During Sir Keir Starmer’s first phone call with Donald Trump since the President’s inauguration, the two leaders discussed the ceasefire in Gaza and the economy. We don’t know if Starmer and Trump touched on the topic of illegal migration during their conversation late last night, but, if not, Starmer missed a trick. He has much to learn from Trump about how to handle this thorny subject.
Whether Sir Keir will learn any lessons from Trump’s short way of dealing with illegal migration is doubtful
Late last week, as a first taste of the President’s pledge to send ‘millions’ of illicit migrants back to their countries of origin, two U.S. military aircraft filled with migrants strapped into their seats had taken off bound for Bogotá, the capital of the Latin American state of Colombia.
However, Colombia refused to let the planes land, and they returned to the US with their unwilling passengers still uncomfortably packed into their seats. Trump’s reaction was immediate and furious: he threatened to impose trade tariffs of 25 per cent on all Colombian exports to the U.S., which, if implemented, would have crippled the country’s coffee production.
Gustavo Preto, Colombia’s left-wing president, who had initially accused Trump of treating the Colombian migrants like criminals, and indulged in a social media war of words with Washington, cracked under the threat.
An exultant White House released a statement boasting that Colombia will not only accept their citizens from the original flights, but all other migrants that Washington will return in future as well. Game, set and match to Trump.
Whether Sir Keir will learn any lessons from Trump’s short way of dealing with illegal migration is doubtful. The subject is now far and away the hottest political potato, both here in Britain as well as across Europe, where it is leading to the rise of hard-right anti migration parties across the continent.
In its election manifesto in July, Labour promised to deal with the thousands of migrants crossing the Channel in rubber dinghies by “smashing the gangs” who are organising the illegal immigration trade.
In its first days in power, the government scrapped the scheme devised by Rishi Sunak to send some migrants to Rwanda to wait while their residence requests were processed. So far, however, after six months in office, there are few signs that the crackdown on migrant smuggling ‘gangs’ has been effective, nor any indication that Starmer and his colleagues have the slightest idea of what to do about the problem.
Meanwhile, immigration has once more rocketed to the top of the political agenda after last week’s conviction of Axel Rudakubana, the 18-year-old who slaughtered three little girls and wounded eight others at a dance class in Southport last year. Rudakubana, though born in Wales, is himself the son of immigrants from Rwanda, though we have learned precious little about their backgrounds or the reasons for giving them residence in Britain.
Compared to the economic clout wielded by a giant like the US, Britain has very little power or agency to put pressure on countries to accept the return of their citizens who have illegally entered our space. Yet there is surely something that Sir Keir could learn from Trump’s bullish attitude to the problem.
Unfortunately, Labour’s do-nothing actions on illegal immigration since its election suggest not only that it doesn’t know what to do, but that it doesn’t care about the damaging effects that unfettered migration is having on society. Health, housing, crime, transport, energy and the environment : all the everyday basics of life that appear to be deteriorating daily are arguably made worse by the numbers of undocumented and unwanted illegal migrants who arrive on our shores every day, even in winter. More than 1,000 have already made the Channel crossing in 2025.
If Sir Keir thinks that adopting the stance of an ostrich and ignoring the issue will have no effect on his political future he merely has to see what is happening to his European soulmates to be disabused of such complacency. In Germany, the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz are facing defeat and their worst vote total in history next month, in an election where immigration is almost the only issue. Austria is about to get its first government led by a hard-right party since the war after another election last year in which immigration was the major theme. In France, president Emmanuel Macron is stumbling to the end of his term, harried by Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally .
Only in America does there appear to be a political leader willing to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. But Sir Keir seems unable – or perhaps unwilling – to take a leaf from Trump’s book. Perhaps that is something to talk about the next time he dials the White House.
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