Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s recent attempts to push irregular migration back up the media agenda have made little headway against the torrent of electoral news coming from across the pond, with an extra £75 million for Border Security Command turning few heads away from the drama unfolding in Washington DC. However, the two subjects are not as disconnected as they might initially appear. Indeed, despite her crushing defeat at the polls, it is ironically from outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris that Labour can learn a few valuable lessons on migration.
Since coming to power, Keir Starmer has attempted to reverse the previous Conservative Government’s clear failures in this area. However, despite fixing some of the Tories’ misguided immigration policies, the bulk of Labour’s efforts seem decidedly short-term.
One of Starmer’s recent faults is the approval of new contracts for migrant processing centres worth £521 million — a temporary fix for the larger problem at hand, as they do not address the source of immigration. Due to focusing domestically rather than internationally — of which this is an example — since Labour took power, we have seen a spike in small boat crossings to 26,699 this year, up 22% from the same time last year.
As these figures continue to rise, such measures give the impression that Starmer is happy just to throw money at the problem — that he favours quick fixes and temporary solutions rather than taking the tough decisions needed to reduce irregular migration in the long term.
Labour must build stronger ties with both the countries from which the asylum seekers are coming and the countries from which the boat crossings are occurring. And Starmer has indeed made some progress in this direction. His promise to “smash the gangs” has been backed up most recently by three new cooperation agreements with Serbia, North Macedonia and Kosovo. However, this style of intelligence-sharing agreement is still fairly small-scale compared to the successful upstreaming measures implemented in the US.
Harris spearheaded initiatives in various South American and Central American countries to reduce the desire to enter the United States illegally. She specifically targeted El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, as immigrants from these countries accounted for the bulk of illegal border crossings between 2014 and 2020. Harris pushed to resolve the problem through the creation of the Partnership for Central America (PAC) in 2021. This alliance works as a mobiliser and convenor of investment by private corporations and organisations such as Chobani, Mastercard, TechnoServe and the World Economic Forum. It managed to increase private sector investment by $5.2 billion and boosted job creation in the aforementioned target countries by 70,000. This generated new economic opportunities and, in turn, lowered political and social violence — reducing the incentive to migrate.
The Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, also created under Harris, achieved similar success. This initiative, spearheaded by the US, was signed by 22 countries across North and South America. The declaration promotes community stabilisation, regularisation of migration pathways, humane migration management and coordinated emergency responses. It makes immigration more of a regional rather than a domestic issue, encouraging countries throughout the Americas to take similar actions in managing migration.
Partially as a result of these programs, there has been a 14% decrease in encounters with Guatemalans, a 39% decrease with El Salvadorans and a 50% decrease in those coming from Honduras at the US-Mexican border. On top of this, Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica have introduced regularisation programs for displaced populations, for instance by providing millions of Venezuelans with Colombian citizenship. Now, 80% of displaced people from Central America are not travelling to the US-Mexican border but are instead able to settle elsewhere.
The UK faces a slightly different challenge. Most immigrants crossing the Channel come originally from incredibly unsafe countries in the Middle East. Further, they only get to the UK after crossing through safe countries in the EU. However, such differences do not prevent the UK from learning from the importance of regional cooperation from the American example. While the US was able to cut down on immigration by taking direct charge of upstream measures, the UK approach will have to be more cooperative.
Looking at EU attitudes to immigration, there is currently a rightward shift towards a tougher stance. This could make the task of cooperation easier. While recent discussions of using ‘return hubs’ — offshore processing centres for irregular migrants deported from the main bloc — have stalled due to questions of legality, Starmer could nevertheless capitalise on this European attitude shift, for instance by pushing for Europe to pursue larger-scale upstreaming measures to stop small boat crossings and smuggling gangs at their source.
Starmer’s inheritance on irregular migration has undoubtedly been a tricky one; it would be unfair to heap all the blame on his shoulders. However, he needs to realise that there are better ways to tackle irregular migration than throwing money at the problem, expanding flawed institutions and hoping for the best. Negotiations and agreements with EU countries are certainly part of the solution, and so is viewing immigration as more of an international and not a domestic issue. The US has led the way with this approach — Keir Starmer should take note.
James DeDonato is an Events and Operations Assistant at Bright Blue.