In the UK, NGOs and experts are campaigning for asylum seekers - arriving in the thousands illegally by small boat - to have the right to work in order to reduce the costs of hosting them.
This campaign comes in the midst of the escalating controversy in Britain after the prime minister presented a law restricting the right to asylum, and after discussions between Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron the day before, Friday, in Paris, on the issue of irregular immigration through the Channel channel separating the two countries.
He also called on experts and NGOs to work to speed up the processing of asylum seekers' files instead of paying for expensive hotels for months or sometimes years.
And British Home Secretary Soella Braverman reported that the cost of hotel accommodation for asylum seekers in the United Kingdom is about $7 million per day and $3 billion annually, which has greatly burdened the public treasury since the accumulation of about 160,000 refugee application files.
"If money is the problem, why not help asylum seekers work and make efforts to process their claims faster?" said Nando Segona, professor of migration research at the University of Birmingham.
Segona pointed out that the accumulation of backlogs dates back to before the pandemic and was arranged in particular since Britain's exit from the European Union (Brexit), which complicated deportations in the event of rejection of asylum applications.
He stressed that "the detention centers are full" and the number of deportees has been declining for more than 10 years due to Brexit.
Lift the Ban, a coalition of 200 NGOs campaigning for an end to the ban on asylum seekers working, says the UK has the world's strictest laws on the subject.
Asylum seekers in Britain are not allowed to apply for a work permit until after 12 months of waiting for their applications to be processed, and exclusively within a specific list drawn up by London that includes sectors suffering from a shortage of labor, which costs companies losses and impedes their activity.
Lifting the ban says that in France, asylum seekers can look for work if their files have not been processed after 6 months, or 3 months in Germany, and immediately in Sweden, Canada and Denmark.
Jonathan Portes, an economist at King's College, stressed that "there are clear signs of significant economic benefits in the short and long term if asylum seekers are allowed to work while their cases are processed" in the UK.
"If people continue to arrive in the UK in small boats, the inability to process their asylum claims could lead to operational chaos and huge costs," says Berter Walsh of the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory.
It is noteworthy that the new immigration bill proposed by the Prime Minister provides for the rapid deportation of immigrants who arrive illegally in the country and prevents them from seeking asylum, and thus settling in the United Kingdom or applying for citizenship.
It also facilitates the detention of migrants until they are deported to another country deemed safe.
The number of arrivals to the United Kingdom via the Channel Channel on small boats increased from 299 in 2018 to more than 45,700 immigrants last year, after illegal immigrants in the past were hiding in trucks to cross to the British mainland, which has gradually changed due to the tightening of procedures. surveillance.