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“Mark my wordsGBYour browser does not support the element., this government will turn the page,” Sir Keir Starmer promised in a recent speech. It is the sort of thing the prime minister says about many areas of policy. This time the topic was one near the top of voters’ concerns: immigration. Labour has pledged to expand detention centres, “smash” people-smuggling gangs and, above all, return more illegal entrants. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, boasted on December 16th that the government is on course to send home more in its first six months than in any six-month period in the past five years. Days earlier Britain carried out the first removal flight to Pakistan since 2020.Removing people with no right to be in Britain seems an obvious way to improve on the Tories’ dismal record. Voluntary returns (migrants who leave of their own accord, sometimes with the encouragement of cash) and enforced returns fell by a third since Labour was last in power (see chart), even as the numbers entering Britain soared. Although there is a legal duty to remove foreigners sentenced to over a year in prison, 18,000 such people remain, four times the number a decade ago.The Conservatives blamed an obstructive justice system, particularly since the courts blocked their plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda. In truth, it was mainly their own bungling. The scandal, in which the government hounded and deported law-abiding British citizens, and reports of woeful mistreatment at removal centres made matters toxic. Immigration officers complain that Atlas, the computer system brought in by the Conservatives, is broken and time-consuming. The decline in returns coincided with an 11% real-terms budget squeeze between 2015 and 2020.But there are few simple fixes. Atlas needed a painful three-year handover, during which officers had to enter everything twice: once in the new system, once in the old. Replacing it will not be cheap or quick. The Home Office admits it hasn’t tried to count how many illegal migrants there are in Britain since 2005 (when it estimated the number at 430,000).Legal hurdles do, as the Tories claimed, make removals harder. In 2019 half of the Home Office’s attempts to enforce a return failed, often due to last-minute appeals on the planned day of departure. The courts tend to be reluctant to approve the removal of those who have married or had children in Britain. In two recent cases judges ruled that paedophiles could remain in part because it would be unduly harsh on their families, despite one being convicted of raping his stepdaughter.Returning failed asylum-seekers, which Sir Keir has promised to do, is really hard. Nearly seven in ten of those refused in 2015 were still in Britain in 2022, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. People are rarely sent back to very poor countries like Iraq or Somalia. The longer claimants stay, the likelier they are to build lives and family ties in Britain of the sort the law and courts value.Deportations appeal to the public. According to More in Common, a pollster, Labour’s removal flights are more popular with voters than flagship schemes like creating Energy, a planned public energy company. But a zeal for expulsions risks uncomfortable comparisons to another deportation enthusiast, Donald Trump, and anger on the Labour left. Sir Keir may turn the page on immigration only to find that it makes for difficult reading.
