The Rwanda plan could save Boris

If you want to see what explosive growth looks like then I invite you to eschew all the old Covid charts and instead make your own graph plotting the number of Channel-hopping migrants year on year. In 2018 there were 299, in 2019 there were 1,843, in 2020 there were 8,466 and in 2021 there were 28,527. So far in 2022 arrivals are running at easily more than twice last year’s month-by-month tally, meaning we are heading for 60,000+ by the end of the year.

Extrapolating the trend to the general election year of 2024 takes us into the ballpark of 250,000 – roughly equivalent to the entire population of Wolverhampton or Portsmouth. With 80 million displaced people in the world and billions more living in poor countries under unappetising regimes, nobody should think the supply of migrants will run dry anytime soon. This is the context in which we should view Boris Johnson’s new agreement to transfer an ‘uncapped’ number of cross-Channel arrivals to Rwanda for processing and resettlement.

In effect, the Prime Minister is proposing to drastically change the cost-benefit calculus for those travelling up through northern France with Britain in mind as their preferred destination.