Who is to Blame for the Calls for Mass Deportations?

Tommy Robinson, Kier Starmer, Far-Right Extremists or Someone Else?

Over the last few weeks one of the more frequently repeated sentiments on X/Twitter has been a call for large scale deportation of migrants from the United Kingdom (UK). I thought it might be interesting to look into this issue more deeply because not only is Tommy Robinson, the pseudonym of Luton man Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, being held out by our government and the mainstream media as the instigator of these calls, he will likely face arrest and prosecution for them on his return to the UK.

Firstly, are Robinson and other’s calls for mass deportations new and related only to recent events in the UK, are they something that has been called for at other times of upheaval in the UK, or are they something that has been a constant message in the background that is simply being highlighted to us now to provide a tenuous way of deflecting blame for issues of potentially poor governance from the true responsible parties?

I conducted a search on X/Twitter and found that Robinson and others have been discussing how citizens in the UK and abroad have expressed a desire for their governments to deport particular at issue groups for more than five years.

I have reproduced that particular tweet for a reason. It demonstrates that not only was the call for mass deportations possibly not one of Robinson’s own invention, but that it was something he was reporting on from a mainstream news provider who he links to in the then tweet. In this case the author is John Binder from media outlet Breitbart - whose article discusses a Harvard/Harris Poll showing clearly universal support for mass deportations.

As you can see, not only has the call for mass deportations existed since long before our current unrest, but Robinson appears to have not been the instigator. This has been an issue that more than half of the citizens in some Western communities have strongly felt and expressed for many years.

The next question might be to ask why so many in our communities might be calling for mass deportations. The most obvious first answer would be criminality.

While most countries have traditionally had laws to deal with migrant criminality that would see them deported if they received a sentence beyond a predefined trigger level (for example, incarceration longer than 12 months) and once their sentence was served, the UK government now seems entirely reticent to adhere to these rules for some groups. These rules famously led to a tit-for-tat game between Australia and New Zealand during the last decade wherein people who were born in one country but who had migrated to the other with their families during their early childhood that committed offences and served jail time were being deported back to their country of birth - where they often had no family ties, no familiarity and it was said would serve out a life no different to those that had been deported from England to Australia 200 years earlier.    

The UK traditionally had an incredibly robust and capricious approach to deportation that even saw over 162,000 of their own citizens deported to Australia in the 1700-1800s - often for little more than theft of a loaf of bread.

Yet now, and I have seen proposed online it is due to current day ideological reasons, the UK can’t even manage to deport criminals who have committed some of the most detestable offences against our most vulnerable and innocent, and who were supposed to have been deported almost a decade ago.

Interestingly, it was even pointed out to me today that we have one group of migrants, legal migrants, who are strongly in favour of deporting another group of migrants, illegal migrants - for reasons which even I hadn’t really appreciated.

Migrants are often classified in many different ways, not limited to:

·       Where they are from

·       Their religious beliefs

·       The various reasons they emigrate from their homeland

But there is also one other fundamental way migrants can be classified. That being, whether they entered the country by legal or illegal means. Legal migration generally means that they have authorisation via some form of permit or visa to enter the country - whether based on a claim of right through ancestry, they applied and were granted leave to enter as a student or skilled migrant, or because they requested and were granted asylum through their adopted country’s consular office in their home country. Illegal migration can mean they entered legally but overstayed or had their entry permit revoked, or it can mean they entered the country without permission.

It is common for countries to deal with people attempting to enter illegally by turning them back at the border to their country of departure. For example, when numbers climbed towards 200,000 individuals annually Australia established Operation Sovereign Borders in 2013 to address the issue of what they termed illegal maritime arrivals, a rather diplomatic way of describing what were illegal boat people.

Illegal boat people were turned back or, where they were persistent and were seen to deliberately damage the hull of their boat on seeing the Australian Coastguard or Military vessel, were taken to an off-shore detainment and processing centre. In this way illegal boat people were stopped from ever setting foot on Australian soil and, aside from some political activist and agitator groups, the average citizen in Australia supported this approach such that it became a key policy for some MPs when touting for votes. However, and in spite of the UK government citing Operation Sovereign Borders as a potential response to the illegal boat people issue during the last several years, very little has been achieved to stem the tide of the 30,000-40,000 arriving annually across the English Channel. We were told in 2023 that the Illegal Migration Act (2023) would do much to address the issue yet, even on conservative estimates, numbers in 2024 have been tracking higher than any for the last five years.

One recent government report acknowledged that the true scale of the problem was much worse, and puts the true number of illegal boat people over the last four years at over 430,000. Migrant Watch UK believes even these figures to be understated by as much as 50% - with their estimates coming in at between 515,000 to 870,000.

And while UK citizens were told by their government that illegal boat people would be deported ‘within days’ - it has become clear when you try to book a room at a UK hotel or holiday destination that few, if any, have been.

However this, in and of itself, does not appear to have been the trigger for many UK citizens and legal migrants to begin calling for mass deportations, and neither was Tommy Robinson. My own survey during the last 24 hours of people expressing this view online has seen many respond with sometimes shocking examples of criminality by identified illegal migrants, which they say justifies their calling for mass deportations.

In total, and in only three hours of commencing my survey, I was sent examples for 53 different individuals that ranged from shoplifting, aggravated robbery and home invasion to battery and sexual assault, rape of women and underage girls and murder. In every case the police, court reports and mainstream media identified the perpetrator as an illegal migrant. Since starting to write this article I can see my message box has already collected another 27 responses that will no doubt contain more examples. Sadly, I believe this is one aspect of the tip of the iceberg that is causal in the current community unrest and calls for mass deportations. It isn’t native white British people simply being racist. It is a response to the fear and uncertainty this rapidly escalating issue, and the disingenuous way it is being portrayed politically and in the media, is destabilising the normally polite and non-confrontational middle and worker classes. Further, the reason legal migrants are also making the same calls appears, at least on my reading of some of their responses, to be a response to the fact that they are feeling pressure both from a political system that continues to disenfranchise migrants (consider the Windrush generation and the hostile environment legislation), and from unfairly being associated with the illegal migrants that people are uncomfortable with and afraid of.

For my part, I too am a migrant to these shores. I have been and continue to be attacked for that migrant status even though I followed all the rules, applied for and was granted permission to enter, and to stay and work in the UK. I have been gainfully employed every day that I have been here and have contributed both economically and through my efforts as an academic and researcher. And yet, I and many other legal migrants have been made to feel the shame of what the illegal migrants whose criminal acts adorn our newspapers almost every day have done, and have felt that some native British see even me and my son as part of this new wave of migrant problems.

Care should be taken when calling for mass deportations - whether the call is uttered by the native UK population or legal migrants. If you feel you have to discuss such issues, you should be more prescriptive and ensure it is clearly understood exactly who and what it is you are speaking about. The wording of such calls should focus on the legal requirements. That is, the law that is meant to ensure that illegal migrants are, as former PM Sunak said, deported ‘within days’, and the law that says individual legal or illegal migrants who commit heinous crimes like rape of underage girls and women and murder should be swiftly deported on completion of their sentence. Approaching this using calm logic and the rule of law has to be preferable to the alternative - and if nothing else, it reminds the lawmakers that we want them to act consistent to the laws of the UK that they, themselves, made or are sworn to uphold.

Addendum: As I often do, I sent the article you have just read to three of my colleagues to review prior to release. Overnight a further 80 responses (for a total of 107 unread) came in. A brief review this morning finds another 21 (for a total of 74) different individuals identified publicly as illegal immigrants who had been charged and/or prosecuted across the UK for offences like those discussed above. In total I received more than 200 responses... not bad for an account that only has 2,200 followers. While I am in no way implying that I do or continue to share the position of those who responded, or that anyone should do anything beyond lobbying their MP to remind them of the UK law with regard to illegal migration that they are sworn to uphold, I do find that the volume of response along with the links and evidence provided are most definitely persuasive. And utterly disturbing. Mindless destruction is unlikely to work. Similarly, our sitting government, judiciary and senior police admonishing the citizenry for expressing their dissatisfaction at how this has been playing out is also futile. This is a heavily emotive and nuanced issue that is clearly not going away anytime soon.