PM Keir Starmer has announced today (via X) that he will be cracking down on illegal migrants who work as bike messengers and delivery riders for companies like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and so on. He says:
“We’re cracking down on migrants working illegally as food delivery riders. We’ll share asylum accommodation locations with Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats so they can take action if riders are staying there. We will do what it takes to ensure fairness for British people.”
It is indeed an issue when migrants take jobs better suited for British university students and people between more regular jobs, but given the present worries of the British public, this should be the least of our collective concerns.
My worry is this: if these people can’t work for money, how do you think they’ll resort to getting it?
I also worry what they will do with all that time and energy they otherwise would have spent on a bike making some cash. What do young men generally do when they have too much time and energy and no money?
A peripheral concern – given the modern propensity to leak data like a sieve – is what Keir Starmer plans to do when, inevitably, the location data shared with these companies is leaked online and leads to local flare-ups. And having shared this data, what does he propose to do to have it make a difference? Fine companies who don’t use it to to check where their casual employees live?
Furthermore, if living at a migrant centre means you’re unable to find work, wouldn’t this just prompt some to simply leave and vanish into to night? The undocumented will become the untraceable. Sure, this database (and the obligations it implies) could be shared with other sectors offering short-term or casual employment – the building trade or agriculture – but as opportunities to offer labour for cash dry up, the lure of crime and other mischief becomes that much more enticing.
Suffice it to say, the small boat of unintended consequences is heading for the shores well south of Charlie Foxtrot.
The idea that not being able to work as a bike rider will disincentivise these young men getting on boats and crossing the Channel is delusional. Does he really think people travel across Africa or the Middle East, and then through Europe, to become a bike messenger in Reading or Stroud?
This is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. He needs to stop the boats. Everything else is a waste of time.
