THERE are plenty of reasons to disapprove of the Home Secretary’s plans to process the applications of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel “offshore” in Rwanda. But the dozens that I could supply – which are, naturally, the sensible and considered ones – are not those that immediately occurred to the opposition parties, liberal commentators, the whole of Twitter and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The wall-to-wall consensus there is that there’s something intrinsically callous and malevolent about this scheme. But why?

It’s hard to see the rationale for that, unless your politics haven’t progressed beyond the kind of half-baked sixth-form assumption that anything the Tories suggest is evil. It’s never explained why they should want to be evil; just that, against all logic and their own interests, they automatically behave like King Rat in pantomime, presumably for the sheer hell of it.

You don’t have to persuade me that Priti Patel has distressingly authoritarian tendencies, because I have thought that of every Home Secretary since Roy Jenkins, of whom I disapproved because he had distressingly liberal tendencies. But I’m even more liberal than he was when it comes to migration, since I don’t see any reason why there shouldn’t be more or less unfettered free movement for every person on the planet.

THE ALTERNATIVE VIEW: Rwanda asylum plans are cruel but far from unusual for Tories

In the case of the UK, thanks to a low birthrate, a shortage of labour, and the necessity of upping the tax base to pay for pensions, I would argue that we obviously need much more immigration. The objections to it are mostly to do with unconnected things, such as inadequate housing stock and pressure on public services. Even there, our experience, when it comes to social services such as the NHS, is that most immigrants come to work in it and contribute to it, rather than to freeload off it.

I’m aware, however, that this is a minority view, and that every country on earth does have rules about immigration and assessing asylum seekers. And this isn’t some expression of xenophobia or racism; part of what makes any nation a nation, according to all of them, is the ability to determine and control their borders.

Since that’s the majority view, what do we do about the huge numbers of people making illegal crossings from a safe, prosperous and democratic neighbouring country, in which they could easily already have claimed asylum, when that journey is extremely dangerous, and often facilitated by organised criminal gangs? Especially since the majority of them are economic migrants, mainly young men with enough money to jump the queue over other equally or better qualified claimants using the approved systems.

The purpose of the Rwanda scheme seems to be to make that trade, and the life-threatening crossings, pointless and counter-productive, not to impose some sort of blanket prohibition on immigration or asylum by the conventional routes.

And there is hard evidence that such a policy works. Australia used to have a similar problem (and similar numbers) with people making dangerous sea crossings, and it has been almost eradicated since they began placing applicants in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Asylum in a safe country was still granted to those that qualified, but it was made clear that anyone arriving by that route would never live in Australia. Numbers arriving by sea dropped from more than 20,000 to fewer than a couple of hundred within not much more than a year.

Some on the Left regard that policy as dangerously right-wing, but exactly the same thing was introduced by Denmark’s Social Democratic government last year – in fact, Rwanda was one of the countries to which they proposed to send those claiming refugee status. In practice, they haven’t yet done it, but I think that the same thing is likely to be true of the UK plan, if it goes ahead.

For several of the real reasons to object to this policy (it’s cumbersome, it’s fairly impractical, and it’s quite extraordinarily expensive), I would be surprised if it were actually to be applied to very many people. But its stated purpose is not to halt or even much reduce immigration or asylum seekers, but to stop cross-Channel people smuggling. If it were effective at doing that, it would very quickly become apparent.

It’s difficult to see why the involvement of a third country should, as Justin Welby claimed, breach the Christian principle of taking responsibility and helping your neighbour. There’s a passage in St Luke that he might like to read some time, featuring Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan. The first thing he did, when offering help to someone in need, was to involve a third party in the form of an innkeeper, and pay for him to look after the man.

There’s the vague aura of racism, too, not about the scheme itself, but the assumption by its opponents that sending people to Rwanda is equivalent to consigning them to the bowels of Gehenna. Despite memories of its dreadful genocide almost 30 years ago, it is now a perfectly peaceful country that scores better than Italy and Greece on levels of corruption, has fairly low crime, and tourism as one of its principal industries.

As I say, I don’t think this is a particularly brilliant policy – partly because I don’t see the need to restrict immigration and partly because it doesn’t make much practical or financial sense. But Ms Patel has at least a point when she asks what alternative plan her opponents have for curbing the lethal trade in smuggling people across the Channel from France.

The overwhelming majority opinion in the UK is that there should be some controls and limits on immigration. The almost universal opinion is that, for reasons of safety, humanity and tackling crime, we should discourage hazardous sea crossings in tiny, unsuitable craft.

If everyone knew that attempting to come to the UK by such means would guarantee that, even if granted asylum, they wouldn’t be living in the UK, there wouldn’t be any reason to try. Whatever deficiencies there are in this policy, it isn’t because it is somehow inhumane. Its express intentions are exactly the opposite. I would solve the problem by letting anyone in, but if you don’t adopt that policy, you need to come up with some plausible proposal to end these dangerous crossings that cost lives, create misery, and enrich gangsters.

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