You can’t fix illegal immigration by making it legal

But Labour’s little-discussed new scheme could still cost us dear

In June this year, the Home Office announced the creation of three new “safe and legal refugee routes”, supposedly inspired by the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

The story got a bit lost because of the chaos around Keir Starmer’s departure, but it’s a really big deal.

There are three separate new immigration routes being created this year:

“A new community sponsorship scheme will allow communities to sponsor refugees to resettle in their area, taking responsibility for housing, integration and supporting them into work.”

Currently a small number of refugees are sponsored in communities under the UK Resettlement Scheme (UKRS) but the vast majority are supported by councils.

The named community sponsorship model will sit outside the UKRS and operate at a much higher capacity once established”

As the government say, we already operate a “community settlement scheme”, where sponsor groups are able to bring over refugees if they can raise at least £9,000 and commit to two years of housing and support per family. Presumably such rules as there are will be relaxed as part of the new scheme.

In addition, a new “study route” will let “trusted universities” sponsor refugees directly.

“trusted universities will be able to directly sponsor refugees through a study route. Applications will open this autumn for organisations to sponsor refugees, with the first arrivals in autumn 2027.

This model will form the future of safe and legal routes. The Home Office will work with ‘lead sponsors’ to accredit them and these will need to be organisations.”

We have not yet been told what would qualify a university as “trusted”, and what incentives institutions would have to take on such people - though it is worth noting that people on such humanitarian schemes can get student loans. With universities keen to increase their numbers that may be incentive enough.

In addition to community groups and education institutions, employers will also be able to sponsor migrants outside the “skilled worker” route:

“A refugee work route is expected to open next year, allowing employers to sponsor refugees.”

Again, the mechanics are unclear.

The Home Office has also not said how many people it expects to be brought over via these routes. It has, however, pointed to the Canadian model this is based on, which it says has “successfully resettled almost 400,000 refugees”. Ministers have also the comparison with the Homes for Ukraine scheme, where “more than 270,000 Ukrainians have been welcomed into local communities”.

Despite this remarkable lack of transparency, we are told that the rollout of the first two routes will begin this autumn.

Why is the government doing this?

Earlier this month, Andy Burnham visited Dover to discuss the issue of illegal immigration. There he told the press that “people want to see this issue addressed, but we also need to build a system that offers safe routes for people as well, because that also takes away the selling point of the gangs.” (my italics).

This is the key point. The idea has kicked around on the left for years that you could solve illegal immigration by simply… making it legal.

It has also been briefed to the media that this scheme is designed to prioritise the nationalities most associated with small boat arrivals:

“Refugees likely to be prioritised under the scheme will be those identified as most in need from countries such as Sudan and Eritrea, whose citizens account for the largest number of small boat arrivals.” (The Times, 26 June 2026)

Why this will not work

Demand to move to developed countries like the UK is near unlimited compared to our capacity to absorb it. Billions of people would be radically better off if they moved to the UK or elsewhere in Europe.

Over the last couple of years 4,725 people from India have been detected crossing illegally to the UK.

This is despite the fact that India is the number one nationality for legal migration into the UK, that India is the world’s largest democracy and a booming, emerging superpower with a successful space programme.

Its a good example of how unless you are prepared to have totally open borders (which few advocates admit openly to supporting), then any “safe and legal” routes will have either a limit, or there will be countries to which they do not apply, at which point the people not included will still seek to come illegally.

In fact it may well be counterproductive - there is such a thing as chain migration - the more people from a place come to your country or town, the more likely it is that further people from that place will want to come. So if you have some people who come via the new “legal” routes that will create more demand to get to the UK.

It is not clear what kinds of organisations will be able to sponsor migrants, but I would assume that faith groups like churches and mosques will be able to do so. As Canada has discovered, the dynamics of “community sponsorship” tend to lead to a degree of balkanisation as ethnic enclaves are deepened and different groups bring over more members of their own community.

The pull factor

Ministers have said that the numbers resettled through the scheme will “start small and build over time”.

For context, under the existing community settlement scheme, 597 people were granted resettlement between 2021 and 2025. Against that, in July of this year, 750 people arrived by dinghy in a single day.

This means that if the government hope to divert some of these people into “community sponsorship” rather than asylum then the new scheme will operate with an almost immediate backlog.

The Canadian experience proves this point neatly. In November 2024, the Canadian government paused new applications to two of its community-based sponsorship schemes to deal with a mounting backlog. The pause was extended again the following year, when data emerged that there were over 100,000 applicants still waiting for a first-stage decision.

This is hardly surprising, when you consider that the UNHCR definition, which the government have adopted to judge eligibility for the scheme, qualifies tens of millions of people worldwide for resettlement. Britain, like Canada, is considered to offer pretty generous terms to those who arrive here, which puts both our countries high up that very long queue.

The difference between us and Canada, however, is that there is not a well established route for illegal immigrants to break into their country via small boats running in parallel. Canada is able to pause the scheme and effectively manage new entrants. In the absence of any meaningful action to end illegal crossings, there is no reason to think that people already prepared to pay smugglers thousands of pounds will instead join a queue that would take years to clear.

For those who are not genuine refugees wanting to come to Britain, who can afford to pay a smuggler, the Channel crossing remains an attractive route, especially given how unlikely removal actually is - nine out of ten people who make it will stay.

Without addressing these factors, the new scheme’s effect on the pull factor is close to nil. These new routes will not meaningfully reduce the number of people willing to cross by small boat, and it will add tens of thousands of additional refugees for the state to house, support and integrate on top of them.

Counting the cost

In June, the Home Office published its own estimate of the lifetime fiscal cost of asylum grants made under one of the most common articles of the ECHR, the right to a family life. This came to £141,000 once any tax contributions are netted off. Others put the cost much higher - an independent report by the University of Amsterdam put the cost at around £400,000 each.

Either way, once we reach the tens of thousands being resettled via this route, even a broadly similar per-person lifetime cost would run into the low billions, on top of whatever continues to be spent on the tens of thousands still arriving by small boat each year.

There is also a further point that the government have been reluctant to engage with. Ministers have tried to spin this new scheme as being analogous to welcoming tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine, asking voters (and community sponsors) to ignore the massive difference between the nations which we are proposing to accept.

It is the job of the government to weigh whatever moral obligation we may have, against the realities of the cost, financial and otherwise, of accommodating people at this scale. Ministers’ refusal to engage with the fact that refugees from some nations are likely to commit violent or sexual crimes at a significantly higher rate, is a dereliction of this responsibility. For example, the Centre for Migration Control have estimated that Afghans are 22 times more likely to be convicted of rape than someone born in Britain. The now-infamous leaflets handed out by the Home Office to asylum seekers underline the point: not all cultures are equal and some of the nationality groups that will be encouraged to come via this scheme both have and create many more problems than the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

In recent months, there seems to have been a steady stream of cases of crimes of the most horrific nature committed by those whom we had extended our generosity towards, or who had entered illegally and could not be removed. The uncomfortable reality of what the government is proposing, is that there are likely to be many more such instances.

Conclusions

The rationale for these new schemes rest on two comforting fallacies indulged in by the those on the left. The first is that opening “safe and legal routes” will reduce the incentives for those attempting channel crossings, despite the fact the evidence from the Canadian model demonstrates that demand will always outstrip supply whatever capacity is built for it.

The second, is the assumption that the goodwill the nation showed towards Ukrainian refugees can simply be transferred, uncritically, to any other nationality or route of arrival, as though the cost of integration is the same regardless of who is arriving or how.

It is the same sleight of hand Labour used on asylum hotels, where MPs attempted to characterise objections to the asylum hotels, being about the hotels specifically, rather than the unvetted men housed within them, and claims to be “solving” it by quietly moving people into HMOs in suburban streets instead.

Here, the pretence is that the objection to housing those from Sudan or Eritrea, is that they arrived by boat - rather than the fact that we will be spending billions of pounds to accommodate people who will make our communities less safe.

Without meaningful action to prevent illegal entry, all this new scheme will achieve is to add a new, parallel stream of arrivals - on top of the illegal crossings that the government is failing to control. The public want control of our borders, not even more routes which will simply add to the problems.