Small-boat migrants ‘top 10,000 in 2024’

MORE than 10,000 small-boat migrants are thought to have arrived in Britain across the Channel so far this year.

Groups of migrants, including several children, were brought ashore in Dover yesterday. As of Wednesday, 9,882 had made the journey from France, according to provisional Home Office figures. Data for Thursday is yet to be published.

Witnesses said a lifeboat arrived carrying 40 people, with another 40 on board a Border Force boat. A second vessel is believed to have been carrying at least 50 migrants.

This suggests around 130 arrived in the UK yesterday, taking the number crossing the Channel this year over the 10,000 mark.

Immigration has become a key campaign battleground ahead of the election and could cause a headache for Rishi Sunak, who promised to ‘stop the boats’. The Prime Minister has pointed to the Rwanda deportation plan to achieve this.

Concern over the number of migrants crossing the Channel and the backlog of asylum seekers waiting for their claims to be considered while they are housed in hotels, costing the taxpayer millions of pounds a day, has dominated the migration debate.

Earlier this week, Home Secretary James Cleverly insisted the Government remained ‘determined’ to stop illegal crossings.

Mr Cleverly also accused Labour of delaying tactics. The party’s vow to ‘take things like Rwanda off the table’ if it won the election was ‘a signal to the people- smuggling gangs to continue doing what they’re doing’, he warned.