Cruel performative policies are being used as a smokescreen

This week, Britain's supreme court was due to give its verdict on the Rwanda deportation scheme. The decision will clearly have a major impact on those who face deportation. It will have an impact, too, on the political debate about immigration.

- Kenan Malik

But, whatever the decision, it will have little bearing on the "immigration crisis". The government itself has acknowledged that, even were the court to deem the scheme legal, and deportation flights to Kigali take off, Rwanda could take only "small numbers" of deportees, possibly 300 a year across the four years of the trial period. Given that there were almost 46,000 people crossing the Channel on small boats last year, and that by August this year the asylum backlog stood at 175,000, the deportation scheme amounts to little more than performative policy - the desire to be seen doing something and doing something cruel - rather than a serious attempt to tackle a problem.

Performative policymaking has become commonplace in immigration management, and not just in Britain. Last week, Italy's prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, announced an arrangement under which undocumented migrants and asylum seekers will be kept in specially built detention centres in Albania.

The details are sketchy, but the scheme appears to be a form of offshore processing, whereby those heading for Italy but intercepted in international waters are to be detained in Albania and their cases heard there. The judges overseeing the cases will, however, be Italian and will sit in courtrooms deemed to be under Italian jurisdiction. If found to be genuine, asylum seekers would be free to move to Italy. Those who lose their cases would face deportation.