Australia, I believe, initiated a policy of making asylum seekers wait in a third nation while their cases were being reviewed, a deliberately long process. It used the tiny island Republic of Nauru, once a more-or-less Australian territory, and an island off nearby New Guinea, a former British colony.
We have done the same with illegal aliens seeking asylum in the States, recently keeping them in nearby Mexico, a nation through which they were traveling. We have been known in the past to use our Navy base at Guantanamo for the processing of Haitians.
Now the UK is doing something similar with asylum seekers caught crossing the Channel illicitly, but its program is far more drastic than anything the U.S. or Australia has done.
The UK is sending asylum seekers to a third country, but not a nearby one. The location is Rwanda, in central Africa, on the other side of the equator. Further, Rwanda is not on the sea, as the other nations are, and it was never a UK colony, having, respectively, had pre-WWI Germany and later Belgium as its colonial powers. The distance from London to Rwanda is more than 6,000 miles.
No one can argue in this case that the asylum seekers were coming through Rwanda on their way to the UK.
My guess is that Rwanda was the closest nation to the UK to accept some kind of cash offer to play host to the asylum seekers. The process by which the UK made that deal must have been an interesting one. Oodles of former British colonies must have said “no thanks” in this connection.
The decision on a “temporary” location for the asylum seekers was, of course, designed to discourage people from taking little boats from Europe to the UK. It has been met with scorn by pro-migration forces, and according to the Guardian some Home Office staffers have threatened to strike over the issue.