"We risk becoming an island of strangers"

It was the line that detonated across the political spectrum as soon as it left the Prime Minister’s mouth last May.

Paired with tougher migration policies, it became a kind of Rorschach test for everyone’s pre‑existing grievances.

The left accused Keir Starmer of abandoning his liberal instincts and borrowing the language of right-wing populism. Some reached for comparisons with Enoch Powell - an uncomfortable reference point for any Labour leader.

The right, meanwhile, did not complain that Starmer was too harsh. They complained that he did not mean it: that he was scripted, managerial and led by advisers rather than conviction.

Yet for all the outrage around that sentence, it is not the part of Starmer’s migration stance that stayed with me.

What struck me was something far less quotable. Early in his premiership, the PM started talking about root causes. Not dinghies, drones or detention techniques. Instead, he said the quiet part out loud: people don’t cross continents for the thrill of a cold beach in Kent.

Migration does not begin at Dover. It begins thousands of miles upstream where people are driven to move by poverty, conflict, repression, corruption and climate stress – or “push factors” as GCSE geography would have it.

And it’s not as if we don’t have an upstream strategy to address migration. We do. It’s vast.

It goes by the name “development” - aid, to its friends.

Through it, we spend billions on diplomacy and interventions aimed at stabilising fragile regions. The problem is that these tools sit outside the migration debate, treated as separate from border control rather than central to it.

Partly that is because development policy is slow, imperfect and politically thankless.

Every few years we rediscover that money poured into fragile states can backfire. That aid can be swallowed by corruption. That well‑meaning programmes can accidentally prop up the very regimes people are fleeing.

So we oscillate between guilt and cynicism, funding and defunding, top‑down and bottom‑up, cash‑based or initiative‑driven. And when all else fails, we wheel out another celebrity re-run of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

But the mixed record of development policy is not the same thing as proof that it does nothing.

There is evidence that sustained investment can reduce some of the pressures that drive irregular migration: better education outcomes, stronger labour markets, improved resilience to climate shocks, and lower violence in specific regions. European Union programmes in parts of North and West Africa, and American initiatives in Central America, have shown local gains.

But they have not transformed migration flows overnight. Their impacts are gradual, harder to visualise on a graph, and difficult to sex up in a headline.

Yet, as a recovering academic, I can’t shake the belief that better long-term collaboration with the countries from which we receive the largest numbers of migrants could make a difference. The problem is that democratic politics rewards immediacy.

So the alternative is what we saw announced last week: writing cheques the size of small national budgets to fund the world’s most expensive game of Whac‑A‑Mole across the Channel. Half a billion pounds to France for more officers, more riot gear, more maritime interventions. Eleven thousand more boots on the ground.

Of course, border control is essential. No serious country can operate without it. But enforcement alone often displaces routes rather than ending them. Crossings fall in one area and rise in another. Smuggling adapts. Costs increase. The incentives remain.

Yet we’ve convinced ourselves that militarising our border is the only viable option. As if the Channel is the problem, not everything that comes before it.

Take Eritrea, Afghanistan or Sudan - countries associated with repression, war or state collapse. If those conditions persist, future governments will still face migration pressures regardless of how many patrol boats are funded this year.

It is easy, perhaps too easy, to be idealistic on Substack. Governments cannot afford to look passive on borders, and voters are entitled to expect control. But control should mean more than reacting at the shoreline.

It should also mean patient diplomacy, smarter aid, anti-corruption partnerships, economic initiatives, conflict prevention and legal routes that undercut smugglers. It should mean treating foreign policy and migration policy as connected rather than separate departments of state.

If we continue to define migration purely as a border problem, we will keep spending billions managing symptoms while ignoring causes.

We really will risk becoming an island of strangers not because people are arriving, but because we refuse to understand the world they’re arriving from.