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I do not get this argument. The ECHR prevents you from directly deporting someone who makes a claim of asylum. Or summarily executing them for entering your country illegally. When the UK signed that treaty, they were very much not "full blown communists". How does the continued adherence to that treaty make them commie today?
Practically, the ECHR does not say you can not deport anyone ever. Even us Germans are deporting people ... to fucking Taliban Afghanistan no less.
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Of course, mid-2026, being worried about immigration feels like being worried about palace intrigues in Constantinople in 1453. I am a software developer, so I am first in line for getting replaced by the machines, but I certainly will not be the last. All white collar work is up for grabs. Blue collar work might still be around for a decade (present rate, no singularity and all that), but even before demand might crash. Unlike the PMC, the data centers will not need a lot of people to fix their cars.
Against this background of "the economic value of the median citizen will be marginal to nil in the near future", sprinkled with x-risk and visions of God Emperor Altman to taste, "OMG whites will become a minority" does not sound like an urgent issue, to put it lightly. Frankly, I observe that the people who get elected on anti-immigration platforms are mostly buffoons and grifters and rarely wise statesmen. History might not judge Trump by the spectacles he holds on the lawn of the White House or in Iran, and more on how he dealt with AI.
(I realize that this is a fully general counterargument. "How can you care about $X when literally $Y is happening right now.")
The ECHR doesn't even say that. ECHR caselaw says that you can't deport someone to a country where they will be mistreated in certain ways. It is completely legal (and most ECHR countries have done so) to state, correctly, that a certain country does not mistreat people in the relevant ways and that you will not entertain asylum claims from its citizens and legal residents, and start summarily deporting people who fit that description. Spain does it with Moroccans, for example. The Refugee Convention works the same way, but in practice the list of relevant ways you can be mistreated is strictly broader under the ECHR than under the Convention, so the Convention is de facto irrelevant to European refugee law.
Neither the ECHR nor the Refugee Convention prescribes the process for asylum claims - both were written at a time when people thought it was obvious who was and was not a refugee - also when people weren't as afraid of genuine refugees illegally crossing from one safe country to another, which is what drives most toxic immigration politics nowadays.
The problem is that the ECHR does not require courts to believe blatant lies by the executive, so this trick doesn't work with evil countries like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan or countries with ongoing civil wars. The most common nationalities among small boat migrants to the UK are Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran and Somalia. Almost everyone from those countries has a colourable asylum claim, and apart from the Iraqis most of them are genuine refugees under the Refugee Convention. (You don't cease to be a Convention refugee until you become a citizen or permanent resident of a safe country.) The problem is that the UK wants them to stay in France and seek protection from the French authorities, and the French want them to leave France and become someone else's problem. (France is not required by international law to take back people who illegally transitted through France en route to the UK, and doesn't.)
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