Not easy at all. It won’t stop the boats and it would be prohibitively expensive. I think people who think it’s going to stop the boats are a bit naive.
With the numbers of applicants wanting to come to the UK, they’d have to at least triple staff numbers in every country there was an embassy to ensure that fingerprints and photographs were taken, to make sure that we weren’t giving asylum to a wanted war criminal etc. That’s without interpreters, medical staff, solicitors etc (as they’re entitled to legal advice prior to their asylum interview and when submitting further representations etc, as you wouldn’t expect them to be familiar with the Human Rights act, or the difference between asylum and Humanitarian Protection/Discretionary Leave) How would you process legal aid funding from abroad? Or would you expect local solicitors to re-train in UK law? Or for us to set up and pay for IT systems for them to access UK solicitors (who obviously can’t be employed by the government as they must be independent).
And if the UK accepts responsibility for considering their asylum claim, what are we supposed to do with them while their claims are being considered? Turf them out onto the streets of a foreign country for 6 months? Or provide them with the same accommodation and support in their location that they’d be entitled to in the UK while their claims are being considered. So more staff needed abroad to process that. And obviously accommodation to put them. Which raises issues locally if they’re all in one place.
Plus the agreement of various governments around the world to have these people in their country while we’re considering their applications, without arresting or detaining them until they’ve been processed.
And if it was possible to claim abroad, then numbers of applications would go up, because you’ll have the people who would have preferred to claim in the UK, but who simply couldn’t afford to pay an agent to get them any further than their current location. So in addition to thousands more people, you’ll also need hundreds/thousands more people to actually consider the claims and process grants/appeals.
And if they’re granted asylum, we then presumably have to pay for their safe journey to the UK. And if we refuse their application for asylum, are they going to hold their hands up and say ‘ok, fair enough, I’ll go back home’ or are they going to think ‘Sod it, I’ve got nothing to lose, I’ll come on a boat and keep my head down’. If they do agree not to continue with their journey, has the country they’re in got to keep hosting them until they’ve worked their way through the second, third and fourth choices? And then who pays for their removal back home?
I suppose we could get all the world leaders together and sign up to a central hub, where we all contribute and people are shared out between countries, but then you’ll have huge numbers of people being very cross because they want to go to country A and not country B, because the levels of support are different and it’s easier to work in the black market, and their friends are there, and they know the language etc. So how would that work? They’d just abscond and get on a boat to get to where they wanted to be. And when asked why they hadn’t claimed asylum in the first safe country, they’d say that they were being smuggled there, which is quite a reasonable thing for someone fearing their government to say, and that they weren’t able to choose where they went.
It would stop nothing and cost so much that no government would risk their position for it.