Tough words on immigration from the British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, are swirling into a controversy that brings Sir Elton John into the fray and could also, though perhaps not immediately, raise the stakes for the future of Britain’s Conservative Party.

The intersection of politics and culture is a measure of how much illegal  immigration issues are roiling Europe, from Lampedusa to London. As in America, there is no easy solution, but that hasn’t stopped Ms. Braverman from going for broke and facing the legions of political correctness.

She did so on Tuesday when in a speech given stateside at the American Enterprise Institute she called the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention as outdated, declaring that “we will not be able to sustain an asylum system if in effect, simply being gay, or a woman, or fearful of discrimination in your country of origin, is sufficient to qualify for protection.” 

It was, though, her claim that asylum seekers “pretend to be gay” is what appears to have incensed Sir Elton. The singer stated that “dismissing the very real danger LGBTQ+ communities face risks further legitimizing hate and violence against them.”

The actor Sir Ian Ian McKellen joined the chorus of disapprobation, telling Britain’s Channel 4 that in many parts of the world gay people face “great cruelty” and “if someone’s escaping from that they ought to be to be welcomed to this country where we don’t have the same attitudes.”

“I have huge admiration for Elton John,” Ms. Braverman told reporters, but “we need to be honest about what’s actually happening on the ground, we need to be clear about what constitutes persecution.”

Ms. Braverman said that she “fully acknowledged” that it is “miserable and incredibly tough around parts of the world to be gay or to be a woman,” but she added that “Being a victim of discrimination shouldn’t necessarily qualify you for asylum protection in the UK.”

While the British shores have largely been spared the sort of dramatic scenes that have unfolded at Mediterranean migrant hotspots like the Italian island of Lampedusa, illegal immigration to Great Britain is growing exponentially.  More than 45,000 people arrived in Britain by boat from northern France in 2022 — that is up from 28,000 in 2021 and 8,500 in 2020. 

The problem has become inflated and accommodations for asylum-seekers so hard to come by that authorities have had to house some on a barge moored in southern England. A recent British law calls  for small-boat migrants to be detained and then deported permanently to their home nation or third countries, but its enactment still faces legal hurdles. 

Ms. Braverman clarified that “where individuals are being persecuted, it is right that we offer sanctuary.” She added, though, that migrants who travel through “multiple safe countries…while they pick their preferred destination” should “cease to be treated as refugees.”

The presence of any prominent British parliamentarian in Washington, of course, comes with political overtones. Ms. Braverman was scheduled to discuss immigration and other issues with Secretary Mayorkas and Attorney General Garland.

Mark, though, that the timing of her trip, just a week before the Conservative Party conference at Manchester, combined with the stern language calling illegal immigration an “existential challenge” for the West, could point to a nascent bid for Tory leadership. 

Prime Minister Sunak could be expected to be first in line to level criticism at a flawed but longstanding UN convention on refugees as it pertains to the processing of asylum requests in Britain. Given that immigration is one of the most explosive issues in the world right now, it is also fertile territory for an ambitious leader to try to make her or his mark.

Furthermore Mr. Sunak’s popularity is in freefall: a recent poll suggested that 65% of Britons hold an unfavorable view of the premier. Ms. Braverman, a Cambridge-educated lawyer who once said she is married to “a very proud member of the Jewish community,” and Mr. Sunak are both a young and ambitious 43. 

It is the former, though, who is capitalizing on the latter’s perceived lack of toughness on immigration, particularly when it comes to cracking down on spurious asylum requests. The Home Secretary’s remarks at Washington reflect an atmosphere of mounting impatience with a global crisis and growing fractures in European unity over the issue.   

Italy’s premier, Giorgia Meloni, staked much of her campaign for office on pledges to clamp down on illegal migrants, who mostly come to Italy from North Africa. And in between Italy and Great Britain there is Germany, where anger over migrants is boiling over.

The day after Ms. Braverman’s speech, the head of the Christian Democratic Union, the second largest party in the Bundestag, took aim at the governing coalition’s  slow deportation procedures for rejected asylum-seekers.

When Germans see that “300,000 asylum seekers are rejected but are not allowed to leave the country, and receive full benefits and receive full medical care,” it makes them “crazy,” said the leader of the CDU, Friedrich Merz. “They sit at the doctor and have their teeth remade, while German citizens next door don’t get any appointments.”

That kind of anger hints at the anger gripping much of Europe as outside certain progressive media bubbles people are frustrated with the reality they experienced.  The verbal jousting between Ms. Braverman and Sir Elton may be theater of a kind, but as immigration remakes politics in one country after another, the stage is set for yet more drama.