024, nearly 6.3K have attempted to make the journey. BBC News (b)
Right narrative:
- The voluntary deportation of a failed asylum seeker to Rwanda is a symbolic victory for the UK government. However, with pressure to fulfill the promise of ending the influx of illegal migration ramping up, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak must make sure that his forcible deportation policy begins to see similar success.
SPECTATOR (UK) (LR: 5 CP: 5)Left narrative:
- The voluntary scheme is completely different from the controversial Rwanda plan. Despite the UK government's best attempts to portray the deportation as a victory, the reality of the expensive gimmick is clear. Paying asylum seekers £3K of taxpayers' money for leaving the country will neither stop the boats nor fix the UK's border crisis.
HUFFINGTON POST (LR: 1 CP: 4)Nerd narrative:
- There's a 10% chance that the Conservative Party will form the first government after the next UK general election, according to the Metaculus prediction community.
METACULUS (LR: 3 CP: 3)
The more cynical take is that they've had him on ice so they can have very highly publicised roundup of immigrants then a deportation right before the council elections. However, that might give them too much credit for competence. It's more likely this is due to lack of investment in the immigration service, which has created a big backlog of claims to be processed. Of course, the cynical take on that is that the Tories have created a problem that they can use to their own ends ("it's not our fault this isn't working, blame the immigrants") and then they get to "solve" the problem they created just before an election so they can win some xenophobic/ignorant votes back from Reform.
Both those cynical takes can be true at the same time.