Immigration and asylum seekers still making waves in UK.
October 2025
This month has been dominated by arguments around the European Convention on Human Rights and the rights of protesters to express their views. Neither of these are directly about refugees, but do have a bearing on the treatment of asylum seekers and dealing with the effects of conflicts. Boat crossings and asylum seekers do feature in the desire to leave the ECHR however.
The government has taken two more actions affecting migrants: making the “leave to remain” decision more difficult by extending the time taken to achieve it, adding more requirements, and blocking family reunions which would previously have been regarded as acceptable. Nando Sigona commented that this “allows policymakers to set shifting and arbitrary standards of belonging.”
One of the areas of complaint by the government has been the “last-minute” stay on deportation of unsuccessful claimants. It has now become clear that this is not gaming the system but the result of the short time available for appeals to be made against the Home Office’s “notice of intent” and the lack of emergency legal aid.
Still in the UK, the “one in, one out” agreement with France has started, but obviously the numbers involved are pretty small. Nevertheless, some commentators, such as Sunder Katwala of British Future take a positive view. At present, the scheme aims to return about 50 people a week; were it to be expanded tenfold, it would make returns “more likely than not”, and at 20 times, “it could operationalise a returns guarantee”. This would effectively destroy the business model of small-boats traffickers, says Katwala. “If you got to the point where there was a guarantee that the irregular route, where you paid a trafficker, wasn’t going to work, and there was a legal scheme to apply to as well, then you would see a three-quarters drop [in numbers arriving by boat].” Eventually, “you could actually eliminate it entirely”. British Future’s polling suggests an intake of 50,000 refugees a year would be supported by 48% of Britons, and opposed by just 18%.
Katwala notes that the US did actually get on top of immigration at the Mexican border in the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency, with a similar “routes and returns” approach by closing off illegal routes to immigration and creating legal ones. The numbers crossing the US border were far greater than those crossing the Channel – 2 million a year – and Biden’s approach reduced them by 77% between December 2023 and August 2024, an achievement that was barely reported at the time.
Also domestically, the government is still planning to phase out hotel accommodation for claimants and is
looking at redundant sites (mostly military) away from inhabited areas – the chief problem is that most of these require major repair work before being acceptable. Also noteworthy is the rumour that the imminent budget will take money away from spending in this area to reduce the deficit. Finally, back to the ECHR; the Supreme Court has taken to using the concept of “margin of appreciation” (in the ECHR but not the HRA) which is a bias towards accepting government cases rather than those of the lawyers – this will likely loom large.
Immigrant numbers falling in Europe
In Europe as a whole, the number of migrants has fallen sharply this year, according to Frontex. In 2025 so far, 112,000 have arrived in the continent, 21% down on last year. Similarly, the number of asylum claims is down by 23% to around 400,000 in the first half of the year. One of the main reasons for this is the EU’s policy of paying “transition countries” to cooperate by not allowing potential migrants through. These countries are chiefly Tunisia and Libya. There have been reports of Libyan security staff throwing people off boats into the sea (Libya is, of course, in the midst of civil war so is not likely to be particularly fastidious).
Frontex say that the number of arrivals by the western route through Algeria have, however, gone up. France and Spain have overtaken Germany as the most favoured final destination – the largest group of national arrivals have been from Venezuela, using Spain as a destination for language reasons. Ursula Van der Leyen has noted that only 20% of those with rejected claims have actually left Europe, and this will be on the agenda for the introduction next year of the new migration pact that has been said to “harden border procedures and envisages accelerated deportation.” Talks are continuing especially about the financial aspects. Interestingly, Hungary is being fined 1 million Euros a day for breeching its responsibilities towards asylum seekers – the government is unmoved.
Fergal Keane at the BBC has been touring the border areas and observed that in Greece, Poland and Latvia migrants were being physically pushed back across the border. The hazardous nature of the whole scenario is reflected in the fact that, over the last 10 years 32,000 migrants have died en route.
For the record, the number of arrivals on small boats this year so far is 34,000, up 36% on the same period last year. The weather is probably the main factor.
Compulsory reading!: The truth about the small-boats crisis – New Statesman.
AH
Amnesty in Salisbury & South Wiltshire 