Today, Explained - Boris Johnson presents: Motel Rwanda

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

The British government will deport UK-bound migrants to Rwanda. It’s part of a larger trend of rich countries offloading asylum seekers to poorer countries. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Tori Dominguez, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson kicked off the week with what looked like a diminishing degree of confidence. There's also some breaking news from London tonight where Boris Johnson has narrowly survived a vote of no confidence by his conservative party. That means, at least for now, he can get back to business as usual, which in his case means deporting migrants to Rwanda? Those who have arrived illegally since January the 1st may now be relocated to Rwanda? Those who have arrived illegally since January the 1st may now be relocated to Rwanda. If you're some poor Syrian fleeing a president who might want to murder you, maybe you get to France, use a paddle boat to make your way to the United Kingdom and hope to plead for asylum, you can get a letter in the mail and it might just say you're being sent to Rwanda. Why the UK is trying to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and whether the wealthy governments of the world are just kind of done

with asylum Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Today explained, Sean Rahm's firm, Boris Johnson Johnson survived a no-confidence vote on Monday. That means his government can get back to governing Britain. What are its plans there? Shafi Musaddiq, Britain correspondent at the Christian Science Monitor, is here to explain. it's offloading immigrants we have spotted another small

rib which appears to be a migrant who have landed in britain from france via tiny dinghies and boats this small dinghy probably three metres long, we think there's maybe 12, 13 on board, a couple of small children at the front and a couple of women. And essentially deporting them to Rwanda, which is what many legal campaigners say contravenes human rights. And this is a massive policy that essentially appeases a lot of voters from the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson says that this will save lives from human trafficking and people smuggling gangs. The most tragic of all forms of illegal migration, which we must end with this approach, is the barbaric trade in human misery conducted by the people smugglers in the Channel.

His Home Secretary, the Interior Minister Priti Patel, says that it's going to be a game-changing solution to illegal immigration. This government is delivering the first comprehensive overhaul of the asylum system and this type of illegal migration in decades. These messages come from a government that was elected off the back of Brexit. Brexit was not totally, but in some parts, an anti-immigrant campaign to break away from Europe, which succeeded ultimately. And this thread goes back 20 to 30 years of inadequate messaging from multiple governments, stoking fears of losing sovereignty over migration policy. Just as Brexit allowed us to take back control of legal immigration,

we're also taking back control of illegal immigration. There's been routine talk of targeting immigration over the past 25 years. And then Brexit happened. And Boris Johnson is following up on this promise to tackle and clamp down on migration. It's 30 years in the making, this. It's not something that's happened overnight. And I think a question a lot of people in our listening audience will have is why Rwanda? The reason why is it goes back to good old colonialism. And Britain is revisiting those links. After Brexit, there's been a pivot away from Europe back to Africa and Asia.

And Rwanda in Britain's eyes is a young population. It definitely is demographically. And so for Britain, this is an opportunity to build new trade relationships further down the road. We can't wait for you to visit Rwanda soon. Think of it as a sort of getting to know each other phase. We'll climb that mountain, swim those waters and trek to experience the wonders of nature. This isn't necessarily about immigration for Britain. For Britain, this is also about trade. And Rwanda represents that post-Brexit. Small, landlocked, and with limited natural resources, the country is relying on new technology to drive its economy forward.

Rwanda needs the money, but whose hands it goes to, we don't know. Britain says that the money will go to Rwandans on the ground. Rwandans on the ground don't believe that for one moment. Rwandans are not happy about this deal. If Rwanda's kids have not the possibility to go to school because of the poverty, how Rwanda government will assume to give education to the kids of these refugees. Listen, Rwanda has taken a huge number of refugees and immigrants from other parts of neighbouring Africa. For the last 28 years, we've hosted more than 130,000 refugees from neighbouring countries. We also have the experience of being refugees

or displaced because of our recent history of conflict. So we know what it means to be desperate. So they are a welcoming country in many senses, but they're also very poor and they're still recovering from a very famous genocide and civil strife. They're on the up for sure. But Rwandans on the ground are very sceptical. Do we know how many migrants might get sent to Rwanda? So we know that 100 people have so far been issued letters of deportation. They're due to fly out on June the 14th. That's just the tip of theation. They're due to fly out on June the 14th. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Afghans in particular are making boat crossings between France and the UK. Almost as many Afghans have crossed the channel from January to March this year, about 1094. That's more than the whole of last year. So you can see that more and more people are crossing the English Channel. And what happens to these Syrians or Afghans or Ethiopians once they get to Rwanda? Do they get some of the reported 120 million pounds Boris Johnson is giving Rwanda for this program? They absolutely will not receive a single penny. This used to be a hostel, but it's already being prepared for the arrival of asylum seekers from the UK. There are 50 rooms in this block, including places to eat and sleep. So their journey will be that they will end up in large-scale hotel accommodation on the outskirts

of the capital city Kigali. Now a lot of the footage that's been pumped out on the internet of these accommodation they look quite swanky they've got a pool there's double beds there's a kitchen sink but we don't know how many people will be fitted into one room so there's a double bed but there could be six to seven people in one room we're told that there will be retraining education and jobs for these people but again the details are murky and this is why there's a legal challenge from human rights campaigners. Refugee law says you can't penalise somebody for being forced to travel illegally when it's not their fault. And we're going to challenge that in court.

This breaches the 1951 Refugee Convention, made after the end of the Second World War, after the Holocaust. The convention recognizes that most refugees have no choice but to travel irregularly, and it prohibits governments from penalizing them for doing so. And for these people who are effectively being sent away to Rwanda for irregular immigration, what kind of status will they have there? They definitely won't be applying or won't have the capacity to apply for British residency. The only route that they have is to apply for residency in Rwanda. Now, if that's rejected, they get sent back home.

Home is Afghanistan, Syriaria to all these regimes that could persecute a lot of these people some of these people are fleeing regimes because they're being persecuted for their sexuality it's a lot of lgbt asylum seekers and that's what they face if they go back home. I've spoken to a few migrants and I spoke to one man, an Afghan man and he told me that he would rather kill himself than go to Rwanda. For them, there's no hope in Rwanda. They want to come to Britain. And listen, Britain

has extensive family support for a lot of these people. If you're a lonely person, you're on the run from a repressive regime, you're destitute, you will go to your family networks. And this is what some of these people are doing. Why Rwanda is their question. And they're not deterred. The migrants that I've spoken to say they're not deterred by this plan. If anything, it would just mean that the smugglers are paid much more money. So there are already lawsuits flying around, and it sounds like this is totally antithetical to the asylum policies that were established after the Second World War, after the Holocaust, but the Johnson government wants to pursue this anyway?

They do, but they have a track record for lawbreaking in the UK right now. At the core of many people's frustration, the so-called Partygate scandal, in which he and staff held illegal drinking gatherings during the country's COVID lockdowns. Johnson was fined by police. But let's not forget, this is political, and there's a general election coming up in about 18 months' time. So they're testing the water here. We expect this will be challenged in the courts. And that's a gamble that could backfire because of everything that's happening in Ukraine.

Sentiment against migrants has suddenly become more positive because of the war in Ukraine. Britons have opened arms to Ukrainians. In just a week, we've seen 7,500 people say that they want to open their homes to welcome refugees. So this is, in one sense, a making of anti-immigrant policy because of Brexit. But it's come at a time that's where the trend is going the other way.

The wind is blowing the other way. And Brits, for the first time in a long time at least, look like they're opening their arms up to foreigners. Now, whether that extends to non-European refugees, whether that warmth extends to them, the question remains. Are you saying that Ukrainians aren't going to get sent to Rwanda? I'm highly skeptical. Actually, in the migrant camps in Calais, which is on the coast of northern France facing England, there were a few Ukrainians there, not a lot,

but Ukrainians there were targeted and taken away and put ahead of the pack and told to come to Britain. And the migrants who were left in the Calais jungle camp said, why not us? We're being left behind. It's a clear indication of the good immigrant. If countries like the UK are just going to push immigrants to Rwanda or threaten to push immigrants to Rwanda for political points, why have asylum policies in place at all? We're going to ask in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

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so we figured we'd ask someone who knows their asylum to help us understand it. I'm Eleanor Painter. I'm a postdoctoral associate of migrations with Cornell University's Mario Inouye Center for International Studies, and I host the podcast Migrations, A World on the Move. Elodore, the Johnson administration is exporting migrants who want asylum in the United Kingdom to Rwanda. It sounds pretty exceptional. Is this kind of thing exceptional? It's not exceptional. This is not a unique policy, although we can certainly say that sending asylum seekers by plane thousands of miles away is an especially extreme version of something that we have been seeing happen throughout the global north for some time now. Italian warship, Italian warship, this is a Kifaha. This is a Kifaha. It funds and trains the Libyan Coast Guard to apprehend migrants who are trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe

and returns them to Libya, where we know they're housed in detention centres. If an Italian boat brings migrants on board, then it has to take them to Italy. And that's exactly what they're trying to avoid, by calling the Libyans to take them away. Israel actually had an older policy from 2013, where it was sending Sudanese and Eritrean nationals to Uganda and Rwanda. This man, who's from Darfur, told us that he was sent from Israel to Uganda with seven others and was left to fend for himself. I was not given any document, nor get a passport, nor get assistance from them,

nothing. Australia has a really infamous offshore detention policy where it uses islands to detain people. Unrest is common here. This is video supplied to Dateline. This protest occurred just weeks earlier. But detention center staff aside, and with media banned, no one would have known about it. In the US, we have the Migrant Protection Protocol, so this policy that's known colloquially as the Remain in Mexico policy. Since 2018, Central American migrants have been forced to remain on the Mexican side of the border while they wait for their cases to be processed.

Eric, a 41-year-old Cuban, was deported after an attempt to cross the border last year and is waiting for the resolution to his asylum application. Here you can make $30 in three days. If you want to live with dignity, it is possible here in Mexico. There's broad recognition that these policies fail in multiple ways. So in general, as border policies become stricter and stricter, people essentially get funneled along more dangerous routes. That's why we see people crossing the Mediterranean Sea, crossing the Sonoran Desert. policies like the UK-Rwanda agreement will keep people safe by deterring them from attempting to cross and by keeping people out of the sea. But that's really a distraction from the reasons people end up on these routes in the first place, and it's also an oversimplification.

The migrants themselves are often relying on smugglers to help them on their perilous journeys, and just like the policies have funneled people along more dangerous routes, further restrictions are also likely to make traffickers and smugglers have to adopt different strategies. So to say that the problem is the paths people are taking really ignores that they're being forced along these paths because of, inhumane treatment of migrants. Is the UK looking at Mexico and the United States or Australia or Italy and going, yeah, we'll have some of that. We'd like to replicate that situation. The UK is definitely taking cues from other countries. In a 70 to 24 vote, politicians agreed to move asylum seekers

who arrive on Danish soil to a reception centre in a third country outside Europe. Denmark had a similar deal with Rwanda in the works prior to the UK deal. It's now likely to implement that. And we know that UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has consulted with Australian leaders who've implemented their offshore detention policy. Australia has seen

migration from the Middle East and South Asia in particular, and people, of course, crossing by boat. And they've been working for years to try to prevent those crossings. In hot and humid conditions, 400 single male asylum seekers, more than half from Sri Lanka, have been leaving 16 men to attend. But what they've done to do that, in the name of rescue and of security also, is house people out of Australia in these detention centers on islands. So they're housing them in Nauru and in Manus in Papua New Guinea. And these are detention centers that have held people for sometimes years. There's a famous case of Behrouz Bouchani, who's written and filmed about his experiences in Manus and the really inhumane conditions in which people are held there.

So through stories like his, we have real evidence of the psychological consequences that these policies bear out on people who are detained. Again, people who are fleeing conflict, fleeing extreme economic precarity. Increasingly, we're talking about people who are fleeing the consequences of climate change as well and who are seeking safety and protection and instead being held in extended periods of detention. What do you call this kind of policy? Does it have a name? Is there, I mean, is there a term for offshoring, offloading,

passing on your migrants to another country for some money? There's no official single term, in part because these aren't internationally sanctioned policies, but you hear offshoring a lot. And that's what we're seeing in the Australian case. In the UK, the Rwanda example is certainly offshoring, but we might be more accurate to call it outsourcing. So they're really handing over asylum accurate to call it outsourcing. So they're really handing over asylum processing to Rwandan authorities. And a sort of larger umbrella term that you hear in these cases is border externalization. Border externalization. Yeah. So meaning that countries implement policies that are effectively pushing their own borders

out so that migrants can never even reach the border in order to enter the country. I mean, we've talked about the history of asylum on this show before, at least in its modern political context. It's coming out of World War II. Are these types of programs that we're seeing in the United States and Australia and Italy and now the UK, are they suggesting that the so-called global north is done with asylum? Is this the new normal? Is this the new normal? Yes, I think we're moving in this direction. I think it's always important to hold in mind that more than 80% of refugees and asylum seekers live in global South countries. So what we think about as this asylum crisis for the global North, you know, when we talk about it in those terms, it really doesn't offer the fullest picture of migration and asylum. about countries with a lot of power who are calling into question international agreements,

asylum protocols, and the place of people's rights as they cross borders. So not only is asylum being trampled on by various countries, but it's also just basically something that can be used as some political ploy in an election. This problem has bedeviled our country for too long. And this is the government that refuses to duck the difficult decisions. Is anyone playing by the rules anymore? Or should they just sort of put an end to asylum formally? I mean, why does this thing even exist if no one cares about it anymore? The ways that countries apply the Refugee convention have always reflected political alliances and ideologies. So even though that convention has been revisited and protections have been expanded

in multiple ways, it still remains really tied, for example, to Western views on what merits protection. And I think that claims about closing borders and keeping some people from some places out really resonate with political bases right now. I hesitate to call it the end of asylum, although I think we are seeing movement towards some kind of conversation about, you know, what kind of accountability can we expect? You know, we're definitely seeing challenges to the Ref convention and to international agreements about asylum and about rescue. And we're seeing those violations go relatively unchallenged. So, yes, the asylum system is being tested and people are being held in precarity and losing their lives in the process.

This is really a crucial moment for talking about what justice could look like in border spaces and for people who have to move to seek safety and protection. And this should really be a global conversation. Eleanor Painter is a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University. She also hosts a podcast. It's called Migrations, A World on the Move. Earlier in the show, you heard from Shafi Musadik, Britain correspondent at the Christian Science Monitor. Our show today was made by Halima Shah.

She had help from Matthew Collette, Paul Mounsey, Laura Bullard, Tori Dominguez, and me. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained.