(yahoo.com)
Britain should be able to accommodate 40,000 refugees a year, the outgoing head of the United Nations refugee agency has suggested.
Filippo Grandi said the 41,000 small boat arrivals in the UK this year represented a small number compared with that faced by other countries.
He also blamed previous Conservative governments for creating a sense of “chaos” around immigration, arguing that this was fuelling public hostility.
Mr Grandi, an Italian diplomat who was elected as the UNHCR high commissioner for refugees in 2016, made the remarks in an interview by Cate Blanchett, the Australian actress, on BBC Radio 4.
He told her that the right to seek asylum was “under threat around the world” and bemoaned Western governments’ cuts to his agency’s funding.
Mr Grandi, who is leaving his post at the end of this month, said politicians were partly to blame for negative public attitudes towards migrants.
“There is nothing that creates a hostile environment as [much as] a badly organised welcome, and unfortunately we’ve seen that,” he said.
“In the UK, the small boats and the challenges of dealing with these people and some of the choices that were made – and that the Government is trying to correct – have conveyed the wrong impression that this brings chaos.”
Official figures show that just over 41,000 people have arrived in Britain on small boats this year.
Mr Grandi’s reference to “choices that were made” probably related to the effective suspension of asylum processing under the Tories, which caused a huge backlog of cases.
That led to the widespread housing of asylum seekers in hotels, fuelling public anger over immigration. Labour has pledged to clear the backlog and move all asylum seekers out of hotels, which are costing the taxpayer £2.1bn a year, by the end of the decade.
Mr Grandi said the number of migrants who had crossed the Channel this year was equivalent to the “daily arrivals” of refugees in countries such as Chad.
He said immigration in Western nations needed “to be organised much better”, and that this included sending back people who did not qualify for asylum.
“When this doesn’t happen, people say there’s no leadership in this chaos, it’s dangerous, let’s listen to those who say, ‘Push back, build walls, don’t rescue people at sea’.”
Filippo Grandi said immigration in Western nations needed ‘to be organised much better’ - Salvatore di Nolfi/EPA/Shutterstock
Mr Grandi also said British and other Western politicians needed to do more to “support” their own populations to improve acceptance of migrants.
He said failure to do so was where “the propaganda that people come to steal jobs and threaten values and undermine security” came from.
Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, has set out plans to overhaul the immigration system, including making refugee status temporary. The changes will include ending guaranteed financial support for asylum seekers, meaning those who have assets may have to fund their own housing.
She has also announced that the Government will create new “safe and legal routes” for genuine refugees to come to the UK.