Home Secretary Priti Patel said on the 18th of April 2022 "We're taking action to control our borders and deter illegal entry with our new partnership with Rwanda”.

Conservative MPs and political commentators alike took credit for the brief two-week gap in illegal arrivals, but this was due to weather conditions, in particular the North Easterly wind, nothing at all to do with the so-called Rwanda Deterrent.

Long before the media started celebrating the Rwanda deal as a success story, UK Independence Party consistently pointed out that to call this a deterrent is simply a lie, there being no evidence whatsoever to suggest it is or will ever be a deterrent.

As I and many others suspected, the premature trumpeting of this false claim of success was just an attempt to gain some credibility before the local elections.

The UK has now had more illegal immigrants arrive so far in 2022 than arrived in the entire year of 2020.

In 2020 it was 8,466 and last year we had a total of 28,526 arriving by boat. This year, we are already close to 9,000 illegal immigrants arriving by boat (that we know about) and of course, we can’t know how many overstay their visas and arrive stowed away and undetected in vehicles.

It has been reported by numerous sources that only 50 illegal immigrants will be sent to Rwanda next month. The deal will at best see a couple of hundred flown to Rwanda each year rather than the tens of thousands that are needed, to create any form of successful deterrent. However, I very much doubt any will leave via this route.

The Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab, says he won’t say how many removals will be expected to leave each year, but he made it abundantly clear that ‘it’s not going to deal with the whole problem’.

The Home Office struggle to deport people to their nation of origin, so to suggest sending people to a nation they don't belong to, will have very obvious and difficult stumbling blocks, not to mention the sheer expense of sending people to Rwanda.

I've been banging this drum since it was first announced but people refused to acknowledge what I was saying.

Only the UK Independence Party will put in place a successful deterrent and it doesn't involve Rwanda in any way, shape, or form.

Steve Laws

UK Independence Party Spokesman for Immigration