London, 25 Jan (EFE).- The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, assessed this Thursday that the policy implemented by the British Government to stop the arrival of ships in irregular situations through the English Channel was the “wrong answer” to the immigration problem.

In statements made today to the British radio station BBC Radio 4 from Kyiv (Ukraine), Grandi questioned the promise made last year by the British Prime Minister, the conservative Rishi Sunak, to end the arrival of boats with undocumented immigrants from France and which represents one of his five priorities.

Grandi today stated that migrants are “easy targets” and spoke about the pressure of citizens on the immigration issue in each country and considered that this pressure is “largely caused by the politicians who feed them. They often manipulate it through fake news to win votes.”

“Migrants, refugees are easy targets. “It’s less sexy and attractive to say we should roll up our sleeves and deal with these problems than it is to say we’re going to kick them out and this is going to solve our problems, which it doesn’t,” he said. .

When asked by the BBC, Grandi clarified that he meant Sunak’s policy of ‘stopping the boats’ and ‘building a wall’ of former United States President Donald Trump on the Mexican border.

“Those are false answers that don’t even address the problem of (migrant) arrivals,” he said.

Grandi also expressed concern about Britain’s controversial plans to deport migrants to Rwanda, a project first proposed by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2022, and a key aspect of Sunak’s mandate.

Under this new law, immigrants who entered British soil illegally would be deported to Rwanda, which received large sums of money in return.

In November 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that this plan was “illegal”, after which the British Government introduced new emergency laws establishing, in British law, that Rwanda is a safe country.

Regarding this thorny issue, Grandi assesses that some countries “that have more resources” are devising “a system by which they abdicate their responsibility towards asylum seekers and pass it on to other countries. “This goes against the basic principles of refugee protection.”