An influential former British diplomat and Conservative Party politician has called for the United Kingdom to accept what he calls a “sensible” asylum quota of roughly 340,000 people a year.
Rory Stewart, who once ran for the Prime Ministership, told the Triggernometry YouTube show that the UK should allow in a number equivalent to 0.5% of the population, saying such a system would solve the “immigration problem”, which he believes is “undermining centrist governments more than anything else”.
At the top of his list of candidates for asylum were Afghan women and Somalians who are in direct danger from a civil war that has been raging since the 1980s.
🚨 Rory Stewart calls for a ‘sensible’ asylum quota of 350,000 per year (0.5% of population) to contend with the rise of populism. pic.twitter.com/9EaNLtPqOq
— max (@maxtempers) July 15, 2024
“A much more sensible way of doing [immigration policy] would be to say ‘we will accept a certain number of people as asylum seekers every year, and we’ll define that number’, I would say 0.5% of your population a year you can take,” he said.
“We will do it in a way that prioritises female judges from Afghanistan, people who are at direct risk of war in Somalia, and we will do it as a target that we sign up to, along with Europe, the United States, and Canada – we’ll all sign up to this.”
He went on to say that such a program would not allow entry by boat of mainly young men seeking asylum although they were already in safe countries such as France.
Mr Stewart’s proposal is a 75% increase on the numbers from last year.
In 2023, there were just over 67,000 asylum applications made, relating to 84,425 people, a 17% decrease from 2022. This is still lower than the peak total of asylum applications of 84,132 in 2002.
According to World Population Review, the last time the United Kingdom had a population growth rate this high was from 2005 to 2019, and previously between 1960 to 1970.
Current projections for the UK’s population growth say that by 2034 the UK will reach 69.8 million people, up from almost 68 million in 2024.
Under Mr Stewart’s proposed asylum seeker plan over a decade, this number would jump to 71.4 million, not factoring in births and deaths and other immigrants arriving in the UK. This population total isn’t otherwise projected to be reached until 2046.
The World Population Review also reports that in 2019 the United Kingdom took in one net immigrant every 3 minutes, had one birth every 39 seconds, one death every 52 seconds and a net gain of one person every minute.
The non-profit NGO Refugee Council reports that in 2023 “the top five countries of origin of people seeking asylum were Afghanistan, Iran, India, Pakistan and Turkey”.
Germany last year received nearly one third of all of the European Union’s asylum applications, and was the leading destination of asylum seekers with a total of 334,000 applications.
When compared to nearby France and Spain, with 167,000 and 162,000 applications respectively, Germany received more applications than both combined.
If Mr Stewart’s plan is implemented, it would therefore make the UK one of Europe’s top destinations for asylum seekers.
Mr Stewart did not mention if such an agreement would have an end date, making his plan a stark comparison to the net-zero immigration policies espoused by Reform UK.
Born in Hong Kong, Mr Stewart was educated at Eton and Oxford, and was a private tutor to Princes William and Harry. His maternal grandfather was Jewish, and his Scottish-born father was once in the running to be chief of British intelligence agency MI6.
