Priti Patels’ Immigration Reforms Mere Banal Rhetoric

London: Waving Immigration Flags and ‘Perfidious Albion’ – Fairness is apparently the value driving the Home Office’s reforms of the UK’s immigration and asylum laws. In her statement before the House of Commons on Wednesday, Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, set out how the reforms seek to ‘increase the fairness of our system so we can protect and support those in genuine need of asylum’. Such banal rhetoric disguises how Johnson’s government, hot on the heels of slashing the international aid budget, is undermining the rights of some of the most vulnerable people in the world and further resiling from Britain’s international obligations.

The difficulties with the proposals begin with how the government has decided to assess if someone is in genuine need of refuge. Rather than focussing on why an asylum-seeker has fled their country, Patel has shifted the focus to how they fled. Seemingly, if you are able to stroll up to an airport ticket desk in the country you are fleeing from, go through security checks manned by immigration officials employed by the government persecuting you, and board a flight to Heathrow, your claim will be enhanced. If, on the other hand, you creep out of your house in the dead of night and trek across miles of perilous terrain, before – if you are lucky – squashing into a rickety dinghy and setting off across the Channel, your claim will be degraded. Perfidious Albion indeed.

Read more: Nicholas Reed Langen, Justice Gap, https://is.gd/u327zr

Rhetoric: language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect, but which is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.