00:00Dr. Ziegler, Labour's own Home Office Minister, says that, and I quote,
00:04immigration is tearing this country apart.
00:07This all looks like a good idea, you might say.
00:14Well, thanks very much for having me on the show.
00:17I certainly don't think any of those plans are good ideas.
00:22I think we can go through them one by one.
00:25We can start with the idea that the government wants to target people that the government itself
00:31recognise needs protection here.
00:34That's why they got refugee status in this country.
00:37And as your correspondent said, what they want is for people who are here to have to wait for 20 years
00:45before they can settle here permanently.
00:48That's worse treated than any other migration group.
00:52And it's entirely out of step with other countries, other liberal democracies.
00:58It's also against the UK's obligations in international law.
01:02It's a plan that would put their lives, of those refugees, in ongoing limbo.
01:09This sense that they cannot commit to any long-term presence here because at any point they could be deported.
01:15But it's also, as your reporter said, means that every two and a half years there needs to be a reassessment of their situation
01:23in an overstretched home office that anyway is unable to deal with the number of applications it has to deal with now.
01:30So somebody who has fled Eritrea 20 years ago under a dictatorship would have had to have their applications reassessed
01:37every two and a half years to see whether there's still a dictatorship they need to flee from.
01:43So that bit of the plan is utterly irrational.
01:46And some of the other elements you've just mentioned, for instance, around the potential Trump-style visa ban on three countries in Africa.
01:58Imagine if you've got somebody who is fleeing the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
02:03who has seen one of the most atrocious conflicts in the last few years.
02:08How are they supposed to get to the UK legally if there's going to be a visa ban?
02:13So this is just again going to introduce them arriving in the UK regularly and then build as some sort of a threat to the United Kingdom.
02:22So those are just two examples of the list your reporter suggested of policies that are both against international law
02:29but also entirely counterproductive.
02:32If you accept that the UK does have an immigration problem, are you saying these are simply the wrong tools to fix it?
02:44Well, I mean, I think framing...
02:47Firstly, I think it is wrong to conflate the UK's protection obligations towards people fleeing persecution and conflict
02:55with the wider immigration debate.
02:57I think there can be a debate to be had about how many people the United Kingdom wants to admit in order to work in an economy that needs workers,
03:08like the care sector and others, how many people the UK wants to admit as students each year, under what conditions.
03:17Those are entirely separate debates to the question of what the UK is bound under international law
03:23and under morality as well to do in relation to people fleeing persecution and conflict.
03:29I think we all have recognized that the UK needed to do something when people were fleeing Ukraine.
03:35That's why the government of the day established specific schemes that without caps allowed people from Ukraine to come to the UK
03:44to apply to come here without having to board any boat to cross the channel.
03:51And for some reason, the same logic that applied to Ukraine doesn't seem to apply when we're thinking about conflicts in Sudan,
03:59conflicts in Afghanistan, conflicts in Gaza, conflicts in the DRC.
04:03And I think that's very troubling.
04:06And it's particularly troubling for a Labour government to be adopting this type of mindset and rhetoric.
04:12Professor, great to talk to you.
04:13Thanks so much for your time.
04:14I'm sure we'll speak again in the coming days.
04:17Dr. Ruby Ziegler, Associate Professor of International Refugee Law at the University of Reading.
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