A few weeks ago, at the checkout of a department store close to the seafront in Dover, I overheard a mildly alarming exchange between the person in front of me in the queue and the shop assistant. My fellow customer was explaining that she now kept a cricket bat by her front door in response to recent reports that young men who had recently crossed the Channel illegally were entering homes in the Aycliffe area of the town.
The small boats crisis has dropped out of the headlines recently, but crossings have continued on a large scale throughout the mild autumn and are only dropping off now due to a cold snap and the lack of light. The crisis is still very much a problem and now high on the political agenda, with the government planning to possibly introduce new legislation in an attempt to address it, legislation which church leaders are likely to criticise.
Indeed tomorrow, Archbishop Welby is to lead a debate in the Lords about the principles behind UK asylum and refugee policy, and the response to the challenges of forced migration. The archbishop, who denounced the Rwanda plan in his Easter Sunday sermon, is against any tightening of asylum policy so we can imagine already which way he will drive the debate.
As recently as 2018, the boats were not a significant problem. Official figures record that 299 people were detected arriving on small boats that year. But by 2021, that many people were arriving every four days on average, with an annual total of 28,526. The total for this year will be well in excess of 40,000; over 100 people every single day and something like a 50 per cent increase from last year.
Against this backdrop, the think tank Policy Exchange has issued a paper “From The Channel To Rwanda”, containing three essays by distinguished Christian thinkers from the University of Oxford – Professors Nigel Biggar, John Finnis and Richard Ekins – reflecting on the morality of migration, asylum and borders. All three dissent from the dominant institutional response by British Christianity, which has been characterised by a strong hostility to any serious attempt to enforce our borders and reduce the number of people entering the country.
Professor Finnis – a Catholic KC with a global reputation as a legal philosopher – defends some aspects of the government’s plan to remove some illegal migrants to Rwanda. Michael Nazir-Ali, former bishop of Rochester and now a Catholic prelate, is another prominent Catholic voice who notes the moral importance of preventing illegal immigration.
It is good to see some opposition from serious Christian intellectuals to the “open borders” approach which is the practical outcome of pronouncements from figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It is true that the Catholic teaching on borders, migration and asylum insists strongly on the responsibility of richer countries to accept migrants seeking a better life, as well as refugees, and suggests that people have a right to migrate for economic reasons. However, these kind of high-level pronouncements are easy to make and much harder to turn into sustainable policy for individual countries facing their own predicaments.
For one thing, almost all the people crossing the Channel in small boats are coming from France, a safer and in some respects richer country than the UK. Among Channel migrants, young men are heavily over-represented, something which brings its own problems.
About a third of all those who made the crossing in the first nine months of 2022 were from a single country, Albania, which is a peaceful and relatively prosperous nation, a member of NATO and a candidate for EU membership. These people cannot be regarded as “refugees” in any meaningful sense, but economic migrants, and the UK is perfectly entitled, on Catholic principles, to limit the number of immigrants it accepts in line with prudential judgments about social coherence and economic stability (we are not stingy in such matters: we granted in the region of one million immigrant visas last year). There have been reports from credible sources in law enforcement that many of the Albanians are being brought here by Albanian criminal gangs operating in British cities.
Many Christians are functionally in favour of open borders, in the sense that they cannot really articulate any limiting principle to their belief that the UK should accept more and more immigrants and refugees. There is nothing wrong with this in principle, as long as they remember that theirs is not the only coherent or compassionate position allowed for a Christian.
There are literally billions of people in the world who would qualify for moving to Britain under an expansive understanding of the principles laid out in Catholic teaching, but obviously it is simply not feasible for us to accept all of them. We have considerable problems with integration, with the economy, with social fragmentation and crime in our big cities.
Pragmatic considerations of the common good and concern for maintenance of law and good order are well-established principles in Catholic teaching – Thomas Aquinas himself suggested that newcomers to a community should have to wait two or three generations before involving themselves in politics.
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