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On April 14, 2022, the British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, signed the U.K. and Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the United Kingdom and Rwanda. Under this MoU, most migrants who have made their way to the U.K. via unauthorized routes on or after January 1, 2022, will find themselves redirected to a holding center in Rwanda where they will wait for the Rwandan government to make decisions on their asylum applications. For their assistance in hosting adult and non-criminal migrants, the U.K. will pay Rwanda £120 million along with an unspecified amount per migrant. The U.K. government refers to this as a humane solution that will deter people-smuggling operations run by gangs that charge desperate migrants from several war-torn and developing countries exorbitant prices for transit, only to endanger them by putting them on unseaworthy boats to cross the English Channel.

While there is no doubt that people-smuggling operations need to be combated as they exploit and jeopardize vulnerable groups of people, the Rwanda asylum plan is not the most effective way to achieve this goal. This plan needs to be seen in the context of the broader immigration debate in the U.K. In 2012, the Home Office implemented the Hostile Environment Policy that was meant to make it as hard as possible for any person who had arrived through an unauthorized route, to stay in the country. According to a 2020 report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, this policy not only fostered racism and discrimination against minority groups but also negatively impacted people who had legally arrived in the U.K. In the run-up to Brexit in 2016, more immigration controls were promised to regulate the flow of European Union workers, especially from Eastern Europe. In the right-wing British press, distinctions between legal and illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees are seldom made clearly. This almost deliberate conflation of categories has worked effectively to mobilize the stereotype of an immigrant as a poor, non-white, non-English speaking, benefits sucking and free medical care consuming person, who also may be a threat to national security.

In 2021, the Boris Johnson government introduced the Nationality and Borders Bill with one stated objective being to “deter illegal entry into the United Kingdom, thereby breaking the business model of people smuggling networks and protecting the lives of those they endanger”. The Rwanda asylum plan is the operationalization of this objective.