EU nations seek to address rising smuggling rings

CALAIS, France — The price to cross the English Channel varies according to the network of smugglers, from 3,000 to 7,000 euros.

Often, the fee also includes a very short-term tent rental in the windy dunes of northern France and food cooked over fires that sputter in the rain that falls for more than half of November in the Calais region. Sometimes, but not always, it includes a life vest and fuel for the outboard motor.

And the people who collect the money — up to 300,000 euros ($432,000) per boat that makes it across the narrows of the Channel — are not the ones arrested in the periodic raids along the coastline. They are just what French police call “the little hands.”

Now, French authorities are hoping to move up the chain of command. The French judicial investigation into Wednesday’s sinking that killed 27 people has been turned over to Paris-based prosecutors who specialize in organized crime.

To cross the 33-kilometer (20-mile) narrow point of the Channel, the rubber dinghies must navigate frigid waters and passing cargo ships. As of Nov. 17, 23,000 people had crossed successfully, according to Britain’s Home Office. France intercepted about 19,000 people.

At a minimum, then, smuggling organizations this year have netted 69 million euros for the crossing — that’s 2 million euros per kilometer.

“This has become so profitable for criminals that it’s going to take a phenomenal amount of effort to shift it,” the U.K. Home Office’s Dan O’Mahoney told Parliament on Nov. 17.

Between coronavirus and Brexit, “this is a golden age for the smugglers and organized crime because the countries are in disarray,” said Mimi Vu, an expert on Vietnamese migration who regularly spends time in the camps of northern France.

“There is one solution to stop all this, the deaths, the smugglers, the camps. Make a humanitarian corridor,” said Nikolai Posner of the aid group Utopia 56. He said asylum requests should be easier on both sides of the Channel.

On Sunday ministers from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and European Union will meet to search for solutions. But, with France and Britain at odds over migration, fishing and how to rebuild ties after Brexit, there is one notable absence: a British delegation.

Rafael Yaghobzadeh / Associated Press Yasser Abdallah of Sudan, who died in September trying to reach the U.K., is buried in Calais, France.