Illegal Migration Bill

Those four existing routes are country-specific for certain emergency situations that arose—for obvious reasons, Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan and the rather prolonged emergency we are seeing unfold in Hong Kong. There will be other such cases that come up, and I believe the Bill as it stands gives the Home Secretary the power to determine, if there is a new emergency in a certain country and a sudden wave of refugees genuinely fleeing danger to whom the UK Government may want to give a commitment, to enable us to take some of those people, and I think everybody would agree with that. However, in between such a country-specific scheme and the four existing country-specific schemes, the numbers able to come here are minimal. If we look at the just under 500,000 who have come here since 2015, we see that almost 400,000 of those are accounted for by those from Hong Kong and Ukraine alone.