Britain could reduce the number of people making perilous journeys across the Channel by allowing migrants to apply for asylum from management centres in France, a think tank has proposed.
New centres set up outside Calais could allow people to apply for UK asylum or to be reunited with family in Britain. The number of asylum seekers granted sanctuary to the UK would be on a rolling monthly cap, a new report from the Future Governance Forum (FGF) think tank has said, and in return France would take back the equivalent number of migrants who have arrived on UK shores in small boats.
The proposals mirror policies enacted by the Biden administration in the US, which allowed people on the Southern border to access pre-arrival processing. Offices were set up in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia and Ecuador to allow migrants to apply to resettle in the US through legal pathways, including by pursuing refugee status.
The programme aimed to decrease the number of people making the dangerous crossings at the US-Mexico border.
The UK is already in discussions with France on a scheme to return migrants who have crossed the Channel in small boats. In return, UK government officials have reportedly floated the idea of accepting migrants seeking reunion with family members already in Britain.
The French interior ministry said in April that the pilot scheme would be based on a “one-for-one principle”. This would mean that “for each legal admission under family reunification, there would be a corresponding readmission of undocumented migrants who managed to cross [the Channel]”.
Author of the report from the progressive think tank FGF, Beth Gardiner-Smith, said: “Setting up new ‘asylum management centres’ in France would enable the government to restore control to the UK’s asylum system and cut the growing number of people attempting to come to the UK via dangerous Channel crossings in small boats.
“Asylum management centres, working alongside a future readmissions agreement, would provide the realistic deterrent and incentive needed to prevent people getting into boats.”
The report said that refugees are likely to delay crossing the Channel if they could get a decision on an asylum claim while in France. They argue: “Full asylum processing allows the UK to admit only those with a valid asylum claim, thus removing the challenge of returning those who arrive without a valid claim, many of whom cannot be returned because we have no returns agreement or the country of origin is unsafe”.
Publication of the report comes ahead of a UK-EU reset summit on Monday, where ministers are hoping to sign a joint pact on security.
The European Council has said that migration and youth mobility will also be on the agenda.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper said that the UK government have recently persuaded France to change their rules to allow police to stop migrants boarding boats from the water.
Ms Cooper said that smugglers have been picking up migrants from the water rather than the beach, as French police currently don’t intervene once migrants are in the water.
The home secretary said that French ministers have now approved a change to the rules, which will be put into effect “over the next few months”.
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