Are humanitarian visas the answer to finally solving small boat Channel crossings?

I was asked to speak to this question at a recent event organised by Patricia Nabuco-Martuscelli, and here’s how I answered. 

The UK’s preferred mode of refugee reception has always been to offer safe passage and settlement to particular nationalities during particular conflicts on a case by case basis. These have usually been short term schemes -think of recent examples – Syrians, Ukranians, Afghans, Hong Kongers. The groups selected for these schemes are politically convenient in some way, and there is usually a lot of media coverage of the situations they are fleeing, and a sense of public demand that they be helped.

Or then the UK also participates in the UNHCR resettlement scheme, with tiny numbers of people arriving in that way.

These schemes, which are similar to humanitarian visas in many ways, can be seen as good in that they expand the space of protection. But they do that in a context where the space for protection has shrunk dramatically. Since the late 1990s UK governments have been deeply hostile to people making their own way here and applying for asylum. 

Because these schemes are so small, and selective, you will often hear people saying that there are no safe and legal routes to reach the UK. What this really means is that there are no safe and legal routes for the vast majority of people who want to seek asylum here, who usually travel by their own steam. In recent years people have therefore increasingly been calling for safe and legal routes for people who would otherwise be crossing the Channel in a small boat. People who are in Northern France. 

I have been part of a team of researchers working on UK government responses to small boat Channel crossings for the past few years. The first thing that you need to know about Channel crossings is that it is not that more people are travelling irregularly to the UK, it’s just that now they are visible. Previously people were travelling in the backs of lorries and other vehicles. They travel -in lorries, and boats- with the help of smugglers, at great expense and risk to themselves. Travelling by vehicle or container was actually incredibly dangerous. And they do this because they cannot board a cheap ferry or Eurostar because of border controls. 

These people have not travelled directly from their home countries by plane because of border controls. For most people there is no safe and legal route. Even where there is a scheme for their nationality in the case of Afghanis, most do not want to wait in regions of origin for the lottery of a resettlement place or for all of the bureaucracy to go through.

So are humanitarian visas the solution to small boat crossings? IPPR have argued that they are. Many charities have argued that they are. They are saying this because there are no safe and legal routes for would be Channel crossers, and HVs are a safe and legal route. But I’m going to argue that they aren’t a solution. And this is because of the logic of borders, and the fact that humanitarian visas leave that logic uncontested.

I think the problem isn’t refugees, it’s the way borders operate. So I have four reasons that they won’t work to solve channel crossings.

First, underpinning humanitarian visas is a logic of desirability deeply tied to ideas of race and culture. Humanitarian visas are selective. The people in Northern France who are looking at crossing irregularly are there because they are not seen as desirable, they are not selected, the border filtered them out. The humanitarian visas are not for them.

Second, humanitarian visas essentially build a bridge over the border for the select special few. But this leaves many people still on the other side without a bridge. Humanitarian visas by their nature are exclusionary, and that exclusion is, again, deeply racialised.

Third, humanitarian visas, at least in the proposals made by those who have fleshed them out such as IPPR, are still from regions of origin. This is still a bridge, but from further afield. And it will make no difference to people who are in Northern France. So even when you create the visa route for people directly from Syria, you still have all the people in Northern France there. You have done nothing for them.

Fourth, most proposals are time limited -there is a scheme for a nationality for a short time. People have been crossing the Channel irregularly for a very very long time. Forced migration, and the resulting irregular migration for asylum, is not something that can be stopped with one or two time limited and nationality specific visa schemes. It is a long term reality of our world, and in my view we need long term responses to people who find themselves camping in Northern France and determined to come to the UK. 

At the moment the response in Northern France is one which prioritises border control, political point scoring, and financial enrichment by companies that sell border security technology. The result is dehumanisation, racism, violence, a thriving smuggling industry, exposure to premature death, human rights violations, and exploitation. At the same time, the boats continue to cross.

Those long term responses need to centre human dignity, safety, and rights. And I think that if those principles were at the centre of our thinking we could come up with something much more ambitious and meaningful than humanitarian visas as a solution to Channel crossings. 

At the same time, if we want to really understand what’s going on and develop sustainable responses, we need to be looking at the wars, foreign military interventions and arms sales which cause forced migration. We need to be talking about who profits from both displacement and bordering, and who is politically trying to benefit from the perpetual manufactured crisis of borders and migration.