No single deal will end £200m trade in migrant crossings
THE English language barely has enough adjectives to cope with the scale of the migrant crisis. Last year some 28,526 illegal migrants crossed the Channel and there was – understandably – outrage that the situation had become so out of control.
But with the number this year already over 40,000, last year’s figure seems relatively acceptable. It just goes to show how crazy things now are.
Which is why yesterday’s agreement with France matters. It can only be a good thing that there will, in theory, be greater cooperation, with British police able to operate for the first time on French soil.
I say “in theory”, because we have been here before. Two decades ago, while writing the biography of former home secretary David Blunkett, I spent much time on the delicate negotiations with his then counterpart, French interior minister (later president) Nicolas Sarkozy over the Sangatte migrant camp. It, too, was a huge political issue. The deal they signed was hailed as a game-changer – and it did help stem the flow from Sangatte.
Over the years there have been any number of supposedly game-changing deals to fix illegal immigration from France, and every time the same thing happens. One door is bolted shut as another opens. One problem, for example, used to be Channel Tunnel stowaways, but that route has been more or less successfully dealt with.
BUT now we have another route – small boats – and even bigger problems. Three years ago the number arriving by dinghy was just 2,000 a year. Remember Christmas Day in 2018, when the Home Secretary had to come back from holiday to deal with the fury as 40 migrants crossed by boat in one day? It is now sometimes 1,000.
At its root there are two fundamental issues underlying all of the different means by which illegal immigrants have sought to enter the UK.
The first, and most basic, is that people smuggling is a huge business. There are no firm statistics, but if you think that each person will have paid an average of £5,000 and that this year there have been over 40,000 crossings, that’s a £200million annual turnover – and there are all sorts of other charges imposed by these criminals.This is a hugely lucrative business and they are determined to keep their vast illicit profits.
The other important point is how profoundly unfair it is. It is unfair to legitimate refugees and migrants who are tarred with the same brush and who are confronted with a system in utter chaos. It is unfair to the illegal migrants whose lives are in severe peril. And it is unfair to those towns whose way of life and calm is being destroyed by an influx of migrants waiting to be processed – whether in centres such as Manston or in hotels and boarding houses.
Politicians, focus groups and polling – as well as anecdotal evidence – all report how angry most people are to see what Home Secretary Suella Braverman labelled an “invasion”.That’s not because we are a nation of xenophobes. Our history shows the opposite, as does the way we have embraced refugees from Ukraine.
The reason so many try to make it across the Channel is simple: the rewards are huge.
The last analysis showed 72 per cent have their asylum claims accepted (twice the EU average of 34 per cent). But those figures are misleading, because the system is in such chaos that only 4 per cent of those who arrived last year have been processed. There is a backlog of 127,000, all of whom we pay to look after. Deals such as yesterday’s are certainly better than nothing. But against this scale of things, they are not that much better.
IN REALITY, there can only be two solutions. Anything else is a form of window dressing. First – and the chances of this are about as likely as Boris Johnson becoming Pope – France could take back all intercepted migrants, destroying the traffickers’ business model.
But if that is never going to happen, there seems almost as little chance of a solution that, without exception, sees every Channel migrant deported to be processed elsewhere.
That could be a ship, it could be another country, it could be anywhere. But as proposed Rwanda deportations show, there are huge institutional – and with the European Convention on Human Rights, legal barriers – that no government seems willing to confront.
The worry is that if mainstream parties refuse to tackle with due seriousness an issue so many feel so angry about, other, more unsavoury types, will promise to do so.That would be an even bigger disaster.
‘So many try to make it across the Channel because the rewards are huge’