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You see the same kind of rules in discord servers and bars. "Inappropriate conduct should be reported will not be tolerated. Offenses will resort in a ban. Inappropriate conduct includes, but is not limited to, initiating unwanted interactions, sexual interactions (ESPECIALLY with minors), soliciting drugs..."
If anything this kind of list is way more appropriate in the context of immigrants who come from different cultures and may be used to very different norms. My only complaint is that the "could"s in the list should be replaced with "will"s. If your interactions conflict with these core values of our society which we consider both reasonable and important, then your claim to asylum is going to be rejected. You will be arrested, sentenced, and subsequently deported never to return here again.
This kind of list does not on its own reflect poorly on the average immigrant or suggests that the statistics actually do show a worrying trend which the government is trying to keep from us (such a trend may exist, but this is not evidence). Like the list of discord rules, it is simply a way to inform everyone about the basic rules, and give something to point to in case someone breaks them. The rule breakers could be rare, immigration could still be an overall good thing, but given enough people you can be certain some bad ones exist.
Here's your evidence.
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Charitably, this could be an attempt to acknowledge the reality of imperfect enforcement from the word go so as not to come across as all bark and no bite later. i.e. a way to head off reasoning of the form "Hur hur, the fancy booklet said that if anyone has sex with a sleeping woman he will go to jail, but my cousin Ahmed did that last month and totally got away with it, can't fool me with empty threats" by saying upfront that it's a risk you incur, not an infallible process.
The risk of doing it this way is that it indicates the law might be lenient or not taken seriously. Like, in some countries bribing public officials could result in jail time, but actually it is the main way to get anything done. "Hur hur, I know this game. As long as I don't do it too loudly, I am going to be fine."
That's also true. You can probably play infinite recursion with this, and plausibly you're right that it would be better to leave it at "You will" than start playing the triple-bluff game. I just sort of got the impression that you were accusing the authors of the booklet of wanting to soften the threat - that you interpreted them as saying "well, if you're naughty, we might have to expel you, although don't worry, we might choose to be lenient" - and I wanted to make the point that this was not necessarily the intention behind the "could"s.
The idea that most of the asylum seekers are carefully parsing the connotations of the pamphlet phrasing seems implausible. Most won't read it, and those who do will not be the ones inclined toward consent accidents anyway.
I agree; but the idea that British bureaucrats would carefully overthink the conjugation of the modal verbs in a piece of official paperwork, on the other hand, isn't so implausible.
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