Category Archives: Migration

EU seals €7.4bn deal with Egypt in effort to avert another migration crisis

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Six of bloc’s leaders sign agreement in Cairo aimed at boosting economy and bringing stability to region

EU leaders have sealed a €7.4bn (£6.3bn) deal with Egypt to help boost the country’s faltering economy, in an attempt to bring stability to the “troubled” region and avert another migration crisis in Europe.

The three-year EU-Egypt strategic partnership involves €5bn in soft loans to support economic changes, €1.8bn to support investments from the private sector and €600m in grants including €200m for migration management.

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‘Longing for home’: letters of Irish emigrants to US reveal 400 years of trials and triumphs

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A collection of more than 7,000 letters will form a publicly accessible digital archive that offers a window to the past

In the week that Ireland turns ­everything green and celebrates its diaspora, a new online archive has given voice to the human cost paid by generations of emigrants.

More than 7,000 letters from emigrants to North America spanning four centuries have been collected and digitised, giving poignant insight into the homesickness, tribulations, and occasional triumphs, of those who crossed the Atlantic.

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Home Office condemns ‘cruel’ Rwanda phone scam targeting asylum seekers

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Scammers claim they can help people go to Rwanda in exchange for £3,000 government payment

The Home Office has condemned scammers who “cruelly attempt” to trick people by pretending they can help them go to Rwanda in exchange for a £3,000 government payment.

The reported scam is the latest blow to government plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

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European Commission accused of ‘bankrolling dictators’ by MEPs after Tunisia deal

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Members of justice committee say €150m in EU funding went straight to country’s president, Kais Saied

The European Commission has been accused of “bankrolling dictators” by senior MEPs who have claimed that the €150m it gave to Tunisia last year in a migration and development deal has ended up directly in the president’s hands.

A group of MEPs on the human rights, justice and foreign affairs committees at the European parliament launched a scathing attack on the executive in Brussels, expressing anxiety over reports that the commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, was about to seal a similar deal with Egypt.

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AFP officers mistakenly handcuffed and arrested Iraqi refugee after acting on bad tip-off

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Agency says bad intelligence led to the wrongful arrest of Nahi Al Sharify at his Sydney home in February, leaving him traumatised and distraught

Australian federal police agents mistakenly handcuffed an Iraqi refugee on strict visa conditions due to bad intelligence, the agency has confirmed.

Nahi Al Sharify has been in community detention since January 2023 but his case has been included in the NZYQ cohort when about 150 detainees were freed in November, despite the 40-year-old having no criminal record in Australia or elsewhere.

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Drowning deaths at US-Mexico border up 3,200% since Trump raised wall height – report

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Thirty-three people attempting to cross the border into San Diego died in the Pacific Ocean from 2020 to 2023, study shows

Thirty-three people attempting to cross the US border drowned in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego after the Trump administration nearly doubled the height of the walls along the southern border, a staggering increase from previous years.

The number of drownings rose by 3,200% from 2020 to 2023, compared to 2016 to 2019, when just one person drowned, according to a study published this week. By 2019 the Trump administration had elevated the barriers around San Diego from 17ft to 30ft.

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Panama orders MSF to stop treating people who crossed Darién Gap

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Loss of Doctors Without Borders services will probably leave void in potentially lifesaving services for migrants

Panama has ordered Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to stop treating people who have crossed the Darién Gap, one of the world’s most dangerous and fastest-growing border crossings.

MSF is one of the largest medical NGOs operating on the dangerous jungle frontier which connects Colombia to Panama and the loss of their services will probably leave a void in potentially lifesaving healthcare services for vulnerable migrants.

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UK politics: Sunak refuses to say how abolition of national insurance would be funded – as it happened

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PM says ‘people trust me on these things’ and refuses to be drawn on whether government would forgo entire £46bn raised from measure

Keir Starmer has accused Jeremy Hunt of repeating the budget mistakes made by Liz Truss during her disastrous premiership.

In comments on the budget during a visit to a building site this morning, Starmer focused on Hunt’s proposal to abolish employees’ national insurance over time, saying that this was a bigger unfunded tax promise than those in Truss’s mini-budget. (See 9.28am.)

How humiliating was that for the government yesterday?

We’ve argued for years that they should get rid of the non-dom tax status, they’ve resisted that. And now, completely out of ideas, the only decent policy they’ve got is the one that they’ve lifted from us.

Nothing that Jeremy Hunt did yesterday, nor anything the OBR said, changes anything very significantly. Which is a shame. Because that means we are still:

-heading for a parliament in which people will on average be worse off at the end than at the start,

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Rwanda deportation bill set back again after House of Lords votes

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Rishi Sunak’s bill was opposed in 10 votes by peers, two days after five amendments were forced through

Rishi Sunak has suffered further setbacks in the House of Lords over his controversial Rwandan deportation bill after peers defeated the government on all 10 votes.

Wednesday’s vote comes two days after the prime minister endured his heaviest defeat in the House of Lords when the archbishop of Canterbury and former Conservative ministers joined forces with the opposition to force through five amendments.

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Dutch ministers trying to stop tech firm ASML moving abroad over foreign labour fears

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Prime minister will reportedly meet CEO of semiconductor equipment maker ASML, which has warned against anti-migrant stance

The Dutch government is scrambling to ensure that the country’s largest company, the semiconductor equipment maker ASML, does not move operations or expand abroad after the tech firm voiced concerns over the country’s hardening stance on migrants.

On Wednesday, the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported that the Dutch government had launched a cross-ministry effort, dubbed “Operation Beethoven”, to encourage ASML to continue to invest in the country.

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Von der Leyen’s EU group plans Rwanda-style asylum schemes

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Centre-right European People’s party says it wants to create deportation deals with non-EU countries to head off rise of far right

The European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, has given her support to controversial migration reforms that would involve deporting people to third countries for asylum processing and the imposition of a quota system for those receiving protection in EU countries.

Manfred Weber, the leader of the European People’s party (EPP), said the policies – similar to the UK’s Rwanda scheme – had been worked out with all the parties in the EPP political group, which includes von der Leyen’s Christian Democrat Union in Germany.

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Sunak suffers defeats in House of Lords over Rwanda bill – as it happened

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Prime minister suffers defeats in House of Lords over Rwanda bill. This live blog is closed

There will be one urgent question in the Commons today at 3.30pm, on the Home Office’s decision to publish 13 reports from the former independent chief inspector of borders and immigration last week on Thursday afternoon.

The former minister Paul Scully has announced he will stand down at the next election in a statement suggesting the Conservative party has “lost its way” and is heading down “an ideological cul-de-sac”.

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Seven-year-old girl dies after makeshift boat heading to UK capsizes in France

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Boat carrying 10 other children between seven and 13 years old, along with girl’s pregnant mother, father and three siblings, sank

A seven-year-old girl has died in a canal close to Dunkirk after a makeshift boat carrying 16 people from northern France to the UK capsized, the prefecture in France’s Nord department said.

The boat, which was carrying 10 other children between seven and 13 years old along with the girl’s pregnant mother, her father and three of her siblings, sank with all onboard entering the water.

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Dan Tehan condemns ‘big Australia’ policy but won’t reveal Coalition’s immigration plan

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Shadow immigration minister wants ‘better Australia’ but refuses to say what level of migration Coalition would pursue in government

The shadow immigration minister, Dan Tehan, has criticised a “big Australia” policy but refused to say what level of migration the Coalition would pursue in government, saying only that it wants “a better Australia”.

In an interview with the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, Tehan was repeatedly challenged to spell out the Coalition’s view on acceptable migration levels, but said: “I can tell you what it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be as high as what it is today.”

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Over 3,000 stranded as boat captain arrests halt Darién Gap migration

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Attempt to stop movement through perilous rainforest leaves people stuck in two remote Caribbean towns

Migration towards the US through a perilous but increasingly well-trodden rainforest border crossing has ground to a halt after the Colombian navy arrested two boat captains for trafficking migrants.

But the attempt to stop movement through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama has left more than 3,000 people stranded in two remote Caribbean towns, where officials fear the bottleneck could cause a public health emergency.

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Jeremy Hunt ‘could adopt Labour tax-raising plans’ – as it happened

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Chancellor reportedly considering energy windfall levy as well as scrapping the non-dom status

The Conservative peer and former MP Stewart Jackson has also made the point about Rishi Sunak’s comments yesterday echoing what Suella Braverman has been saying. (See 9.25am.) He suggests Sunak is a weathercock, “buffeted by events”.

Rishi Sunak is now saying what #SuellaBraverman rightly said four months ago, and for which she was sacked. Tony Benn astutely divided politicians as between signposts and weathercocks. One can think ahead, the other is buffeted by events. We know which one is which, don’t we?

We commend the prime minister on his powerful speech at the CST dinner last night, pledging more funding to protect the Jewish community, outlining a new protocol to safeguard our elected representatives and effectively police protests, and drawing a clear line between democratic dissent and mob intimidation.

The last few months have seen an extreme rise in antisemitic hate in the UK, which has had a significant effect on British Jews. The prime minister’s announcement has made it clear - those bringing chaos to our streets and academic institutions will no longer be allowed to act with impunity.

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One person dead and two missing in Channel boat incident

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Officials say 179 people trying to cross Channel were rescued after four French-led operations

One person has died and two others are missing in the Channel after an incident involving a small boat, French rescue services have said.

According to the Préfecture maritime Manche et mer du Nord, four French-led rescue operations took place in the Channel on Wednesday, coordinated by the regional operational surveillance and rescue of Gris-Nez.

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Watchdog urges EU rescue rules change after migrant boat disaster off Greece

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Ombudsman says papers show EU agency made four offers to help Greece with surveillance of boat that sank, but got no response

The rules governing the EU’s border and coastguard agency Frontex must be urgently revised if Europe is to avoid a repeat of last year’s tragedy off the coast of Greece in which about 600 people are thought to have died, an official investigation has found.

In one of the worst disasters in the Mediterranean sea in recent years, the Adriana, a dangerously overcrowded fishing trawler en route to Italy from Libya, capsized and sank in the middle of the night near Pylos on 14 June. Only 104 survivors were rescued and 82 bodies recovered after the ship, estimated to have been carrying more than 750 people, sank off the Peloponnese.

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Prosecutors target smuggled people who were forced to pilot small boats

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Campaigners say Ibrahima Bah should be treated as a victim of trafficking after he was forced to steer a boat. Instead he faces at least six years in jail

Ibrahima Bah will spend at least the next six years and three months in custody. He will do so for manslaughter, and for smuggling dozens of people into the UK on a perilous small-boat journey across the Channel during which at least four died.

In the words of the migration minister Michael Tomlinson, it was “right that he has been brought to justice” because Bah “put dozens of lives in extreme danger by taking charge of a perilous and illegal small boat crossing”.

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Videos show migrants stripped of clothing in freezing temperatures at Serbian border

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Exclusive: footage of semi-naked men is evidence of increasing abuse during illegal pushbacks on Europe’s borders, say rights groups

Videos appearing to show groups of men stripped of their clothing in near-freezing temperatures and being forced back from the Serbian border into North Macedonia are evidence of escalating mistreatment of migrants at European borders, according to human rights groups.

Two videos shown to the Guardian by Legis, a North Macedonian NGO, show a line of semi-naked men on a stretch of road near the Serbian-North Macedonian border.

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