Rwanda-on-Thames: Britain’s asylum proposal

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know, one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month. Now, you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist in New York. I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The pandemic played havoc with global supply chains and made governments keen to boost domestic manufacturing to better protect their economies against shortages. New research suggests, though, that this may be precisely the wrong approach. And one of America's greatest bassists, composers and band leaders was born 100 years ago today in Arizona, our correspondent reflects on the legacy of the fiery, often intemperate, but always brilliant Charles Mingus. But first, It sounds like a policy from a political farce. But Britain's Conservative government is pressing ahead with a controversial new way of dealing with refugees.

Under this partnership, those who travel to the UK by illegal and dangerous routes, including by small boats across the channel, may be relocated to Rwanda, where they will have their asylum claims considered.

The plan set out by the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is a straightforward one. Try to enter the country illegally and you could be flown 6,500km to Rwanda. No matter where you've come from. Opposition has come from all sides, predictably, from the leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer.

You know, they're unworkable, they're extortionate, they're going to cost taxpayers billions of pounds. I think it's a desperate announcement.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said the policy did not stand the judgment of God. There have even been critics within the Conservative Party itself. Among them former Prime Minister Theresa May.

I do not support the removal to Rwanda policy on the grounds of legality, practicality and efficacy.

There's been a lot of focus on reasons why the plan won't work. But the bigger concern might be the impact, if it does, in Britain, Rwanda and beyond.

It's a really big step.

Joel Budd is the Economist's Social policy editor.

Britain has for many years tried to be unwelcoming to asylum seekers. It has cut their per week subsidies, it has banned them from working for very long periods of time. It's forced them to wait months and months and months before their claims are heard. But this is something entirely new.

And Joel, can you flesh it out a bit more? When could this go into effect and what does the plan do?

It only goes into effect once the government has passed a kind of enabling law in Parliament, and that's being argued over at the moment, but I imagine that will pass within a couple of months. In theory, it could start sending people to Rwanda pretty quickly. I mean, people in Downing street have suggested that they could start doing so within a few weeks. I think that's fairly unlikely because there will be legal challenges.

And what's the rationale behind it? Why are they doing this?

There's a kind of ostensible rationale and then I think there's a more sort of realistic rationale. The ostensible rationale is that asylum seekers trying to get to Britain in little inflatable dinghies with the help of people smugglers is a very, very dangerous way of going about things. It's really undesirable. It puts money into the hands of criminals, people drown and so forth, and we just can't have such a kind of hazardous criminal system operating. I think, though, a more kind of realistic reading of it is that it's being done in order to deter people from trying to make the journey at all.

And have other countries tried approaches like this?

Yes, they have. I mean, as soon as Covid struck, America started to simply sort of push people back over its southern border under guidance from the Centers for Disease Control, which argued that they were a Covid risk. And for the last few years, the European Union has kind of relocated people, mostly Syrians, who crossed from Turkey into Greece, has sort of sent them back to Turkey. And so as a result, Turkey now has an enormous point population of Syrian asylum seekers. Denmark did a deal with Rwanda last year, but it's pretty theoretical. So this would be a new thing because it would send people kind of regardless of where they come from, it will send people sort of 6,500 kilometers away.

I'm curious, why is Britain and why did Denmark choose Rwanda? And what does Rwanda get out of it?

Well, Rwanda gets money out of it. They also get a bit of respect and immunity from criticism. It's an autocracy, but it's a funny. It's a funny kind of autocracy. It's not a sort of thuggish regime. The police in Rwanda do not go around kind of beating people up. Instead, it's a country where ordinary people are just sort of too scared, too alarmed to criticize the government. The government exercises a sort of a kind of control over their minds, really. Asking somebody in Rwanda about politics, the look of terror that comes across their faces, is quite something. So this deal means, in effect, that Britain has to stop asking whether Rwanda is sticking to kind of human rights obligations.

And this policy has come in for a lot of criticism, though, hasn't it?

Yes, it's coming for criticism, but the criticisms are, I think, a bit odd. One very common criticism is that it will be super expensive to do this. Another one is that it just won't work. Lawyers will attack it. It's going to be very hard to send lots and lots of people to Rwanda, just sort of practically. And so as a result, it's not really going to be very much of a deterrent. I think those criticisms are not really quite the right ones. Having an expensive asylum system is sort of maybe desirable. You know, it's not clear that asylum systems ought to be cheap. And if not many people are sent to Rwanda, well, then sort of. So what I think a much more worrying possibility is that in fact, it is effective.

Effective in that it works as a deterrent.

Yes, definitely. I mean, Denmark has already said that it's going back into talks with Rwanda to send asylum seekers who reach Denmark. And I think, yes, if Britain does manage to send lots of asylum seekers, in other words, kind of thousands per year, people will get the message, I think, and stop trying to come to Britain. And once it becomes clear that that has happened, I think you would indeed see a cascading effect of other countries deciding that they want to do sort of pretty much the same thing.

Joel, what's the risk if other rich countries start doing this?

I think the risk is that there just becomes a sort of copycat situation where rich countries simply buy their way out of having to hear asylum claims at all. And what that would lead us to is a world where the countries that are most able to to accommodate asylum seekers kind of end up doing by far the least. Now, rich countries already host fewer refugees than poor countries. In many cases, the huge populations of refugees are in countries like Turkey, Kenya, Bangladesh with its Rohingyas and so on. But if other rich countries start to follow Britain, then we would just end up with a sort of extreme version of that, where sort of all refugees are in the countries that can't afford to ship them. Somewhere else.

It's not easy to balance controlling the borders toward compassion with people who need a place for safety. Setting aside this policy for a minute, do you think that Johnson's government is getting it wrong?

More broadly, it is just enormously difficult. I think the British government needs to be clear and honest about what it really wants to achieve. If it wants to prevent deaths in the Channel, prevent chaos in the Channel. There are actually quite easy ways of doing that. The easy way is simply to allow asylum seekers in northern France to apply for asylum in the uk so Britain would kind of move its border onto French territory. The French are up for this, so they have said. And so people would be allowed to try to claim asylum in Britain from northern France. And that would mean that essentially nobody, I would think, would, you know, try to cross the Channel in a dinghy ever again. Or Britain could issue some kind of, you know, humanitarian visa. You know, essentially, you know, kind of we give you permission to come to Britain in order to claim asylum. And then people would just get on ferries, which is much cheaper and much safer than trying to get in a dinghy.

All right, Joel, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

Over the quarter century prior to the pandemic, manufacturing was transformed by the emergence of complex global supply chains. Firms have used them to efficiently produce all sorts of goods at low cost and enormous scale. Common wisdom might suggest that COVID 19 has exposed their vulnerabilities. The pandemic created shortages of everything from vehicles to electronic goods to garden furniture. Some governments have suggested pulling back from globalization, instead boosting domestic manufacturing to protect their economies. This is called reshoring. But the International Monetary Fund has come up with an alternative interpretation of the resilience of those supply chains and a different prescription for what should happen next.

Reshoring production is not actually the way to prevent damage from supply shocks. And actually the conclusion of the IMS research is that a policy of reshoring could, in fact, leave economies more vulnerable to such shocks.

Ryan Avent is a senior editor at the Economist and writes the Free Exchange column.

The pandemic really did a number on global supply chains. It put them through the wringer. You had this enormous blow to economies that provided a huge shock to demand, which tumbled in the spring of 2020, and then it bounced back with a vengeance. The consequence has been an enormous surge in shipping times and delays. Costs have risen. There have been shortages of critical components like computer chips and other inputs to electronics. It's really encouraged governments to think more about how they can encourage domestic Production. But the work that the IMF has just published suggests that that may in fact leave them more vulnerable to troubles like this in the future.

And why is that? What does the IMF think is the right thing to do?

Well, the IMF thinks that actually what you want to aim for is diversification of your supply chains, which means importing critical components from a broader array of countries, and also that you're making your supply chains more flexible. So if that certain components aren't available, you can easily switch to substitutes. So the way the IMF makes the case for diversification is in part by looking at how concentrated production is across the global economy as a whole. If you're looking at a given product produced by different countries, the concentration of that production or the average market share that a country has in production of that product is about 31%. But if you look at specific individual economies and their production strategies, they tend to draw about 70 to 80% of the components they use in production from the home economy, from their domestic economy. And so what that means is that if you increase the share of critical inputs that you're taking from the domestic economy, you're making your supply chains less diversified. And this ends up being hugely important. The IMF estimates it builds a model which it uses to kind of assess different trade shocks. And so if it hits this model with a massive trade shock, like if we say that China gets a quarter of its production knocked out, the average economy in that case can expect to see GDP fall by a full percentage point. In a world where trades become much more diversified, the cost of that kind of shock is halved, which is just an enormous improvement in the resilience of the global economy.

I want to talk about resilience and diversification in a bit. What do we know about the economic impact of the pandemic?

Broadly, trade fell by about 12% in the second quarter of 2020 relative to late 2019. That's a similar drop in trade to what happened during the global financial crisis, but it happened much more quickly. But then it also rebounded far more quickly than has typically been the case in, in other recessions. And so you just had this extreme volatility in global trade. And that shows up in this model that the IMF has developed. If they plug in the fall in spending that was observed, the effects that it predicts for trade are not what we actually saw. And so it's clear that this is not just your sort of garden variety recession. It was a very strange period that was not just about economic weakness, but Also about things like lockdowns that affected trade in really strange ways.

What are some of those strange ways? I mean, how did reality differ from what the IMS model predicted?

Part of what we observed was strangeness within economies themselves. And so you saw a big shift in spending away from services and toward goods. People spending much more on home electronics, either to amuse themselves or so they were able to work from home. And then also because domestic economies couldn't produce all the things they normally produced, some places had to import goods from. From elsewhere.

So the pandemic distorted domestic economies. Presumably, there was also an effect on countries, trading partners, and on trade more broadly, right?

There definitely was, yes. What the IMF shows is that through the first half of 2020, about 60% of the decline in a country's imports could be explained by lockdowns in its trading partners. But importantly, these effects got smaller over time. And that's partly because there was a lot of telework that developed. And so places which were able to do more remote work saw smaller effects on trade from lockdowns. But also the IMF finds that there's this improvement over time in the effect of a given lockdown on trade. And they chalk this up to the adaptability of supply chains learning to get around mobility restrictions better, but also shifts in production. And so places that left lockdowns earlier see this increase in market share, which is a sign that firms are moving production around to places that are dealing with the virus better. And this really reflects, well, I think, on supply chains as a way of handling production and trade.

Now, Ryan, you and I are both in the United States, and it may feel to us like the pandemic is in some sense over, but it's not. The world is still in the middle of it. China, a huge manufacturing center, is imposing new lockdowns. Russia has invaded Ukraine, which has prompted fears of supply chain shortages in grains and fertilizer. How do these sorts of factors affect the picture you're painting?

Well, you're absolutely right. And one of the limitations of this IMF research is that the data is not yet available to take the analysis forward through the end of 2021 and into early 2022. And obviously toward the end of last year, we saw intense supply chain stresses which have only continued. But based on this model that the IMF has developed, they think that they're nonetheless able to say something clear about the. The lessons of the pandemic that I think applies, even though we haven't yet gotten the full picture, toward the sort of latter stages of the pandemic.

So, Ryan, I want to end where we began with diversification. What does that look like in practice? And how can countries best encourage diversification of their supply chains and economies?

The conventional wisdom has been that the past few years were not good for supply chain trade, and governments are keen to do a lot of reshoring of production. I think this IMF work really ought to make us stand back and question those assumptions and really think hard about how we can encourage diversification. The question is how best to do that. The IMF recommends that governments work to reduce barriers to trade, and it also reckons that investments in infrastructure, particularly in places like Sub Saharan Africa and Central America, could really be useful in terms of providing more opportunities for firms to diversify their supply chains. But for me, the big question is whether that's going to be enough. There has been a change in mindset. There's been this new awareness of geopolitical risk, and I suppose I worry that firms and governments will be a little bit unwilling to develop trust in the global economy once again and make that effort to really diversify and rely more on trade and not less.

All right, Ryan, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure.

Friday, 22nd April is the centenary of one of the undeniable greats of gaz, who is Charles Mingus.

Sebastian Scottney writes about music for the.

Economist, composer, bassist, a band leader.

And.

A really giant figure. Do you ever feel that your energy is sapping? You put on a track like Boogie Stop Shuffle. This is a larger than life figure making music, a big character. The curious thing about him is that he was mixed race. I mean a complete melting pot of different cultures. In white circles he was on the wrong side of it. But when he as a child was living in the community in Watts in the suburbs of Los Angeles, he was being chased around and bullied by black gangs of kids his age. There's a feeling of vulnerability. There is always a spirit of defiance and dissent that runs through his music that comes from that. You know, his father was not an easy character. He himself has been described by one biographer as a violent self obsessed asshole who may have been a genius. I don't put the genius in question. There's an instant of a band director just saying, oh well, black people can't read music. And that kind of stuck with him. He was astonishingly talented, gifted and hardworking and those slights and those knocks along the way clearly left a mark. There's a real sassiness about the Haitian fight song from the album the Clown from 1957. This is the language of defiance. It's the sort of do I care? This is me, this is who I am. In jazz, there is always this combination of precision and accuracy to a kind of uproarious, riotous exuberance, self expression, maybe chaos, dissonance and that kind of thing. And throughout his career as a band leader, there's a very clear sense of maybe wanting both. If you listen to a tune like Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, then you have that very, very structured opening, a very soulful tune being declared. But then it gives way to something much more riotous and free, and he wanted both of those in his music. There's a whole debate around in the superhero cartoon world as to whether the Superman and the Batman theme that were around in the 70s were inspired by that kind of restless energy of I better get it in your soul and boogie stop shuffle. That kind of urgency in music, that desire to really just express pure energy, left its mark on other composers. There's an astonishing legacy there. He was the first person of color to have his entire catalog of music into the Library of Congress in Washington.

He's definitely a complex personality.

That's longtime associate saxophonist Charles Macpherson, who's now 82. He first worked with Mingus when he was in his early 20s. He was able to compose from all of the emotional menu that human beings have. A great composer should be able to create music dealing with all of the emotions of what being human is. The legacy of Charles Mingus at 100 has a lot to do with how he is being taught in conservatoires, where people see him as an absolutely indispensable and huge and towering figure. That he stands for individuality, that he stands for protest. And I'm also fascinated by one use of him in the uk, which is a group which is called the Blues and Roots Ensemble. They take Mingus ethos, that kind of workshop, unfinished. Let's see if we can get it better into primary schools as a way to give marginalised and underprivileged children a voice. And I think that perhaps stands as a really good example of how a figure like this can inspire in the very long term.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors this week are Marguerite Howell, Chris Impey and Kim Gitelson. Our sound engineer is Will Rowe, with additional help from Saul Rivers. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin, Jack Gill and John Jo Devlin. Our US Audio correspondent is Stevie Hertz. Our producers are William Warren, Rory Galloway and Alize Jean Baptiste. With extra production help this week from Kevin Kaners, we'll all see you back here on Monday.