Why Everything You Know About Illegal Immigration is Wrong
The Real Story Behind Britain’s "Illegal Immigration" Crisis
Illegal immigration is one of the most heated topics in Britain today, and this controversy appears to be shared globally. Yet much of what we hear about it – from the true nature of “illegal” migrants to the effectiveness of deterrence policies – is flat-out wrong. In this article, we’ll debunk common misconceptions about illegal immigration, using hard evidence and real-world examples to show how current UK thinking and policies are often contradictory and counterproductive. Whilst this is a UK case study, specifically, these points are useful globally.
The Myth of the “Illegal” Immigrant
The term “illegal immigrant” conjures images of people sneaking into the UK and hiding in the shadows. In reality, the line between legal and illegal status is far more fluid than people assume. Research shows that most migrants living in the UK without authorization originally arrived legally – for instance, on valid visas – and only later fell out of status. The vast majority of undocumented people weren’t “smuggled in” at all; they came through formal routes and became undocumented thanks to an overly complex system (missed paperwork, hefty fees, legal misadvice, etc.). In other words, many so-called “illegals” are not willful law-breakers at the border, but victims of a system that produces illegality through bureaucracy and high barriers.
Even those who do arrive without papers are often legal migrants in waiting. Consider the Channel crossings that dominate headlines: it’s widely assumed these people have no right to be here. Yet government data shows roughly 70% of asylum seekers who arrive on small boats would ultimately be legally allowed migrants. In the first eight months of 2023, this went as high as 75% of Channel-crossers. In other words, the majority of people entering “illegally” via small boats are eventually legally recognized as refugees fleeing war and persecution (or would be, if systems allowed). Our rhetoric paints them as criminals, yet calling them “illegal” obscures this reality and feeds a false narrative that they are all meritless “bogus” claimants, when in fact many have valid claims under international law.
This begs the question, why do these immigrants take this dangerous route to the UK?
Policies That Encourage What They Aim to Prevent
Perhaps the biggest misconception is that harsh policies will stop illegal immigration. Politicians boast that tough measures – walls, “hostile environment” crackdowns – will deter migrants. But time and again, we see these policies not only fail to stop irregular migration, but sometimes encourage it in new forms.
A striking example is how European governments (including the UK), unbeknownst to most, make it illegal for airlines or ferries to carry anyone without a visa, under threat of heavy fines. On paper, that’s “combating illegal immigration.” In practice, it means that a refugee who could legally claim asylum in Britain cannot board a cheaper and safer plane to get here, because they won’t have a visa (you can’t get a tourist or work visa when you intend to claim asylum).
Airlines, not wanting to be penalised, simply ban anyone without the proper documents. The result? Refugees are literally forced into the hands of smugglers on dinghies, paying huge amounts of money for the privelige, because official policy leaves them no safe, legal route.
And why do smugglers use dinghies and not safer vessels? Because government policy is to confiscate any boat bringing refugees by sea. So they use cheap boats that they can economically lose.
So planes and safe boats are out. Why don’t asylum seekers simply wait in their own country and apply there? Impossible. The UK government's official position is explicit: You cannot apply for asylum from overseas. You must reach UK territory first. There is thus no legal route to asylum without doing something illegal, to get into the UK, inbetween.
We rage at those “vile trafficking gangs,” yet it’s our own laws that deliver desperate people into their clutches. The only way for an asylum seeker to seek asylum in the UK is to be here already, yet there is no legal route which allows them to do so. This is a system set up to encourage crime.
Surging Irregular Arrivals
The number of people detected entering the UK without authorization surged dramatically after 2018. This spike correlates with the rise of the Channel dinghy route, which itself emerged as other routes (like concealed truck crossings) were shut down by heavy security. In other words, when one route is blocked, another (often less safe route) opens – a hallmark of deterrence policies backfiring. It’s basic logic: if you don’t have a legal route, and you close off safe illegal routes, you leave only unsafe illegal routes.
Between 2020 and 2024, around 175,000 people were recorded entering the UK without authorisation, 78% of them by small boat. The Channel became the alternative “route of last resort”. No amount of naval frigates or asylum bans has stopped the dinghies because the pressure fuelling them (conflict, persecution, lack of legal options) hasn’t gone away.
Even Britain’s “hostile environment”, denying undocumented migrants jobs, housing, bank accounts and healthcare, hasn’t yielded the promised results. The theory was that if life is made unbearable for illegal migrants, they will either self-deport or not come in the first place. But multiple evaluations have found little proof of this deterrence. In fact, the Home Office’s own 2023 review admitted it was “not clear” to what extent these measures achieved their aim of pushing people to leave. A majority of migrants sanctioned under hostile-environment rules between 2015–2018 were found to still be in the UK years later. The policy did succeed in making lives harder – increasing exploitation and fear – but not in significantly shrinking the undocumented population.
And why would it? We already know that the majority of people entering the UK in this way are eligible for asylum, so they are often fleeing something far worse. Short of creating a war zone out of the UK, no hostile environment is likely to be worse than what is being fleed.
By scapegoating migrants and treating ever harsher restrictions as a silver bullet, we blind ourselves to viable solutions. The evidence is clear that cracking down in isolation doesn’t stop desperate people from coming; it just makes their journeys more dangerous and their stay more precarious.
The Third-Country “Deterrence” Doesn’t Work
Another fashionable idea is offshoring asylum seekers, i.e. shuttling people who arrive here to a far-off “safe third country” to have their claims processed there. Advocates tout examples like Australia’s offshore camps or Israel’s deals with African countries, claiming these stopped illegal migration. But a closer look at those experiments reveals a litany of failure and abuse, with lessons the UK must heed.
Israel’s Rwanda/Uganda scheme is a cautionary tale. Between 2013 and 2018, Israel sought to rid itself of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers by effectively bribing them to leave. They gave each person a choice: deportation to Rwanda (plus a $3,500 payment), detention in Israel, or return to their home country (which for many wasn’t actually safe). Around 4,000 asylum seekers were sent to Rwanda under this program. The expectation was that Rwanda would let them claim asylum there and settle.
What actually happened? Few, if any, stayed in Rwanda. Investigations found that many were not even allowed to formally seek asylum upon arrival. Instead, Rwandan authorities swiftly moved them onward – smuggled to Uganda or elsewhere – essentially washing their hands of them. From Uganda, many of those migrants headed north, ending up back in the people-smuggling routes to Europe. In interviews, dozens of these refugees who eventually reached Europe said they felt they had “no other choice” but to risk the dangerous journey again, having been dumped by Rwanda with no durable solution.
Not only did Israel’s scheme fail to stop onward migration, it also violated core refugee protections. Evidence later presented by the UN Refugee Agency showed that some of the people Israel sent to Rwanda were secretly forced back toward their home countries – including attempts to send some back to Eritrea, a country they had originally fled, which was only stopped at the last minute by UNHCR’s intervention. This is the nightmare scenario (known as refoulement, returning refugees to the persecution they escaped). Israel’s arrangement ultimately collapsed and it was suspended amidst legal challenges and Rwanda’s refusal to continue taking people when the abuses came to light.
Tellingly, when the UK Supreme Court reviewed Britain’s Rwanda plan in 2023, it cited the Israel-Rwanda fiasco as evidence that Rwanda could not be trusted to protect asylum seekers’ rights.
Australia’s oft-cited offshore model is not much better. Starting in 2013, Australia adopted the stance that anyone arriving irregularly by boat would never be allowed to settle in Australia, even if found to be a genuine refugee. Instead, boat migrants were shipped to remote island camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG). The navy turned back many boats at sea in a militarized operation.
On the surface, arrivals appeared to plummet dramatically, from a peak of 25,173 boat arrivals in the fiscal year 2012–13 to just 207 in November 2013. Yet, the numbers suggest this was primarily due to the aggressive "turnback" policy rather than offshore detention itself. Indeed, boat arrivals actually continued to rise significantly after offshore processing resumed in August 2012, with more than 24,000 people arriving by boat between August 2012 and July 2013. It was only after the implementation of military-enforced turnbacks at sea that numbers drastically reduced.
Meanwhile, migrants simply adapted. As boat routes closed, arrivals shifted notably to legal pathways via air travel. The number of asylum seekers arriving by plane steadily increased, rising from around 8,308 in fiscal year 2012–13 to 14,389 by fiscal year 2022–23. This shift demonstrates that the offshore deterrent didn't solve migration; it merely redirected it into a different, legally permissible channel. One that Europe already closed.
Then there’s the staggering financial cost. By one estimate, Australia spent A$3.4 million per person to process asylum seekers offshore, compared to about A$4,400 if they housed an asylum seeker within the Australian community during processing. In other words, offshoring was 770 times more expensive.
The lesson for Britain is clear: third-party deterrence doesn’t solve illegal migration. Israel’s outsourcing failed, and Australia’s model simply shifted people to different forms of transport. Additionally, the shift to air-based arrivals seen in Australia wouldn't be feasible in the UK without significant changes to flight and visa restrictions. Changes that would likely render expensive and dangerous small boat crossings obsolete anyway (so why not just do that, and open up legal avenues, as earlier discussed?)
Equally, the UK is not an island continent with vast surrounding oceans. It shares the narrow and busy English Channel with France, a sovereign country unlikely to cooperate with aggressive maritime turnbacks (as seen by recent deals).
In sum, offloading asylum responsibilities onto poorer countries or remote islands is not the silver bullet it’s often sold as. We have seen it fail elsewhere, and there is every reason to believe it would similarly fail—morally, legally, practically, and financially—if attempted by the UK.
The “Turnback” Fantasy
What about the practicalities of simply turning the boats back at sea? This idea, often inspired by Australia’s tactics, is that the UK Border Force or Navy could intercept small boats in the Channel and push or tow them back to French waters. Proponents imagine it as a firm but straightforward solution: no need for asylum processing or Rwanda deals if migrants never reach our shores. However, this “pushback” approach is a dangerous fantasy in the busy English Channel, and even our own officials have effectively admitted as much.
In 2021, then-Home Secretary Priti Patel authorised plans for Border Force teams to use “turnaround” tactics on small boats. In essence, to physically force them back toward France. What followed was an almost farcical climb-down. By April 2022, before the tactic was ever deployed, government lawyers quietly withdrew the pushback policy on the eve of a court challenge. Why? Because the plan collided with reality.
The Royal Navy (which had been given responsibility for Channel operations) refused to implement pushbacks, saying they lacked authorisation and put lives at risk. Navy and Border Force personnel reportedly balked at an order that would force them to potentially capsize flimsy dinghies, endangering migrants and officers alike. Equally, without French cooperation (which was never on the cards), a unilateral UK pushback could mean leaving migrants adrift in a busy shipping lane or escorting them into French territorial waters, neither of which is lawful. Essentially, those on the frontlines knew what politicians chose to ignore: pushbacks are “extremely dangerous” and “not a viable policy” in the Channel.
The collapse of the pushback plan is a microcosm of the larger issue: simplistic “tough” solutions tend to evaporate when confronted with facts. Australian-style turnbacks worked under very specific conditions: on the high seas, with Indonesia (often reluctantly) taking boats back, far from media scrutiny. In the Channel, any pushback would happen in broad daylight, in one of the world’s busiest sea corridors, between two wealthy nations who are supposed to be partners. It would likely end in tragedy or diplomatic crisis (or both). British authorities recognised this, and wisely stepped back. Yet the myth persists in public debate that “we just need to grow a spine and send them back.”
Confronting Our Contradictions
Consider the contradictions in our current approach. The government claims to champion safe and legal immigration, yet it has shut all safe and legal routes for asylum from the countries producing refugees. Afghans, Syrians and Eritreans make up more than half of the people crossing the Channel, and outside of a few bespoke resettlement schemes, there is no visa they can apply for to come to the UK to claim asylum.
We then rage at them for coming “illegally.” Our rhetoric insists refugees should seek asylum in the “first safe country” they reach, yet Britain itself takes a comparatively modest number of asylum seekers – far fewer per capita than many European neighbours – and thus such an argument ignores the legal responsibilities of all nations, not just those next to nations being migrated from. We are happy to trade with and benefit from nations globally, yet seemingly keen to escape our responsibilities of being that global nation. Likewise, we sell arms and benefit regularly from wars in various nations, then complain about people fleeing and seeking asylum from that nation.
At heart, the UK’s immigration debate suffers from an almost wilful refusal to face reality. The reality that migration – especially forced migration – is a complex phenomenon driven by war, oppression, and global inequality, not easily quelled by force. The reality that people willing to risk drowning in the Channel or suffocating in a lorry are not acting on a whim that can be switched off with harsher slogans, and that closing off legal routes is the major cause of these dangerous routes.
Want a plan to safe, managed migration? Set decreasing but sensible migration targets, based on previous years, then open legal, managed routes toward it. Routes whereby someone in Calais or their original country and quickly get a decision on an asylum application, which removes the need for them to travel here. Spend money staffing this system properly, rather than housing people arriving here in order to claim asylum. It would close down small boats over night, not only by offering a safer route, but also because people would no longer have to get here (by any means necessary) to try to gain asylum. Most would undoubtedly be accepted, but they’re going to be accepted anyway. Those that aren’t would be able to focus elsewhere.
We have a choice: continue down the path of contradictory policies and perpetual “crisis,” or change course and deal with immigration with level-headed pragmatism. If we keep doing what we’re doing – ignoring facts, doubling down on failing policies – we will keep getting the same results: more deaths in the Channel, more human misery, more political grandstanding, more squabbling over figures and no end in sight. It’s time to rewrite what we think we “know” about illegal immigration.