The Door Locked Against the Wrong Guest

You have seen the Home Secretary standing firm, telling a foreign government that if it will not take back its nationals, Britain will stop letting them in at all. You have not yet looked for the people who will pay for this firmness, and I promise you the Government of Eritrea is not among them. Let us follow the consequences a little further and meet the people who have been left out of the account.

First, the strongest case for the policy, because it deserves a fair hearing. A country that accepts visitors, students and workers from a nation may reasonably expect that nation to receive its citizens back when a British court has ruled they may not stay. Without returns, a refusal of asylum is only a polite suggestion. Leverage is the ordinary tool of diplomacy, and visas are leverage. All of this is sound, up to the moment we ask who actually feels the pressure.

Picture a householder whose neighbour will not collect a dog that keeps wandering into his garden. Exasperated, he announces that no member of the neighbour’s family may ever again come to tea. The neighbour, who never much liked the dog and who has quarrelled with half his relatives, finds this sanction remarkably easy to bear. The cousins who used to come to tea are the ones who feel it.

This is the trouble with the Eritrean case. A government whose citizens leave in large numbers, and which shows little appetite for their return, is not obviously harmed when Britain closes the door on them. Those who are harmed are the Eritrean nurse with a place on a British course, the grandmother hoping to visit a grandson in Leeds, and the British firm that had a job waiting. They are the cousins at the tea table. The officials in Asmara will go on drinking theirs.

Now consider the second year. Legal routes narrow, but the reasons people leave Eritrea remain. Some who would have come with a visa and a return ticket will instead come the other way, by smuggler and by small boat. They arrive with no papers, claim asylum, and if refused, cannot be sent back, because the dispute that caused the ban has not been settled. The policy, meant to shrink the queue of people who cannot be removed, has found a new way to lengthen it.

Notice, too, the word on which all of this rests. Britain says Eritrea will not cooperate on returns. Perhaps it will not. But cooperation is a transaction between two parties, and the public has been given only one side’s ledger. We are not told what was asked for, what was offered, or what was refused. Is the sanction a response to a fact, or a negotiating position presented as one?

So I would put one question to the Home Secretary, quite politely. When the ban comes and Asmara shrugs, which Eritrean will have been punished, and what exactly will they have done wrong?