Britain Spent Millions to Send Migrants to Africa. So Far, Just Two Have Gone.
The U.K.’s closely watched plan might be shut down amid logistical, political and legal issues
By Max ColchesterFollow
and Nicholas BariyoFollow
June 26, 2024 12:01 am ET
Two years ago, the British government decided to spend big to outsource a migration problem.
To deter migrants seeking asylum from illegally entering the country, it announced a radical plan: Those smuggled on makeshift dinghies to British shores would be sent to Rwanda, a small country in central Africa, where they would remain. The U.K. government handed Rwanda a £120 million (about $150 million) down payment and told it to get ready to host thousands of potential refugees.
Shortly after, Hope Hostel, a neatly kept yellow-fronted hotel in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, was rented out with British taxpayer funds to accommodate the expected planeloads of asylum seekers. Hotel manager Ismael Bakina and his team of 40 have been keeping busy ever since, changing the sheets on 100 double beds weekly, trimming decorative pot shapes into the bushes that adorn the hotel’s entrance and mowing the lawn on its mini-soccer pitch.
But on a recent day the beds at Hope Hostel were untouched. The suggestion box at the reception desk sat empty. No one has yet come to stay. “We are still waiting,” Bakina said, standing near a sign that reads: “Come as a guest, leave as a friend.”
Ismael Bakina, manager of Hope Hostel in Kigali. PHOTO: JACQUES NKINZINGABO FOR WSJ
The entrance at Hope Hostel. PHOTO: JACQUES NKINZINGABO FOR WSJ
No one may ever arrive. The U.K. government’s plan—criticized by some as inhumane, praised by others as a pragmatic response to a global migration crisis—has faced logistical, political and legal hurdles. So far, it’s been a huge waste of money. Just two migrants have volunteered to go to Rwanda after being paid £3,000 by the British state. Meanwhile, record numbers of migrants are crossing the English Channel to Britain so far this year, according to official data.
Britain’s Rwanda plan highlights the increasingly bold—and often legally fraught—plans that countries are taking as they grapple with a surge of migrants crossing into countries illegally and asking to be considered refugees. At least 920,000 asked for asylum in the U.S. during its 2023 fiscal year, and 1.14 million did the same in Europe last year.
President Biden in early June barred people who enter the U.S. illegally from seeking asylum. Asylum seekers must now cross at an official port of entry. Dozens of European nations are also exploring the idea of sending asylum seekers to third countries to stay while their refugee claims are considered or even to live there permanently.
The Rwanda plan is a cautionary tale of how complicated it can be.
The U.K. government has spent years locked in a fight with human-rights lawyers who argue that Rwanda isn’t a safe place to house asylum seekers. It has expended enormous political capital on the project, passing a law that prevents British courts from deeming Rwanda unsafe for asylum seekers, getting Rwanda to overhaul its own judicial system and offering the African nation up to £490 million in payments if the project gets off the ground.
Hope Hostel’s reception area. PHOTO: JACQUES NKINZINGABO FOR WSJ
Workers tended the grounds at Hope Hostel. PHOTO: JACQUES NKINZINGABO FOR WSJ
Faced with yet more legal hurdles, the British government began rounding up migrants in April to be sent to Rwanda. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called an election for July, and promises to get flights off if he is elected. The opposition Labour Party, who are favorites to win, say they will immediately scrap the policy.
“I am not going to flog a dead horse,” Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer said in a speech recently. “I am not interested in a gimmick.”
Other countries are interested. Advisers to U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump are studying the Rwanda plan. Italy’s leader Giorgia Meloni organized a letter by 15 European countries asking the European Commission to explore new powers to process asylum applications outside EU territory. The election manifesto of the main center-right party in European parliamentary elections, the European People’s Party, calls on sending asylum seekers to “safe third countries.”
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“The penny is dropping,” said Sunak during a recent campaign stop. “The challenge is growing, our security is being threatened and that is the only way to solve it.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak spoke at a press conference in April. PHOTO: TOBY MELVILLE/PRESS POOL
At the moment, asylum seekers are generally allowed to stay in their host country while their claims are processed to determine whether they are in need of protection. This system has been exploited by people smugglers to also move economic migrants, who aren’t under threat but want better working opportunities, into Western nations.
Many asylum systems are now clogged, and it often takes years for cases to be decided. By then, it’s often difficult for countries to expel or deport those who lose their case. In the U.S., most asylum seekers are found to not be refugees, but few are deported. Less than half of the asylum claims are approved in France. British officials last year approved around two-thirds.
Italy recently struck a deal to send certain asylum seekers to Albania. If the migrants win their case they can come to Italy. If not, they get sent off back home. In return, Albania gets money from Italy.
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Britain’s plan goes a step further: sending asylum seekers to live in Rwanda, and barring them from the U.K. even if they are deemed refugees. The government argues the policy meets international law by offering refugees protection from persecution in their home countries and, crucially, will dissuade economic migrants from coming.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that the 1951 Refugee Convention doesn’t forbid working with other countries to process asylum applications. However, there need to be important safeguards and “the UK’s plan didn’t have those safeguards,” said Matthew Saltmarsh, a spokesman for the UNHCR. Rwanda has in the past sent refugees on to other countries where they risked harm, a process known as refoulement, according to the agency. Furthermore, migrants sent by Britain are unlikely to assimilate into Rwandan society and would likely attempt a dangerous journey back to Europe, he said.
The Rwandan government contests this, pointing out it already houses 130,000 refugees from neighboring African countries. “We have worked very hard to make it safe,” said Yolande Makolo, the spokeswoman for the Rwandan government. “We have no apologies about being involved in an innovative partnership that could be one of the solutions to a problem that has gone on for far too long.”
The White Cliffs
On a recent blustery day on Britain’s south coast, a U.K. Border Force ship pulled into the port of Dover with around 60 asylum seekers wearing bright orange life vests. The group had been intercepted at sea traveling from France on a black rubber dinghy.
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Together with another dinghy that morning, a total of 141 people were being processed. “It’s a quiet day for us,” said one Border Force official watching on.
The mostly male passengers, some without shoes, filed off the boat to be checked by doctors and then arrested for illegal entry. Within weeks, they are usually taken to hotels or other government accommodation where they live, at taxpayer expense, until their cases are decided.
Migrants picked up at sea disembarked from a Border Force vessel this month. PHOTO: BEN STANSALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Migrants were escorted ashore after disembarking from a Border Force vessel this month. PHOTO: BEN STANSALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
To get to Britain, migrants often gather in makeshift camps in Northern France. When the wind is calm, smugglers cram between 50 and 100 people onto rafts made of the materials used to build children’s bouncy castles. The 9-foot-long boats often deflate somewhat during the trip and nearly always let in water. Crossing the channel can take over six hours, during which the migrants get wet and cold. Some 200 migrants are estimated to have died crossing in the past decade.
Once in U.K. territorial waters, the smugglers call for help, sometimes dialing the British equivalent to 911, and lifeguards or Border Force boats come to lift the migrants out of their rafts and sail them to Dover. The U.K. now employs two tugboats equipped with cranes working 12-hour shifts to haul discarded dinghies out of the water.
A decade ago, such boat crossings were rare. Lax controls on the border with France meant migrants hid in trucks that crossed into the U.K. via the underwater Channel Tunnel or on vehicle ferries from the port of Calais. Then in 2015, Britain and France tightened up checks on trucks.
In 2018, just 300 people made the crossing in small boats, the majority Iranians. By 2022, it was 45,000, and smuggling gangs were bringing in people from across the Middle East, northern Africa and as far away as Vietnam.
Migrants detected crossing the English Channel in small boats
MIGRANTS ARRIVED
BOATS ARRIVED
299
43
2018
164
2019
1,843
641
2020
8,462
1,034
2021
28,526
2022
45,755
1,110
29,437
2023
602
2024
12,901
258
Note: 2024 data as of June 24
Source: U.K. government
By 2020, the exponential rise caused panic in Downing Street, according to former government aides. Britain was leaving the European Union, a process that was meant to see the country take control of its borders. But migrants were leaking across at an alarming rate. The most obvious solution was to send the asylum seekers back to France, where they would be in a safe country, but the French didn’t want them. A latticework of human-rights law made deporting failed asylum seekers legally complex and time-consuming.
With thousands of applications, it was taking on average nearly two years for the Home Office to interview asylum seekers and determine whether they were refugees. Unable to find government housing for them, many were placed in hotels, a tab that cost taxpayers some £3.1 billion last year.
A smorgasbord of solutions were floated by Home Office officials, including using wave machines to wash boats away from British shores, officials say. But if migrants couldn’t be forcibly stopped or easily removed, officials concluded the best option was to make Britain the most unpalatable destination possible, former officials said.
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An aerial view shows rolled-up inflatable dinghies and outboard engines believed to have been used by migrants in Dover in January. PHOTO: BEN STANSALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Sending asylum seekers abroad isn’t a new concept. Following a European migration crisis in 2016, the EU signed a deal with Turkey for forced returns of Syrian migrants to Turkey in exchange for €6 billion (about $6.79 billion at the time) in aid. Under a Trump-era policy known as Remain in Mexico, tens of thousands of asylum seekers waited in Mexico until they got court dates in the U.S., a policy the Biden administration ended in 2021 and which is still the subject of court cases.
The British plan was inspired by a controversial decade-old Australian policy that saw migrants trying to arrive illegally by boat sent to Nauru, a remote small pacific island, or Papua New Guinea.
The UNHCR said there were several instances of reported self-harm among the offshored migrants who grew desperate. Papua New Guinea’s top court said the agreement was illegal in 2016. Still, the boats now rarely turn up. In 2023, 74 people turned up on four boats. None stayed in Australia.
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“You don’t need to send that many back,” said Alexander Downer, the former foreign minister of Australia who helped devise its plan and has advised the U.K. government on migration issues. “If there’s a better-than-even chance you might get sent to Rwanda, they’ll stop coming. No one is going to pay 3,000 to 5,000 pounds to go from France to Rwanda.”
Switzerland of Africa
The small landlocked African nation is best known for the 1994 genocide where nearly one million mainly ethnic Tutsis died during a 100-day civil war. Since then, the country is credited with undergoing a social and economic transformation under the iron-fisted rule of President Paul Kagame, who has been in power for 24 years.
The country is sometimes called a tropical “Switzerland of Africa” for its capital’s clean streets and low crime rate. Government officials say Kagame brought order to a traumatized nation. Human-rights groups say that Kagame has built a quasi-police state. Among those recently calling out Rwanda’s human-rights record: the British Foreign Office.
A view of Kigali. PHOTO: JACQUES NKINZINGABO FOR WSJ
Despite being one of the most densely populated countries in Africa, Kagame positioned Rwanda to be a welcome home for refugees. In 2019, Rwanda signed an agreement with the UNHCR to take in asylum seekers stranded in Libya. So far, more than 2,200 migrants have been sent to a camp south of the capital.
In 2022, Britain struck its migrant deal. It pledged £370 million for an Economic Transformation and Integration Fund to bolster Rwanda’s economy, of which £270 million has been disbursed. If Rwanda manages to take at least 300 asylum seekers, it would get an additional £120 million.
The U.K. also pledged to pay to get asylum seekers to Rwanda and house them for five years. The sums turned out to be eye-watering. A one-way ticket to Rwanda would cost £11,000, according to the U.K. Home Office. Officials decided they couldn’t use commercial flights and needed a chartered aircraft, with trained handlers to accompany about 50 migrants at a time.
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Once in Rwanda, the U.K. would pay a further £151,000 per person to cover housing, food and medical insurance over five years. If an asylum seeker wanted to subsequently leave Rwanda, the U.K. would hand Rwanda £10,000 to facilitate their departure.
Quantifying the plan’s success is difficult, according to an analysis published by the Home Office. Much depends on trying to work out how many migrants would be subsequently deterred from coming to the U.K.
If only 300 people are sent to Rwanda, the cost comes out at £2 million per migrant, and the deterrence effect is likely negligible, according to the Migration Observatory, at the University of Oxford. If 20,000 migrants are sent, the cost drops closer to £200,000 per asylum seeker and the deterrence is more sizable.
In Rwanda, even if they aren’t deemed refugees, the asylum seekers would be granted residence and work permits, receive access to educational training courses and be offered purpose-built accommodation or rent a place of their own, say Rwandan officials. Each migrant would get a monthly stipend of roughly $1,400 for five years, leaving them well off by Rwandan standards. A Rwandan schoolteacher earns on average $340 a month, according to the Anker Research Institute.
“It is the most humane mechanism out there for relocated individuals and the most dignified one,” said Doris Uwicyeza Picard, the coordinator of Rwanda’s migration and economic development unit. Rwanda wants migrants to settle and contribute to its economy, she said.
At the Gashora refugee center south of Kigali, refugees sent by the UNHCR from Libya are housed in a collection of brick houses surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire. On a recent morning, sobs from two newly arrived young women could be heard over the din of the crowds lining up to receive mosquito nets.
Newly arrived migrants lined up to receive mosquito nets at the Gashora refugee center, south of Kigali. PHOTO: JACQUES NKINZINGABO FOR WSJ
Newly arrived migrants in Gashora. PHOTO: JACQUES NKINZINGABO FOR WSJ
“Their intention was to go to Europe, and this is not Europe, you don’t expect them to be that happy,” said Ruyumbu Fares Augustin, the camp manager. More than 1,600 have then been resettled in third countries including Canada, Sweden and France. None have asked to stay in Rwanda.
Stop the boats
When then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the Rwanda plan in April 2022, there was an immediate backlash. The Archbishop of Canterbury and a group of fellow bishops said in an open letter that the plan “shames us as a nation.” A flurry of legal complaints followed.
Two months after the plan was announced, seven migrants were loaded onto the first flight to Rwanda. Minutes before takeoff, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued an injunction to stop it. Despite Brexit, the U.K. still adheres to the European human-rights convention, though Sunak is now threatening to pull out.
When Sunak became prime minister in late 2022, he made “Stop the Boats” a key plank of his electoral strategy—a slogan that had also been used in Australia. Last November, Britain’s Supreme Court ruled the Rwanda plan didn’t comply with U.K. law because there was a real risk that Rwanda could process claims incorrectly and send migrants to places where they could face persecution.
Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited the command room of a maritime rescue coordination center in Dover in 2022. PHOTO: DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES
The U.K. government responded by signing a treaty with Rwanda stating that no one sent by Britain could be forcibly sent on to another country. Rwanda organized for some 100 lawyers to take a special course in migration law to better process refugee claims and created an asylum appeals tribunal, made up of judges from several nations.
The Sunak government then passed a new law last summer stating that migrants arriving by small boat aren’t allowed to claim asylum at all, and that the government must remove them to another safe country. More than 50,000 migrants have since entered, but Britain has nowhere to send them.
In April, migrants began to be rounded up and placed in special detention centers awaiting a trip to Rwanda, creating panic. The Irish government complained that migrants were fleeing over the border from the British province of Northern Ireland to avoid being sent to Africa. Other asylum seekers went underground. Of the initial cohort of 5,700 asylum seekers identified to be sent to Rwanda, the Home Office said it could locate just over half of them. Some of those rounded up have now been released.
Ayoub, a 36-year-old Iranian who sailed across the Channel over a year ago to claim asylum, was previously informed he might be sent to Rwanda. The former engineer, who is living in northern England awaiting his case to be decided, said he would have done things differently if he had known he could be sent to Africa. “I would have changed my plan 100%,” he said, sucking on a cigarette. “I would have tried to reach the U.S.”
Downer, the former Australian official, said walking away from the scheme now would encourage new boat crossings. “The number of crossings will go way up—just watch,” he said. “Then they will start all over again trying to fix it.”
