I wouldn’t change your mind because of this issue.
All the parties are dishonest about it, and always have been. The simple, plain fact is that no government can control immigration. Curbing legal immigration would collapse public services and cause a lot of damage to the private sector.
And if people want to come here in boats or under lorries or aircraft landing gear they will. The Tories are embarrassing in their rhetoric about it. Similarly, Labour cannot ‘smash the gangs’. They both have to appeal to unpleasant instincts because that’s how politics works. It’s painful to watch. God knows what the Libs propose, but if they were anywhere near government you’d hear the same from them.
The worst are Reform, of course, because they boast and strut the most but have no greater prospect of stopping a single asylum seeker.
There are arguments to be had about the current fitness of international treaties, sure. And off-shore processing. And we can be more efficient. But there is a careful process of evaluation, research, fact finding, decision and tiers of appeal. It’s never quick.
Withdrawal from the ECtHR (but not the text of the Convention, which could be domesticated), for which there is a respectable argument for other reasons, won’t make any appreciable difference to immigration or asylum. Other conventions place a responsibility on nations for asylum seekers, and I would expect us to act humanely with or without international codes.
In the end a government would have to threaten asylum seekers with preemptive force. I do not believe for a moment that British people would accept armed repulsion of refugees, whether genuine or chancers. If a few people would accept that, they were always on the ghastly fringe anyway.
The Tories and Labour are as bad as each other for mendacious posturing. And Reform will fail their credulous followers spectacularly.