Labour will need to 'resurrect the Rwanda plan', predicts Shadow Minister

Shadow Home Office Minister Matt Vickers has predicted the Labour Party will have to follow in the Tories' footsteps on its illegal immigration policy.

Speaking on GB News, he said: “Actually, this hasn't been going on for hundreds of years in its current setting, it's a recent phenomenon. Globally, there are more people on the move than ever before.

“It is a complete mess, whether it be legal migration or whether it be illegal migration. We saw legal migration starting to come down now as a result of measures we brought forward, when the Conservatives were in office, about stopping people bringing their mum and their dad and their gran, and everybody else, which was the right thing to do.

“We should have seen in April the introduction of a threshold on salaries that required people to be earning £38,700 in order to be able to bring people with them.

“But then on illegal migration, we're seeing record levels. People might have said, ‘this was terrible. It was broken. It wasn't working. We weren't fixing it.’ Actually, when the last government left office, the numbers were beginning to come down.

“The number of people in hotels was coming down massively because we stopped opening hotels. But actually, we had a deterrent in place. Rwanda, or wherever it might be - the further away, the better.

“But in real terms, it didn't matter. It was about the principle in law that if you arrived in this country illegally, you should be detained and you should be removed. You should either be sent back to your own country, as we did with Albania.

“Albania was one of the top places from which people were arriving. All of a sudden, we started sending those people back and the numbers arriving went down by 93 per cent. It's not rocket science. If people arrive here and realise it's not worth their while they stop paying those heinous, vile people smugglers to smuggle them into the country.

“Stop that motivation. If people realise that if they get in that boat they're not going to get to stay, they will stop coming. We were going to detain them. The legislation was in place, and the Labour party have ripped it all out.

“They're going to have to start again in a few months’ time. They're going to realise this is a damned mess, and they're going to have to bring forward legislation to do exactly what we were doing.

“It didn't matter where you were sending them, Rwanda was the catch all. So we were sending them back to where they came from, where we could get those agreements in place. But there are countries where you can't send them back and you need to find somewhere else.

“So now those people who are going to be in Rwanda are in Redcar and Romford and Richmond and places across this country, because we're not sending them anywhere.

“The current government have sent a message to the world. They've actually repealed legislation to allow people who arrive here illegally to become British citizens. If that isn't a flag to say, come to Britain, if that isn't the red carpet, what is?

“We put forward amendments to that legislation on several things. The Labour Party brought forward this bill that removed all of the ability we had to detain and remove people who derived here illegally. It allowed people to become British citizens who had arrived here illegally.

“We applied two major amendments, one of them being that if you committed any crime and you come to this country, you should be deported.

“And secondly, we said we would disapply the Human Rights Act and interim judgments from the court.

“They wouldn’t be here when they applied; we wouldn't allow interim judgments, so they would be removed."

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