Undeterred, migrants still plan to cross English Channel
Despite the recent maritime disaster, many are waiting for the right time to dash out of the woods and make a break for the beach
The lights on the opposite side of the English Channel were visible Thursday, emboldening Emanuel Malbah, an asylum-seeker who has been living in a makeshift camp on France’s northern coastline for the past week, dreaming of making a crossing.
“I don’t believe that I’ll die,” he said. “I believe I’ll get to England.”
Just a thin waterway separates Malbah, 16, and other migrants from their goal after long journeys across Europe from homes they fled in the Mideast and Africa. But the narrowness of the passage is deceptive, as was made clear Wednesday when at least 27 people died in a failed attempt to cross the channel aboard a flimsy inflatable boat.
Despite the deaths — the disaster was one of the deadliest involving migrants in Europe in recent years — Malbah and other people were still waiting Thursday for the right time to dash out of the woods with their own boats and make a break for the beach.
In recent months, the number of migrants setting off into the channel has soared because authorities have cracked down on other routes to England, especially by truck through the tunnel under the channel.
“This is a new Mediterranean,” said Malbah, who arrived in Calais, France, a week ago, invoking the scene of the migrant crisis of 2015 that shook Europe.
Malbah himself made the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean to Italy after he left Liberia, in West Africa, more than a year ago. On Thursday, he was speaking in a wooded area near the coast where dozens of other asylum-seekers were seeking shelter from the rain under blue tarps and trying to keep warm around a fire.
Prompted by the tragedy at sea a day earlier, French and British leaders vowed to crack down on migrant crossings of the channel that separates their two countries, blaming organized smuggling rings and also one another.
The deaths offered a sobering reminder of how little has changed in the five years since French authorities dismantled a sprawling migrant camp in Calais. Both countries are still struggling to handle migrants in the area by following a policy that migrant rights groups and immigration experts say puts asylum-seekers in unnecessary danger.
On Thursday, French officials confirmed that children and a pregnant woman were among those who drowned, while crews worked in the cold and wind to recover bodies and identify the dead. Two survivors, one from Iraq and one from Somalia, were taken to a French hospital, where they were being treated for severe hypothermia.
Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said authorities believed about 30 people had been crowded onto a vessel that he compared to “a pool you blow up in your garden.”
President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain spoke by phone Wednesday and said they had agreed to step up efforts to prevent migrants from making the journey across one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Britain currently gives France money to help cover the cost of deterring crossings through surveillance and patrols.
At the start of Europe’s migration crisis in 2015, the English Channel was regarded as an unbreachable barrier, its shifting currents and volatile weather making any attempt to cross too dangerous. Many tried instead to get onto trucks entering the tunnel under the channel. But now the police regularly patrol roadways leading to the channel, and 12-foothigh barbed-wire fences stretch for miles along several routes to the port of Calais. That has sharply reduced the number of migrants hitching rides on cargo trucks.
Pierre Roques, the coordinator of the Auberge des Migrants, a nonprofit group in Calais, said France’s northern coastline “had been militarized” over the past few years, adding that “the more security there is, the more the smuggling networks develop, because migrants can’t cross by themselves anymore.”
Several Sudanese migrants lining up at a food distribution on the outskirts of Calais said that the police often swept through their makeshift camps, sometimes hitting them with electric sticks.