The global migration compact trap

There are many charges that can be laid at the feet of Theresa May: idleness is not one of them. In just twelve months, the former Prime Minister managed to botch Brexit, push net zero onto the statute book, and sign up Britain to a corrosive immigration pact. A simply incredible run of form. 

The Global Compact for Migration (GCM) was billed by the Tory government as benign and legally non-binding. Those who voiced concerns at the time were described by the House of Commons research department as “far right and anti-immigrant”. At the time, this was enough to shut down the debate. 

Well the US has this week given us the opportunity to make up lost ground and apply some long overdue scrutiny to this deal that, according to the Department of State, “enables mass migration”. It might be a touch steep to suggest that the GCM is the primary cause of the Tory immigration betrayal, but one has to question why Britain is party to an agreement that explicitly calls for states to “facilitate access for migrants in an irregular (sic) status” to a process that could award them amnesty. It was a reiteration of this commitment to “regularization” in a recent Compact report that awakened the wrath of the US.

The UN assures us that the Compact is “not legally binding”, as did Conservative ministers in 2018. Of course the agreement is not binding: no international agreement actually is. To paraphrase Stalin, how many divisions has the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration? 

To paraphrase Stalin, how many divisions has the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration?

But these multilateral documents possess power nonetheless. They possess it because our statesmen are constructivists: they decide that they do, and thus it does. It is that simple. Elect a government that does not believe, and the Tinkerbell of international commitment fades away. 

Since 2018, Britain’s ministers have continued to clap and reaffirm their belief in the GCM; the result has been a further collapse in the decision space of elected politicans when it comes to migration policymaking.

All immigration decisions — both legal and illegal — in Britain are made, to varying degrees, with an eye on the GMC’s twenty three objectives. A submission made to the UN by the Johnson government made it clear that the “GCM is fully integrated into the UK policy architecture, that GCM principles are reflected in wider UK migration policy and maintains senior official/ministerial focus on the GCM”. What greater condemnation can be offered?

This does not mean the GMC forces the initiation of policy measure, although it has certainly heightened Whitehall enthusiasm for the “faster, safer and cheaper transfer of remittances” (in accordance with Objective 20) and led the British government to explore “alternatives to detention” for illegal migrants. 

What it does mean, however, is that politicians and officials are aware they will have to account for steps that they take. Indeed, the Tories’ 2022 GMC submission to the UN was highlighting the adherence to Objective 5 of their skilled worker route which “is not capped in numbers and provides a route to permanent settlement”, and that the “number of visas issued across work and study routes is now exceeding pre-pandemic levels – 677,000 in 2021”.

Even as late as 2024, the government’s GCM review was preening that, in accordance with Objective 5, the health and social care visa made it “quicker, easier and cheaper” for low-wage migrants to come to Britain, that they had reduced visa fees, and they did not have to pay into the NHS. 

The country may be reeling from the Boriswave, but at least it allowed ministers to seek affirmation from the UN.  

The British political class is a dangerous mix of “uncertainty reducers”, credentialists all too willing to be duped by the guidance of someone with a PhD, and passionate believers in the foggy doctrine of immigrationisme, that that immigration it is “both inevitable and positive.”

Place people with this disposition, desperate to be spoon fed solutions into their open mouths, in a multilateral forum alongside migration academics (read: campaigners), as the GCM does, and the results are predictable. They develop a common language and theoretical framework that makes no space for the simple instruction given repeatedly by voters: to end mass migration. 

It is much easier to reject a simple manifesto commitment to “take back control of our borders” than to lose face by abandoning a corpus of multilateral work on human rights, a collective wittering constructed alongside 160 other states. This desire to keep up appearances on the international stage is part of the potency of the Global Compact for Migration.  The compliance mechanisms are not legal, but social and political. The British state has an unhealthy obsession with honouring international commitment out of nothing more than a misplaced sense of honour. 

The Refugee Law Initiative purred in 2019 that “while the Compact may not be legally binding, it is politically binding on States”. This is certainly true, as treaty “commitments” and “actionable objectives”, even if not possessing legal backing, create informal restraints on the legal powers of ministers, which are often sufficient to dissuade ministers from even exploring their feasibility. 

The domestic pressure created by the GCM is just as great when you have ideologically vacuous politicians that are knocked off course by the faintest waft of hot air. Imagine the heart palpitations that would afflict a timorous Conservative minister were they to be greeted with a Daily Mirror headline that Charlotte Church and the Refugee Council had signed a joint letter slamming their efforts to deviate from “international human rights law” . 

Ultimately, those guilty of inflicting mass migration on our country are our homegrown politicians. Mass migration was being inflicted on Britain long before the Compact was signed, and this is in no way an apologia. But there can be no doubt that, with the current ilk of parliamentarians, the Compact has successfully created a lock-in effect that makes deviation from our descent into social and fiscal catastrophe only escapable with iron-clad will. Words and promises are one thing: but the next government must also be elected on temperament.