UK's Asylum Overhaul: Generation in Limbo?

I wrote recently on the idea of this "last cohort" of asylum seekers as OECD countries turn off the spigot, and I want to expand on it given the white paper published yesterday by the UK wrt asylum and returns policy.

The UK has sent immigration advisors to Denmark recently, and you can see quite a bit of Danish influence in this paper: mainly the idea of indefinite impermanence as a deterrent. For the Danish, it looks like 1-2 year visas that must be renewed, strict rules around family reunification, and a high bar for applications for citizenship. The UK seems to want to mimic this, with an initial 2.5 year visa that must be renewed, strict rules around family reunification, and 20 years in the UK before PR can be granted.

Has the Danish model worked?

Yes, from certain angles.

1. # of asylum seekers: dropped from ~15K in 2015 to an historic low of 870 in 2024.
2. Left-leaning politicians: the right-wing Danish People's Party (DF), which ran almost entirely on anti-immigration, surged to prominence in 2015 (almost 21% of the vote at the time), then cratered as the centre-left adopted an anti-immigration stance.

However, there have been a fair share of detractors arguing that leaving a large number of people in limbo indefinitely for the purposes of deterrence, while effective, is not exactly a humanitarian approach to refugees.

This last point is important, because so far in all the White Papers from the UK this year, the discussion has been relatively light in terms of assimilation. There's been some concrete chatter about english requirements for skilled workers (unlikely to see lots of asylum seeker applications), but lots of vague language around integration via protection work/study and "community integration."

What does community integration actually look like? 4 years of full-time salaried positions in the UK? Zero criminal convictions? 2 years of community service?

I could see an argument for figuring out deferral and deportation first, then concrete measures for integration, but it seems like the UK is purely importing the Danish model of indefinite impernance. Leaving a generation of asylum seekers in limbo is a risky humanitarian decision and, at UK scale, I think it's a political bet likely to backfire.

The UK's asylum seeker population is an order of magnitude larger than Denmark's (~400K since 2021). If several hundred/thousand people in Denmark can't learn the language or can't find work, you can expect 50 or 100K+ in a similar situation in the UK. I wouldn't describe that as a recipe for success.

If you lean Reform, or you're a fan of what America is doing, perhaps mass re-patriation is your answer. Historically, though, Europe has had a very bad return rate, and withdrawing from humanitarian conventions won't get people to go back to war-torn countries. So Labour is betting that the voting public will accept this cohort of asylum seekers -- too big to quickly absorb, too difficult to return in large enough numbers, and too politically visible to downplay -- as long the government can deter future arrivals.