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on July 23, 2024
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Inevitably, immigration was a major topic of discussion throughout the recent general election, with much focus on the respective parties’ approaches to irregular, or “illegal”, immigration.
Labour’s emphatic win in that contest – in which it claimed 411 seats in the House of Commons, compared to the ruling Conservative Party’s 121 MPs – has led to new focus being thrown on the party’s immigration policies now that Sir Keir Starmer is Prime Minister.
The term “immigration amnesty” or “migration amnesty” is typically used in reference to a country issuing a legal declaration that foreign nationals currently in the country without permission to be there – for example, because they do not have a visa – have the right to live there permanently.
Sometimes, the term is used to refer to broader Government policies that regularise the status of undocumented migrants.
During the election campaign, many people will have noticed references being made to the Labour Party potentially offering an “amnesty” to irregular migrants – albeit, the term was not used by Labour politicians themselves.
Labour has, of course, made much comment about the Conservatives’ approach to migration, and made various pledges of its own planned policies. For example, the party criticised the Rishi Sunak-led Government’s scheme to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda, stating that the initiative’s costs ran into “hundreds of millions of pounds”, even though it was only able to address “fewer than one per cent of the asylum seekers arriving.”
Sure enough, that scheme has now been ended by the new Labour Government. Another eye-catching element of the party’s election manifesto, however, was the claim that the Conservatives had passed “unworkable laws” resulting in a backlog of tens of thousands of asylum seekers “indefinitely staying in hotels costing the taxpayer millions of pounds a week.”
Elaborating on Labour’s own approach, Mr Starmer said during the election campaign that a Government led by him would resume the processing of asylum applications for people who had previously arrived in the UK illegally. A law passed last year had effectively blocked tens of thousands of such migrants – including those who had made controversial “small boat” crossings of the Channel – from being granted refugee status.
The Conservatives had said that it intended to remove these migrants from the UK, whether through the Rwanda scheme or to other countries. However, Mr Starmer said such removals were not taking place, and that the policy had ultimately been the “absolute opposite of a deterrent”. The Labour leader said to BBC Breakfast at the time that if his party triumphed in the election, it would allow migrants arriving by irregular means to have their claims considered.
He reasoned: “For years, the system in this country has operated on the basis that if someone claims asylum, they are processed. Does anybody seriously think that not processing the claims, when now record numbers are coming across the Channel, is operating as a deterrent?”
The Telegraph reported on Monday 8th July that with Labour having entered Government, there were now plans to allow over 100,000 migrants to apply for asylum. The newspaper stated that some 90,000 migrants who had been “earmarked for deportation to Rwanda” would be among the 102,000 processed through the asylum system under Labour.
The official spokesman for the Prime Minister reasoned that it was important to process asylum seekers’ claims to ensure they were not “sitting in the system, housed in expensive taxpayer-funded hotels”, as had been the case under previous Governments.
However, James Cleverly – now Shadow Home Secretary – slammed this move on the basis of it constituting an “effective amnesty to 100,000 illegal migrants… it has taken the Labour Party less than five days to make the UK more attractive to asylum seekers than ever before.”
Net migration to the UK has been especially high over recent years, reaching 685,000 in 2023. The following factors are among those that have been cited as driving the steep increase:
Students from overseas, and their dependants. After the UK’s departure from the EU, post-study work rights were reintroduced in the country. This seemingly helped to make the UK a more alluring destination for students from other parts of the world. The then-Conservative Government implemented restrictions on students’ family members in January 2024, as it sought to dampen down increases in the numbers of these migrants.
Whether or not Labour’s decision to process some 100,000 migrants through the asylum system can indeed be considered an “amnesty” for irregular arrivals to the UK, many campaigners and other observers have long spoken in favour of such a policy.
Various arguments have been made on this over the years, including that an immigration amnesty would bring such benefits as:
It could also be argued that immigration amnesties of some kind have long existed in the UK, even if Governments have not exactly called them by that name.
Even as far back as the John Major Government, when Michael Howard was Home Secretary, there was a big jump in the numbers of asylum seekers granted exceptional leave to remain, from 2,000 in 1991 to 14,000 in 1993. As The Guardian has previously reported, such a swift rise – unaccompanied by any public announcement – strongly indicated the then-Conservative Government was using administrative means to pursue a deliberate policy of reducing an asylum backlog.
Fast-forward to the Labour Government under Tony Blair and later Gordon Brown, and in 1998, then-Home Secretary Jack Straw said there was no question of an amnesty. Nonetheless, he permitted 30,000 migrants who had failed with their asylum claims to stay in the UK, simply on the grounds of the lengthy delays they had faced.
It was also estimated by the London School of Economics that some 160,000 irregular migrants were granted official status between 2003 and 2007. This was partly attributed to the fact that when certain eastern European countries joined the European Union (EU), migrants from these countries who had spent many years residing illegally in the UK effectively become legal migrants.
So, it could be argued that even if Labour was to formally announce an “immigration amnesty”, the practicalities of such a policy would likely not greatly differ from the approaches pursued by various UK Governments for decades.
In practice, history – and present-day political realities – suggest that any immigration amnesty put in place by the new Labour Government would be an internal one, instead of being announced to the world.
The need for some kind of urgent action is clear; between 2018 and 2022, the UK’s asylum backlog ballooned from 27,000 to 132,000 applications. There was, however, a 28% fall in the backlog during 2023, after the then-Government implemented numerous measures to speed up the processing of applications.
As of 31st December 2023, the asylum backlog – defined as the total number of asylum applications waiting for an initial decision – was approximately 95,000.
Ahead of the 2024 general election, the Labour Party set out various pledges on the approach that it would take to immigration policy in the event of winning the election. These included:
Here at Cranbrook Legal, we would be pleased to project-manage your immigration application for the UK, or to assist you if you are an employer wishing to recruit migrant talent. For further information and to request our advice and guidance, please call 0208 215 0053, or complete and submit our online contact form today to request your free consultation.
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