If you can find any examples of people arguing for truly open borders and unfettered immigration, be my guest. I don't think many serious people advocating those positions exist: I certainly don't.
However the eagerness to scrap the ECHR and HRA has to be taken very, very carefully considering the era in which those conventions were established and what they were designed to prevent. I disagree that they are the problem instead of the British state struggling after prolonged neglect to generally manage its affairs.
Why can’t they?
English common law is the basis of the free world. Canada, Australia, NZ do not need to be a part of the ECHR. Australia, by the way, had a similar issue with small boats from Indonesia and provide the blueprint for us to follow. On the Human Rights Act, it enshrines the primacy of the ECHR over British law and that is fundamentally wrong. There’s no reason why a British Bill of Rights could be used to replace the HRA. After all, the Bill of Rights (1689) is still active on the statute books so this idea that we had no human rights before the HRA of 1998 is demonstrably false.
Again, these conventions were set up in response to specific circumstances post-WW2 and clearly is not equipped with millions of people coming to Europe’s doors.
For example, take the 1951 refugee convention:
- no ‘first country’ obligation wasn’t envisaged with people travelling cross-continent to claim asylum. A practical reform could be to amend it to apply in the continent of origin
- ‘Protection for illegal entry’ - again, makes sense in the context of the Cold War. Not so much when you have people from Afghanistan or Eritrea who cross tens of safe countries and pay traffickers to go to the EU, travel through multiple EU countries and then pay traffickers to get to the UK.
If these conventions cannot be reformed to adjust to modern realities… at the v least they ought to be suspended temporarily.