Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss: Final candidates in UK PM race vow to expand Rwanda immigration policy
Former finance minister Rishi Sunak announced plans to tackle illegal immigration in a nearly five-minute video posted on Twitter on Sunday in which he said the UK had lost control of its borders. his world.
“Every year thousands and thousands of people come to the UK illegally. Usually we don’t know who they are, where they come from and why they’re here. These are not bad people. But it creates a mockery of our System and in the current chaotic free world there is simply no way for a serious country to govern itself,” Sunak said in the video.
The measures he proposes include an annual limit set by the UK parliament on “the number of refugees we take in annually through safe and legal routes, which is subject to amendments in an emergency,” according to the plan published on Sunak’s campaign website.
He also introduced a measure making “aid, trade and visa conditional on a country’s willingness to cooperate on return” of migrants who had entered the UK illegally.
Sunak also pledged to “do whatever it takes to make our partnership with Rwanda a reality and work on a large scale and pursue other migration partnerships.”
This policy will see asylum seekers believed to have entered the UK illegally to be sent to Rwanda to process their asylum claims.
The first such flight to Rwanda was scheduled to take off on June 14, but the European Court of Human Rights intervened at the eleventh hour.
Judicial review proceedings by a group of NGOs, asylum seekers and a civil service union questioning the legality of the plan will begin at the Supreme Court UK high on September 5.
In an interview with British newspaper the Mail on Sunday, the UK’s foreign secretary and Conservative Party leadership candidate Liz Truss also supported the Rwanda plan, calling it “the right policy.”
She said she intends to “look over for full implementation” and even expand the project by exploring similar partnerships with other countries.
Announced details of her immigration plans in a tweet Sunday, Truss also pledged to increase frontline Border Force staff by 20% if elected leader of the Conservative Party.
