Re: &#@%!?
Sure. While Johnson has complained about the difficulty of returning asylum seekers to the EU, European nations are unsympathetic to a country on the north-western fringes that receives relatively few asylum applications.
In 2019, Germany registered 142,450 applications for asylum, France 119,915 and Greece 74,905, according to the European Asylum Support Office. The UK recorded 44,250 asylum requests.
While the UK could strike a new bilateral agreement with France, one former EU lawmaker was sceptical about mini-deals with other EU countries. “It’s a non-runner,” said*Claude Moraes, a British former MEP who has co-drafted EU asylum law and chaired the parliament’s justice and home affairs committee. “They [the EU] are very sensitive to the UK cherry-picking justice and home affairs policy.”
And remind me, wasn't brexit all about taking back control of the UK's borders? And now all your politicians are saying they need france, the EU, bilateral arrangements to control the border. Was brexit the most superfluous operation in this regard?