The point of the asylum system is to provide a safe place for people whose home country is no longer safe. One of the arguments that is often made against the demonisation of asylum seekers is that their stays are usually temporary, as once the strife from which they fled has subsided, they want to go and help rebuild those home countries. Indeed I myself have argued that on occasion - during the Syrian civil war.

Making it harder to stay permanently in the country where you end up is not at odds with that goal. However.

Throughout this debate there is insufficient clarity on what we are trying to achieve. The far right wants to get rid of asylum seekers because they’re xenophobic and want to “protect our women” (while beating their own wives, it would appear). The leaders of the far right want to conflate refugees with people who “tuk are jerbs” i.e. economic migration (which is unrelated, as the numbers are much smaller than those who come primarily to work) because this allows them to pull in support from people who are not, or who are less, explicitly bigoted.

People who don’t just want to get rid of asylum seekers because of bigotry - whether their own home-grown bigotry, or the lies of bigots that they have bought into - are concerned about the dangers of small boat crossings and by a sense of unfairness that those who enter the country irregularly jump a queue. At the same time, there is an understandable wariness that expanding safe routes without limit would risk an explosion in numbers that could have undesirable economic effects. There are also people who think that expanding safe routes without limit is the only moral course, but it seems they’re an even smaller minority than the dyed-in-the-wool racists.

Even though those first two now-mainstream viewpoints both want to see fewer asylum seekers coming, they are completely incompatible, and a solution that makes one set happy is not going to appease the other set: the right wing will never be happy, even with zero asylum seekers, because it won’t magically reverse economic trends they blame on foreigners, and it won’t kick out all the brown people. And the rest won’t be happy with extreme measures like deportation, pushing back boats and likely sinking a few of them.

So we need more honesty. Labour needs to come out and say that they want to reduce numbers but that it won’t solve economic problems and that most proposals to reduce numbers would be catastrophic. We need safe routes that allow a realistic number of refugees into the country - not a handful every year - so that we are actually doing our moral duty rather than relying on geography to let us pretend we’re doing everything we should. That is a message that needs to be declared loudly, a challenge to Farage and his lot. And we need real measures that make it less viable for those not using safe routes to come, because hundreds drowning in the channel is not acceptable.

Where does removing permanent settlement fit into that? Denmark suggests it would reduce numbers. The downside is causing upheaval to those who do arrive, but I think we ought again to be clear: the international refugee system is not there to prevent “upheaval.” It’s there to prevent torture, persecution and death.

I hope they don’t make it any harder for British citizens to bring over foreign partners