Your asylum claim may be heard three countries away

A medium-term budget projection prepared for a small coastal municipality would list, alongside fishing, seasonal tourism and a cement works, a fourth revenue category: processing and return capacity operated on behalf of another country's asylum system. The projection depends on an intergovernmental agreement that does not exist and a facility that has not been built. It is also the only line in the document that goes up.

What makes it attractive is the commercial structure rather than the politics. The host is paid for capacity — beds maintained, perimeter secured, staff rostered, an interpreter on call — rather than for cases decided. The site earns whether it is full or empty. For a town whose income has always depended on how many of something arrive, a revenue stream that does not depend on arrivals at all is close to a miracle.

The projection's second half is a list of things that would follow. A laundry contract. A catering contract. Security posts filled locally at a wage nothing else in the district pays. The bus route restored because staff need it. A doctor who would finally stay through the winter, and a school that would keep a class open that is currently scheduled to close. Nobody in the projection is cruel. Everybody in the projection is solvent.

The mayor's own note is appended at the end, and it concerns the column with no figures in it. The town has a name. At present the name means a headland, a bad road and a patron saint. For roughly a decade after any such facility opened, the name would mean the facility — in news coverage, in court filings, in the first line of every search result, and in the way people from the next valley would say it.

“We are not deciding anybody's case,” the mayor would say. “The decisions are taken somewhere else, under somebody else's law, by people who will never come here. We provide rooms.” It is an accurate description of the arrangement. It is also the sentence that makes the arrangement possible.

Lawyers would point at the part that does not travel well. The claimant's lawyer, the appeal court, the interpreter and most of the evidence would be in one country, and the claimant in another. Video links would close that distance in roughly the way a photograph closes the distance to a person: completely, for the purposes of the form, and not at all otherwise.

The council would not be voting on migration policy. It would be voting on a budget line, and the two are the same vote with different amounts of sleep afterwards. What makes the projection worth reading is not the scenario but the arithmetic. Once processing capacity has a price per bed per night, it is a commodity — and the towns with nothing else to sell will read the catalogue.