LONDON: In April, Britain’s Immigration Minister issued an extraordinary order to staff at a center in Kent, southeast England, set up to process unaccompanied children seeking asylum after arriving in Britain on small boats.

He said murals of Mickey Mouse and other cartoon characters should be painted on the walls, as they were “too welcoming” and sent “the wrong message” to asylum seekers, some as young as nine.

Robert Jenrick’s gesture was widely condemned as a “cruel” act of “extreme cruelty” and a cynical attempt to subdue the “rabid right” ahead of a by-election that many commentators believed would see Conservative MPs deposed, heralding a catastrophic defeat for the party in the next general election.

In the event, the Conservatives on Friday lost two of the three seats they were defending.

But “Mousegate” is merely a symptom of a broader problem — the resurgence of a kind of right-wing politics across Europe in which populist parties increasingly and misguidedly blame refugees, migrants and asylum seekers for every problem, from overwhelmed health services and housing shortages to soaring crime and unemployment.

And across Europe, such parties are gaining ground. Research by the ParlGov Project shows that right-wing parties now hold the majority of seats in the parliaments of 11 countries, including those on the front line of the migrant boat crisis: France, Italy, Greece and the UK.

For the right, the south-to-north migration crisis, which has claimed nearly 2,000 lives this year alone, is not a tragedy, but an opportunity. On Saturday, the lead story in The Times of London reported that in the wake of Conservative by-election defeats, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is preparing to launch a more aggressive campaign in a bid to turn around Labor’s lead in the polls with divisive policies on crime (and) boat migrants.

In addition to the dehumanization behind the statistics, and the constant death toll among people desperate enough to risk their lives across the Mediterranean and the English Channel in wholly unsuitable boats, the general aggregation of all those seeking refuge obscures important truths about where they come from, where they are going, and why.

The nature of migration is changing, as the death toll reveals after the fishing boat Adriana capsized in waters off Greece on June 14.

There were up to 700 people on board the ship, which set off from Tobruk, Libya, bound for Italy. Among the 108 survivors were mostly men from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and Pakistan.

Hundreds died, including women and about 100 children, who were reportedly trapped below deck.

The day after Adriana’s loss, the UN’s International Organization for Migration released data showing that last year 2,761 people drowned in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe from the Middle East and North Africa.

The report received little media attention, in contrast to the saturated coverage of that month’s search for four wealthy tourists who went missing on a submarine that exploded while on a tour to see the wreck of the Titanic.

Over the past 15 years, there has been a steady increase in the number of first-time asylum applications in Europe, rising from 121,600 in 2008 to nearly 900,000 in 2022.

This is the highest number since the peak of 2015, which was driven by the conflict in Syria and saw 1.28 million applications. With the trend rising since 2020, there are chances that this alarming record will be shattered soon.

The 881,220 applications in 2022 represent a 64 percent increase from 2021, when there were only 537,355 applications.

Tracking changes in the assets of these applicants not only serves as a barometer of global geopolitical events, but also highlights undiscovered trends.

For example, in 2022, Syrians, Afghans, Venezuelans, and Turks submitted the most asylum applications—together they account for nearly 40 percent of all first-time asylum seekers to EU countries.

Syria has been the main country whose citizens have sought asylum in the EU since 2013, and the numbers continue to rise, from 98,900 in 2021 to 131,970 in 2022.

Perhaps the most sobering statistic is that of the 30 countries whose nationals most commonly seek asylum in Europe, the numbers have increased in all but one case in 2022.

The largest increases were from Syria, where there were 33,070 additional applications in 2020, Venezuela (32,675 more), Turkey (29,405), Colombia (29,280) and Afghanistan (28,940).

But alarm bells should be ringing in those countries that saw the largest relative increase in asylum applications in 2022 — including India, with a 605 percent increase in asylum applications from its own citizens, and Burundi (536 percent) and Peru (315 percent).

The only glimmer of hope in the stats comes from Iraq, where there were 605 fewer applications in 2022. A drop of just 2.3 percent, this may be a statistical indicator rather than an indicator of social and economic improvements in the country.

What is clear, however, is that many countries are losing the flower of their youth, and with it, hope for a better future.

Nearly 80 per cent of first-time asylum seekers in the EU in 2022 were under 35, most (53.9 per cent) were between the ages of 18 and 34 and a quarter (25.2 per cent) were minors under 18.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Conservative government, having decided the case represents its best chance to stave off an election defeat, is writing a playbook on political exploitation of the “illegal immigration” crisis.

Although an appeals court has ruled the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda illegal, it still plans to move forward with the headline-grabbing policy.

In the meantime, three barges on which the government plans to house hundreds of asylum seekers have been rented – in an effort to grapple with right-wing allegations that it wastes money housing migrants in supposedly “luxury” hotels.

Despite protests from the House of Lords, the government also challenged Parliament to the controversial “Illegal Immigration Act”, a measure that according to the United Nations “will have devastating consequences for people in need of international protection”.

In essence, in the words of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the bill would “repeal the right to obtain asylum in the UK for anyone who arrives illegally, having passed through a country – even for a short period – in which they have not faced persecution”.

The bill, which fails to provide asylum seekers with a safe and legal pathway backwards and thus encourages the boats rather than stopping them, as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged, “contradicts the country’s obligations under international human rights and refugee law”.

Alf Dobbs, a former British MP and member of the House of Lords, made a particularly influential contribution to the debate over the bill. Dubbs, who came to Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1939 as a six-year-old Jewish refugee who had escaped Nazi persecution, condemned it as “a bad deed”.

Across Europe, he added, “right-wing parties seek to exploit refugees for political gain, and have had some successes in France, Greece, Austria, Hungary and even Germany.”

British right-wing politicians and agitators such as Nigel Farage, architect of the UK’s disastrous withdrawal from the European Union – who was largely motivated by the urgency to “control our borders” – like to suggest that the UK bears the brunt of mass migration between south and north. But this is simply not true.

In 2022, there were 74,751 asylum applications in the UK (by the way, only 45 percent arrived by small boats).

But by far the most popular destination for applicants in Europe in 2022 was Germany, which received 217,735 asylum applications (24.7% of the total), followed by France (137,510), Spain (116,135), Austria (106,380), and Italy (77,200).

In other words, the UK was the sixth most popular destination for those fleeing violence or persecution, or simply seeking a better life.

A search of Home Office figures on ‘irregular migration’ reveals a shocking truth that undermines the government’s argument about the ‘illegal’ status of those arriving in the UK on small boats.

The truth, which the government has chosen not to make public, is that the majority of asylum applications submitted by people arriving in the UK on small boats that have been considered have been approved.

In other words, even the Home Office recognizes that, far from being “illegal” immigrants, most of those seeking sanctuary in the UK have strong reasons to do so under international law.

Of the 88,221 people who arrived in the UK by small boat between 2018 and March 2023, 80,989 have applied for asylum.

Nearly three-quarters of those applications (57,371, or 70 percent), are still awaiting decision, and 3,845 applications have been withdrawn.

But of the 11,902 applications decided so far, refugee status or other forms of permission to remain has been granted in 7,643.

This means that, by the government’s own assessment, 65 percent of asylum claims lodged by people arriving on small boats that have been decided so far are genuine and approved – a figure that would almost certainly have been higher had the UK government not introduced the controversial ‘third country’ rule in 2020.

Of the 4,259 applications that were denied, only 1,266 were rejected because they did not meet the criteria for refugee status. But twice as many applications – 2,993 – were not considered on a “third country basis”.

This change in rules says people must seek asylum in the first safe country they reach, a requirement that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says contravenes the Refugee Convention and international law.

The concern now is that the UK government’s selective approach to international law will spread across Europe among other right-wing parties keen to exploit asylum-seekers for their own political ends.

Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has urged the UK government to repeal the law.

“The bill sets a worrying precedent for dismantling asylum-related obligations that other countries, including in Europe, may be tempted to follow, which could have a detrimental effect on the refugee protection system and international human rights as a whole,” he said.