UK-France migration deal fails to address root causes, UN migration chief warns

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The head of the United Nations Immigration Agency has warned.

Emmy Bob, the International Director of Migration Director, said that pushing the French police to employ strict tactics against boats in shallow waters would reflect increasingly “rough measures” around the world, although it rarely in democracies that have advanced legal regulations.

“The problem does not start in France,” she told the Financial Times. “Cooperation in the United Kingdom and French is a positive sign, but it will not reach the heart of the matter.”

Bob argued that the UK will achieve much less through the motivation for its most cruel enforcement than if it had kept spending on the targeted aid to help migrants stay closer to their country of origin.

The head of the United Nations immigration was speaking as UK officials, and French officials made details of a “one, one” experimental plan to deter people from the trip to Britain in small boats.

Sir Kerr Starmer and Emmanuel Macron announced on Thursday the return deal to return to mutual immigrants that the UK Prime Minister and French President Hop will reduce the number of small boat crossings in the English channel.

The agreement includes up to 50 immigrants per week sent from the United Kingdom to France, with a number of equivalent in the opposite direction if they have a legitimate right in Britain, according to the people who have been informed of this issue. This would equal about one in 17 migrants currently arrive in Britain on small boats.

Starmer told parliament on Wednesday that it was pressing the French government “to review its laws and tactics”, days after filming the French police to reduce a boat to prevent the channel from crossing – a more aggressive approach than it had previously taken.

The International Organization for Migration, which works with the UK resettlement of refugees, said it was not yet clear how one deal would be implemented in one.

Bob said the approach would be unlikely to be the most effective deterrent to people who “have already paid dozens of smugglers from thousands of dollars, and a arduous trip, survived.”

She said: “What worries me more than the details of the French deal and the US agency is that the United Kingdom is lowering the budget of foreign aid,” on the pretext that helping countries like Egypt to support the migrants who hosted them from neighboring countries “will have a greater impact on less money.”

Bob, a former immigration adviser to the departments of former presidents in the United States, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, said similar financial aid helped Colombia to integrate millions of migrants from Venezuela.

The International Organization for Migration lost about 30 percent of donor financing this year after US President Donald Trump moved to reduce American aid and reduced more than 6000 employees because it restores its global programs.

Bob has argued that efforts to liquidate irregular immigration will only succeed if governments also expand the legal ways of people to migrate to work.

I compared the last step in the UK to close the unlawful low -skills visa roads with Italy’s approach, which involves seriously applying to smugglers while opening paths for large numbers of migrants to work in care, agriculture and tourism.

Bob said that Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni “combines the two issues in ways that may be a model for others,” which links it to Italy’s need to finance the elderly population.

In contrast, unless the UK brings together strong evidence to understand where it will have gaps in its working power and concerted efforts to fill these gaps, “they will have a big problem … not only today but within five or 10 years.”