We know the difference between Ukrainians and Gazans

Can people from Gaza move to Britain under the Ukrainian Settlement Scheme? No, they cannot. Not only did the scheme apply explicitly to Ukrainian nationals and Ukrainian nationals only, it also closed to new applicants in February 2024. 

However, a decision by the Upper Tribunal (Asylum & Immigration Chamber) ruled that a Palestinian family from Gaza did have the right to settle in Britain under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The original application was made on a form intended for applicants for the Ukrainian scheme, and the original judge hearing the case found that the existence of the Ukrainian scheme made lack of an equivalent scheme for people from Gaza an anomaly. The latter observation was withdrawn by a subsequent judge, but the link between Ukraine and Gaza had been made, and was referenced in an acrimonious exchange across the dispatch box at PMQs on 12th February. 

The relative generosity of the provisions made by the British government toward Ukrainians since February 2022 has been a source of resentment on the part of those who advocate for similar treatment for other groups of refugees and immigrants. This disparity is typically attributed to the fact that Ukrainians are white, whereas the nationalities who make up the bulk of asylum claims in the UK generally are not. One could point to the similarly generous conditions extended to Hong Kongers, however a lot of the campaigners seem to consider them the exception that proves the rule. 

The Ukrainian and Hong Kong schemes are unusual in as far as they make a specific distinction based on national origin, which is something that the British government generally avoids doing when it comes to asylum policy. The system prefers to take each individual case on its own merits, maintaining a watchful eye for particular personal attributes that might make the system liable to a legal challenge should an asylum claim be denied. This is partially why the system is so painfully slow and mired in backlogs. It is also why it is easy to game by a canny and unscrupulous applicant who knows what the system is looking for. 

This individual approach has perpetuated a long-running argument about whether most asylum seekers are better thought of as refugees or as economic migrants (not that there is a clean dividing line between the two categories). This is because it is very difficult to tell whether an individual is a refugee; refugees can be discerned by group characteristics. They are predominantly women, children and elderly people; they are usually carrying as much with them as they can bring, and they are unlikely to have destroyed or offloaded documents that identify their origins. There are many individual exceptions, but if the arrivals from a particular place during a particular period display these characteristics, they are more likely to be motivated by the need to flee for safety’s sake.

If a group of people making a journey from one place to another is composed predominantly of young men, with the women, children and elderly having remained behind, this suggests that the journey is more dangerous than staying put, and that such people are probably not refugees. However, the British system deliberately blinds itself to such considerations, as it refuses to consider group characteristics for specific arrival cohorts, or the group profile of particular nationalities. 

Egypt and Jordan have strained every political sinew to prevent people from Gaza entering their countries

Another important characteristic of genuine refugees is that they tend to settle as close as possible to their homes as it is safe to do so. For Ukrainians, this came down to the relative degree of risk that they were willing to bear personally. There were people from the most war-torn parts of the country who re-settled in central areas of the country, in places from which some of the native inhabitants were themselves trying to evacuate. 

This is where the UK’s resettlement scheme for Ukrainians was slightly unusual, as Britain is almost as far as somebody could possibly travel from Ukraine without leaving Europe. The profile of the individuals coming to Britain under the scheme was unusual, compared with the great bulk of displaced Ukrainians who either remained in other parts of Ukraine, or who went to neighbouring countries like Poland or Slovakia. Not only were they generally younger and more likely to be unaccompanied individuals, many of those who chose Britain as their preferred destination came from the places in Ukraine that were furthest removed from the fighting, such as Lviv. 

To be very clear, there was and remains a substantial risk to life all across Ukraine from Russian air raids, which is a highly stressful threat to live with. But it seems reasonable to guess that such people who made the decision to move so far from home may have had additional motivations to seek a different type of life, on top of fears about their safety at home. 

So is it then reasonable to distinguish between somebody coming from Gaza and somebody coming from Ukraine? Whatever desires they may have about a better standard of living and higher incomes available in Britain, there are unquestionable risks to life in both places from military activity. Once again, the British state’s reluctance to draw conclusions based on group attributes and characteristics is unhelpful in making such decisions, and leaves it open to accusations of prejudice. 

While the Ukrainians who resettled in Britain may have differed from the median displaced Ukrainian in some ways, they were certainly predominantly women or children (albeit with a fewer number of elderly people). This is due to Ukraine’s very rigid restriction on men of military service age leaving the country during wartime. Given the profiles of asylum seekers coming to Britain from other post-conflict zones in the Middle East, it seems likely that arrivals from Gaza would be a far more male group on average than the Ukrainians. This poses an additional challenge in terms of finding temporary accommodation. Many Ukrainians arriving in Britain were initially placed with British families while they found their feet, which is far easier to do with a group of people made up primarily of women and children. 

Presumably, a direct resettlement scheme would result in more female arrivals than the overwhelmingly male cohorts who arrive on Britain’s shores illegally from elsewhere in the Middle East. However it still seems likely that there would be a substantial number of unaccompanied young men. 

In terms of the relative social and cultural differences, Ukraine has a similar individualistic social structure based around the nuclear family as the UK does, with a similar approach to relations between men and women. Despite some differences in timing and scope, the European parts of the USSR and its successor states underwent a similar process of social and moral transformation as western European countries over the second half of the 20th Century. Gaza on the other hand retains a traditional Arab and Muslim societal structure, culture and morality. The short-term integration of a sudden influx of people being resettled in the UK along the lines of the Ukrainian scheme would therefore require much more careful planning and preparation. Especially if it were to include a substantially higher per centage of male applicants, given the misunderstandings that can arise when people are transplanted into such a different cultural setting. 

There are also substantial economic and educational similarities between Ukraine and the UK, meaning that Ukrainian arrivals in Britain were able to find work with relative ease. If the experience of Levantine and North African arrivals in other European countries is anything to go by, Palestinians arriving in Britain would be more likely to struggle to gain access to the formal labour market. This is especially so for younger arrivals, given the shortcomings of the education system in Gaza over the last 20 years. 

The totalitarian Salafi-Jihadi organisation Hamas has controlled Gaza as a proto-state since 2007. Anybody under the age of 18 in Gaza has never known any other form of government, and the group enjoys a profound support among the vast majority of the population, whose views Hamas apparently represent quite faithfully. 

Despite the UK’s irrelevance in the Arab-Israeli conflict for a long time, the politics of the Palestinian cause has had a deeply disruptive effect on British public life in recent years, and particularly on the safety of Britain’s Jews. Much of this originates from unassimilated South Asian Muslim communities, among whom the Palestinian issue is an alarmingly animating and radicalising cause. This has at the very least acted as an accelerant, if not a catalyst, for the fracturing of democratic politics in areas of some British cities down ethno-sectarian lines. 

We have already seen the Metropolitan police being forced to take a hands-off approach to serious and chronic disorder in London at pro-Hamas events, as the crowds were too large and too unruly to police effectively. The addition of a substantial number of arrivals from Gaza itself seems very unlikely to calm or reduce this kind of activity. 

None of these issues has been a problem among the Ukrainians who have settled in Britain. And indeed, whereas Poland and Slovakia have thrown their borders open to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, Egypt and Jordan have strained every political sinew to prevent people from Gaza entering their countries. Recent history has taught them, and much of the rest of the Arab world, the political dangers of importing the Arab-Israeli conflict onto their own streets. 

But those Arab states allow themselves far more latitude than the UK to examine behaviors and trends at a group level when deciding who they will or won’t admit into their countries. 

Britain, for example, spent twenty years fighting in Afghanistan on one side of a drawn out civil war which included a critical ethnic component. The Taliban were predominantly ethnic Pashtuns, whereas the Afghan state and army drew more heavily from other groups, such as the Tajiks and Uzbeks and the rest of Afghanistan’s intricate ethnic tapestry. Despite the coalition ultimately being defeated by the Taliban, the British state is still unable and unwilling to discern the difference between a Pashtun and an ethnic Tajik or a Hazara etc. when assessing an asylum application from an Afghan national. This seems fairly remarkable in the context of the war which we have so recently extricated ourselves from, and the presumed importance of keeping Taliban-aligned elements out of the UK if we are to provide a safe haven to those fleeing their rule. 

However, if that Afghan national were to state that they were bisexual, or had recently converted to Christianity or atheism, the authorities would be forced by their own protocols to sit up and take notice. Because those are boxes that exist to be ticked on the relevant paperwork. 

This is the inevitable end point of a system in which the primary consideration is the risk of legal challenge to the government if asylum is denied to an individual who may be exposed to danger if they are sent home. Especially if that danger can be deemed a result of the individual’s protected characteristics. Given that almost every country outside of the OECD falls short in one way or another of providing the acceptable degree of protection for people with any kind of minority status, the Home Office is forced to go through this process for arrivals from a very long list of countries. And minority status applies not only to religious, ethnic and sexual minorities, but also people who might be victimised on account of things they’ve said or done in the past; this includes crimes committed while in the UK, as well as political activities. 

Given this array of considerations that the system is forced to take into account, there is very little room for the system to consider the specific origins and backgrounds of individual asylum applicants. Let alone whether those backgrounds make people especially suitable or unsuitable for resettlement in the UK. This is why it was necessary for the government to pass specific legislation to create pathways for Ukrainians and Hong Kongers. 

Notwithstanding the Upper Tribunal’s withdrawal of the judgement that the UK was in breach of its obligations to people from Gaza under our own discrimination laws by not providing a Ukraine-style pathway, the sheer breadth of the applicability of Article 8 of the ECHR in the view of our courts means that a consequential precedent has been set. Closing that loophole to prevent an influx of arrivals from Gaza in the wake of that ruling will probably require further legislation, should the Government feel so minded. I personally won’t be holding my breath.