Those who have followed the apparently interminable debate about the UK’s so-called Rwanda law will be familiar with the critiques levelled against it within the UK from both right and left. From the perspective of liberal opponents of Rishi Sunak’s flagship migration law, the policy is an inhumane outrage – sending defenceless migrants to a landlocked third world country in central Africa rather than housing them in Britain is, to Guardian-reader eyes, the kind of thing only the most heartless of right winger could dream about, let alone enact.
From the perspective of Sunak’s right-wing critics, the law is greviously insufficient: The UK has been beset with an unprecedented migration crisis, with thousands of people resorting to crossing the English Channel in rubber dinghies, and thousands more arriving at ports and airports. Staking the border security of the country on a few monthly flights to Rwanda may have seemed, to Daily Mail reader eyes, the equivalent of trying to staunch the bleeding from a severed limb with a sticking plaster.
What events of the last few days in Ireland have demonstrated, however, is something that those right-wing critics missed: The impact of the Rwanda policy on the behaviour of migrants.
The Irish Government is presently complaining to anyone who will listen, domestically and internationally, that some 80% of new asylum applications in Ireland are now arising from a cross-border flow of migrants, fleeing Sunak’s Rwanda policy. Sunak’s response, over the weekend: They’re right. It’s working.
Sunak is of course correct, because of something that is all too often missed in discussion of immigration policy: Migrants, by and large, are rational actors. They are looking, when deciding where to migrate to, for the country and economy and welfare system that will give them the best deal, and the best chance of building the kind of life that they want. It matters not that much to a rational migrant whether his or her chances of deportation to Rwanda, from the UK, are 5% or 95%: Once the chance is greater than zero, there’s a deterrent effect. In Ireland, the chance of being sent to Rwanda is presently zero, which means Ireland is a more attractive destination for migrants than the United Kingdom is.
For about six years now – if not longer – the Irish Government has refused to consider the impact of its policies on migrant choices. To listen to any Government spokesperson, or senior Irish journalist (but I repeat myself) one might imagine that immigration is just something that has happened to our unfortunate politicians in the manner of the weather. Despite Eamon Ryan’s best efforts, the Irish Government cannot avoid or deter the rain. And despite Roderic O’Gorman’s best interests, we simply cannot avoid or deter immigration.
Last week, at the Oireachtas committee on Justice, in the midst of one of the most disastrous ministerial performances at such a committee in decades, the Minister for Justice announced, having looked into the hearts of the Irish people, that they did not want or desire a “Danish style” immigration system.
So what has Denmark (unlike the UK, a fellow EU country) done? Here’s Politico Europe:
Denmark — under Social Democrat Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and her center-right predecessor Lars Løkke Rasmussen — has pursued some of the toughest immigration policies in Europe over recent years. Denmark’s policies were initially seen as extreme in countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Germany but over recent years lawmakers in those states appear to have moved closer to Copenhagen’s line, and to some extent, followed its example.
In the last decade, Denmark has integrated an increasingly harsh stance on immigration. In 2023, Denmark revoked residency permits for Syria refugees, declaring some parts of the war-torn country safe for return, before backtracking after international backlash. In 2021, the country passed a law that could allow refugees arriving in Denmark to be moved to asylum centers in partner countries, such as Rwanda, a proposal which the European Commission criticized. It also looked hard at detaining asylum seekers on a remote island.
The most recent immigration numbers for Denmark show that in 2023 that country had net migration (the increase in population when immigrants and emigrants are set against each other) of 30,172. Ireland, in the same year, per the CSO, had net inward migration of more than twice that number, at 77,600.
Denmark and Ireland, lest it need pointing out, are countries of very similar land area, economy, and population. One might get the impression that policy matters.
And it does: Over the same period that Denmark was adopting progressively harsher migration policies, Irish politicians were adopting progressively friendlier ones: A globalised announcement at the beginning of this Government’s term of office that direct provision would be abolished and that migrants would get own-door accommodation; Generous welfare benefits; the right to work in Ireland within six months; a deportation policy that appears to exist mainly on paper, as a theoretical system, rather than anything working in practice.
A migrant making a choice between Ireland and Denmark, or Ireland and the UK, does not have much of a choice to make at all, assuming that they are broadly rational people.
The former US President, Ronald Reagan, had a theory about how to win the cold war: The more you spend on defence, he argued – the more powerful your armed forces were – the less likely it would be that you would ever have to use them. Strength is a deterrent.
The same principle might be applied to the UK and Sunak’s Rwanda policy – and indeed that of Denmark. The point of the “cripplingly expensive” (in the words of some opponents) scheme is that you rarely actually have to use it. Faced with the threat of a worse outcome, a lot of rational people who should not be in the UK have chosen to self-deport themselves to Ireland.
In Ireland, by contrast, where self-deportation has no much worse alternative, more people are arriving than leaving.
Absolutely none of this is hard to understand. The only thing that is hard to understand is how long it is taking Irish politicians to figure it all out.