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A deal between Britain and France to stop illegal Channel crossings will be far less effective than action to tackle the root causes of irregular migration, the UN’s migration agency chief has warned.
Amy Pope, International Organization for Migration director-general, said pushing French police to employ tougher tactics against boats in shallow waters would mirror “rough measures” increasingly seen around the world, although rarely in democracies with developed legal systems.
“The problem is not starting in France,” she told the Financial Times. “UK and French co-operation is a positive sign but it is not going to get to the heart of the matter.”
Pope argued that the UK would achieve much less through a drive for harsher enforcement than if it sustained spending on targeted aid to help migrants stay closer to their country of origin.
The UN migration chief was speaking as UK and French officials thrashed out details of a “one in, one out” pilot scheme to deter people from making the journey to Britain in small boats.
Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron on Thursday announced a reciprocal migrant returns deal that the UK prime minister and French president hope will reduce the number of small boat crossings in the English Channel.
The agreement includes up to 50 migrants a week being sent from the UK to France, with an equivalent number going in the opposite direction if they have a legitimate right to be in Britain, according to people briefed on the matter. That would equate to about one in 17 migrants that currently reach Britain on small boats.
Starmer told parliament on Wednesday that he was pressing the French government “to review its laws and tactics”, days after French police were filmed slashing a dinghy to prevent it crossing the Channel — a more aggressive approach than they had previously taken.
The IOM, which works with the UK on the resettlement of refugees, said it was not yet clear how a one-in-one-out deal would be implemented.
Pope said the approach would be unlikely to be the most effective deterrent to people who had already “paid smugglers tens of thousands of dollars, made an arduous journey, survived it”.
“What worries me more than the details of the French-UK deal is that the UK is cutting its overseas aid budget,” she said, arguing that helping countries such as Egypt to support the migrants they hosted from neighbouring countries would “have far more impact for less money”.
A former adviser on migration to the administrations of former US presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Pope said similar financial aid had previously helped Colombia integrate millions of migrants arriving from Venezuela.
The organisation lost some 30 per cent of its donor funding this year following US President Donald Trump’s move to slash US aid and has cut more than 6,000 staff as it scales back its global programmes.
Pope argued that efforts to clamp down on irregular migration will succeed only if governments also expand legal routes for people to migrate for work.
She compared the UK’s recent move to shut down low-skilled visa routes unfavourably with the Italian government’s approach, which involves clamping down hard on smugglers while also opening up paths for significant numbers of migrants to work in care, agriculture and tourism.
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni “is putting the two issues together in ways that may be a model for others”, Pope said, linking it to Italy’s need to fund an ageing population.
In contrast, she said, unless the UK amassed solid evidence to understand where it would have gaps in its labour force and made concerted efforts to fill those gaps, “they are going to have a major problem . . . not just today but in five or 10 years’ time”.
