U.K. Sees Record Numbers of Migrants Crossing English Channel in Small Boats
By David Luhnow and Joanna Sugden, Nov. 6, 2022, WSJ
LONDON—Britain is grappling with a surge in migrants crossing the English Channel by boat that is overwhelming the country’s asylum system and posing a challenge for Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Migrants from Africa have long undertaken perilous sea voyages across the Mediterranean to get to southern Europe. But such trips across the channel, which separates the U.K. from continental Europe, are relatively new and have increased rapidly.
Nearly 40,000 migrants—many crammed in overcrowded small boats—crossed the channel from Jan. 1 to Oct. 31, compared with 28,526 for all of 2021 and 8,404 in 2020, the Defense Ministry says.
Five years ago, the total number of migrants crossing the channel on boats annually was in the low hundreds. Between July 2014 and May 2016, there were only nine confirmed cases of migrants crossing that way, the Home Office said.
This week, U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman described the flow of people, in particular a growing number from Albania, as “an invasion of our southern coast.” She described illegal immigration to the U.K. as out of control and the British asylum
system as broken.
Ms. Braverman said many people were coming to the U.K. not because they were fleeing persecution at home but because they were seeking better economic opportunities. “These people are not fleeing wars. They are coming here often having paid thousands
of pounds” to smugglers, she said.
Her use of the word “invasion” was criticized by some fellow lawmakers who said the term was unwarranted and came just days after a British man threw several gasoline bombs at a migrant detention center in southern England before killing himself
shortly after, police said.
The rise in arrivals has led to a record backlog of roughly 280,000 asylum seekers awaiting either an initial or final decision from the U.K. government on whether they will be allowed to stay.
Asylum shelters are overcrowded and the U.K. government has been putting up thousands of families at hotels—costing the government 5.6 million pounds, equivalent to around $6.3 million, a day. One Conservative Party lawmaker described conditions at a
packed asylum facility as intolerable.
Mr. Sunak told Parliament last week that migration problems were “serious and escalating.” Opposition parties criticized the slow pace of the asylum process. The U.K. has resolved only 2,000 or so of the 50,000 applications for asylum in 2021,
according to government figures.
Migrants are taking to boats in part because stepped-up enforcement on the French side has largely prevented smugglers and migrants from using the route into the U.K. favored for decades: hiding in trucks that cross via the underwater Channel Tunnel or
on vehicle ferries from the port of Calais.
The new migration route is more dangerous. Last year, 27 migrants drowned when their boat capsized during a storm. This past weekend, French authorities said they rescued more than 220 migrants on boats that were in danger of capsizing.
Policing the French shoreline has proved a huge challenge. The French say there are more than a hundred miles of coastline from which small boats can depart. It takes only a few minutes to load a boat and push off, officials say.
Once migrants are in the sea, French police have a policy of intervening only to help vessels in distress.
Despite the risks, most of the boats make it safely across the relatively narrow sea.
“Now a smuggling industry has been created round the sea route and people see it as tried and tested in a way they wouldn’t have a few years ago,” said Madeleine Sumption, the director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
Whether or not there are greater overall numbers of migrants entering the U.K. now is difficult to tell, migration analysts said, because migrants who entered in previous years hidden on trucks or those who simply overstayed their visas often evaded
detection, whereas the vast majority coming on boats are picked up and registered by U.K. border officials.
But several experts said the current surge was also likely explained by greater migration overall, including migration caused by political upheaval in places such as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, which is pushing more people to try their luck in
Europe. More than 134,000 people applied for asylum in Germany by September, an increase of about 34% compared with the same period last year, according to figures from the German government.
A new development is the rise in Albanian migration to the U.K. In 2021, some 800 Albanians arrived in the U.K. on small boats, whereas just 50 did so in 2020. But so far this year more than 12,000 Albanians have made the crossing, led by professional
gangs of human smugglers, according to Home Office figures.
The wave of migration from Albania has led to a war of words between the U.K. and the small Balkan country. Ms. Braverman, the U.K. home secretary, has said most of the Albanian men crossing have links to organized crime and were coming to the U.K. to
deal in the illicit-drugs trade.
Albania’s prime minister responded, saying what he described as the U.K.’s failed policies were to blame for the situation. He said Albania had signed agreements with Germany and France to fast-track deportations, but that talks with the U.K. had
gone nowhere.
The rise in migration underscores the difficulties for many countries in trying to control their borders, especially since most laws governing asylum make it difficult for countries to turn down those who show up at their border and even harder to send
them back, according to some migration experts.
The ruling Conservatives have long promised to control migration into Britain, and regaining control over immigration was one reason some Britons supported leaving the European Union. But since Britain’s formal departure from the bloc at the start of
2021, the country has seen more irregular entries than in previous years, according to government figures.
The government of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson passed a law making it illegal to arrive in the U.K. via unofficial channels, and in April announced a plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda to await a decision on whether the U.K. would grant them
asylum.
Officials had hoped the plan would discourage new arrivals, but it has been bogged down by legal challenges and so far no one has been removed to Rwanda under the program.
Most migrants who make it to the U.K. are eventually allowed to stay, which acts as a draw for other migrants to follow, said David Goodhart, head of immigration at Policy Exchange, a center-right think tank in London.
Currently, U.K. government figures show roughly 76% of asylum requests are eventually granted—a higher figure than in previous years. More than half of the Albanian migrants have had their requests approved, according to the Home Office.
The post-World War II Geneva convention and the European convention on human rights “basically makes the right to claim asylum a sacred unqualified right, and that’s a huge magnet,” Mr. Goodhart said.
The U.K. government said it would continue to try to remove migrants who enter the U.K. illegally. “We will go further and faster to tackle those gaming the system,” a government spokeswoman said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-sees-record-numbers-of-migrants-crossing-english-channel-in-small-boats-11667746870
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