It makes me a little uncomfortable that Britons are paid to host Ukrainian refugees in their homes, which is the right thing to do, while black African asylum seekers are transported thousands of miles from our shores.
Brexit campaigners had falsely promised a reduction in asylum claims and now new solutions are sought.
Sending people who claimed asylum in the UK to centres in Rwanda may be endorsed by the Nationality and Borders Bill presently making its way through parliament. Critics argue this would breach international law, which gives people the right to seek asylum here regardless of how they arrive.
However, both governments involved are right that there is a need for imaginative policies to address migration and that nations around the world need to cooperate to solve one of the greatest challenges facing civilisation.
Members of Genocide Prevention Advisory Network warn that tens of millions of people will leave their homes in coming decades as lands become uninhabitable due to climate change. World leaders need plans to manage this unprecedented human migration with humanity.
We have already seen in Syria and Darfur how climate-induced migration risks exacerbating identity-based violence and conflict. This may lead to mass atrocities of the kind we commemorate at the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in the UK, and the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. In turn such atrocities and conflict are followed by even more migration and refugee movement.
In Syria, a four-year drought from 2007-11 led to a million Sunni farmers moving in to the cities. Unable to find employment, tensions led to clashes, in which the Alawite elite of President Assad, with support from Putin, crushed protests. 13 million people were subsequently displaced, many internally. Of five million of the refugees, most went to neighbouring Turkey and a million found their way to Europe. The conflict also fostered an environment in which Daesh flourished, contributing to a global terror threat.
Boats of desperate people arriving in the UK daily highlight that we live in a relatively small world. This is everybody's problem and needs solving by governments around the world cooperating with each other.
Upstream prevention should involve modeling to predict likely migration and subsequent conflict flash points. From there, plans should be put in place to build communities resilient to the pressures they will endure - improved land and water management, peace education, dialogue and economic investment in fragile communities. These interventions need to be on a massive scale and may then only slow the process down to secure communities on the periphery of growing deserts. Ultimately there will be need for resettlement and integration as ancient lands are scorched dry and cannot sustain life while low-lying estuary states are permanently flooded with saline water.
Leadership, compromise and cooperation between states will be required in abundance.
It will cost billions of dollars. However, we should stop viewing desperate people as a burden. They are human capital that with a Marshall-type plan of investment can drive new economies.
In contrast, the human and security consequences of ignoring the climate-induced migration crisis will run in to trillions of dollars. That is not speculation. We've already seen it in relation to the fallout of the Syrian conflict.
Dr James Smith is president of the UK National Holocaust Centre and CEO of the Aegis Trust, which is responsible for the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda.
