Frigid water, flimsy boats don’t deter risky night voyages across Channel
CALAIS, France — One migrant family’s night voyage across the English Channel ended an hour after it began, back on a beach in northern France, after their overloaded rubber boat listed and two small Iranian children slid into the frigid, murky water before being hauled back to safety.
“After one hour, we came back on the beach,” said the children’s 37-year-old father — who doesn’t exclude trying again to get into Britain.
The man, who identified himself only as Ahmed and a Christian from Ahwaz in southwest Iran. He is among hundreds of desperate Iranian migrants around the northern French port of Calais who are trying the high-risk tactic of using small boats and motorized rubber rafts to get to Britain.
A matter of time
Successful crossings and the horrifying conditions in small, makeshift camps in Calais feed the dream.
“Here it’s dangerous, 50/ 50,” said Ahmed, referring to the camp where he set up his family near the dunes of Calais. “But in the water, it’s also 50/50.”
He said he felt targeted at home because he converted to Christianity.
French border police and maritime officials are patrolling the land, sea and air of northern France, combing beaches, dunes and coastal waters in a bid to end the small boat crossings. Britain has pressured France to do more and is financing the new effort, as it has in the past.
French authorities counted 71 small boat crossings or attempts in 2018 — 57 in November and December alone, according to the Interior Ministry. Forty of the crossings were successful, with the majority of the 504 migrants who tried managing to make it to British waters or the coast.
In 2017, there were only 12 such crossings.
To date, there are no known cases of migrants drowning on the English Channel crossings, but officials worry it is just a matter of time.
The stepped-up security, announced earlier this month, is beginning to pay off. A patrol discovered a rubber boat and four people this week in the dunes south of Calais, a top French border control official told the Associated Press.
On Friday, a motorcycle patrol found evidence that an Iranian migrant had camped out on a beach near Ambleuteuse, 18 miles from Calais.
“The motorcycle patrol has found this one-man campsite,” Lieut. Col. JeanLuc Pereau a gendarme leading the beach patrol, told the Associated Press accompanying the search.
A survival blanket and a torn-up police report showed the person was Iranian, he said.
The patrols, who talk to town folk and comb beaches, seek witness accounts and evidence of migrants looking to launch a boat.
The goal is to save lives in one of the world’s busiest and most treacherous waterways, known for its strong currents and cold waters. Officials also want to catch smugglers who appear to have found a new money-making niche, adding to their specialty of hiding migrants in the freight trucks that cross the Channel on ferries or trains.
Most migrants in northern France still opt to hide among vegetables or other cargo in trucks, trying to outwit heartbeat detectors, scans and other sophisticated equipment seeking to rout them out at ports in Calais and Dunkirk and the Eurotunnel.
About 3,000 migrants were discovered hiding in trucks in the region in 2018, Franck Toulliou, the No. 2 Air and Border Police official, said.
The Calais region has long been a magnet for migrants hoping to settle in Britain.
Officials have no clear explanation for the spike in bids by Iranian migrants trying to reach British shores by sea in small boats. Some media reports have speculated that migrants are desperately trying to reach Britain by March 29, when the country is scheduled to leave the European Union, fearing increased border checks after that date.
Desperate people
The cliffs of Dover, visible in good weather, are irresistible to the desperate people huddled around camp fires in hideouts around Calais, defying police who regularly clear them out. A huge makeshift migrant camp in Calais went up in flames during a dismantling operation in 2016.
Ahmed said he, his wife, 8-year-old daughter and 2year-old son boarded the rubber boat about two months ago but the unsteady vessel quickly listed to one side. Eight people helped pull his children back aboard.
Smugglers are suspected of expanding their operations to selling crossings on small boats that Iranian migrants originally started to buy on their own, according to Toulliou.
The high-tech detection is likely to only make Ahmed’s life worse in his small camp, which is rife with ethnic and religious divisions.
But he vowed he will try again to cross the Channel by boat.
“(But) we (do) not have the money to take to the mafia” now, he said.