Europe has finally realised the enormous costs of mass migration

Britain is the odd one out as country after country adopts harsh measures to control their borders

Has Keir Starmer’s Britain become the softest touch in the West for illegal migrants? In a week when another 12 people drowned in the Channel and ministers squirmed under scrutiny about their still leaderless Border Command, attention turned to the Continent. “Rwanda’s back – but it’s Germany planning to use it,” screamed a tabloid headline on Friday. Tory leadership candidates fell over one another to claim German endorsement for their now defunct scheme.
Joachim Stamp, Berlin’s migration commissioner, had indeed floated the idea of processing asylum seekers in Rwanda, using facilities now sitting idle since Labour abandoned the policy as their first act in office. The irony of this turn of events will not be lost on British taxpayers, who paid hundreds of millions of pounds for these facilities in Kigali. And if the Germans are so eager to go ahead, where does that leave all the legal objections and moral outrage of our own liberal establishment?
In a further twist, Germany’s London ambassador, Miguel Berger, denied the story. “Let’s be clear,” he tweeted, “there is no plan of the German Government to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.” But this official denial was a classic piece of diplomatic distraction. The ambassador added: “The discussion is about processing asylum applications in third countries under international humanitarian law and with the support of the United Nations.”
So Germany is considering sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. The only difference is that Stamp wants to put the scheme under UN supervision and target migrants entering the EU across its eastern borders — a tactic used by Putin’s Russia to destabilise Europe.
In Germany, the politics of migration is even more incendiary than in Britain. Last month a deadly terrorist attack in Solingen, allegedly by a Syrian asylum seeker, helped the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to become the first Right-wing nationalist party to win a state election since 1945. Olaf Scholz’s embattled centre-Left government responded by speeding up deportations. True, there has been no popular unrest in Germany to compare with this summer’s riots in Britain. Over recent years, however, there have been hundreds of arson attacks on refugee hostels in the former East Germany. In some of these incidents, crowds of onlookers have cheered on the arsonists. Many blame Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than a million migrants from Syria in 2015 for the rise of the AfD.
Friedrich Merz, her successor as leader of the Christian Democrats, has moved his party to the Right to head off the populist challenge. He wants to exclude all asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan. Expect more of this if he replaces Scholz as Chancellor after next year’s federal elections.
The migration debate is, of course, highly charged not only in Britain and Germany but also in France. There Michel Barnier, President Macron’s choice as Prime Minister, has a reputation as a hardliner on immigration. The direction of travel in France and Germany is therefore clear: on migration, both countries have had enough of the liberal policies that are still championed here by the Labour Government.
Across the EU, the idea of outsourcing asylum processing to third countries is gaining ground. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has done a deal with Albania, while Denmark also plans to send migrants to Rwanda. Sweden, meanwhile, has reversed decades of porous borders: this year, more migrants will leave than arrive there.
Suddenly Starmer’s Britain — with mass immigration, both legal and illegal, still roaring ahead — looks like the odd man out among European countries. Nor is this likely to change any time soon. A Labour Government led by a human rights lawyer is not only out of step with Europe, but increasingly out of touch with British public opinion. Crushing the riots was the easy part. Finding a solution for migration will be much harder – especially if using third countries such as Rwanda is ruled out.