Only hours after twelve migrants drowned attempting to reach England from France another group set out. This time they were intercepted by police before their small boat could be launched close to Dunkirk. Two alleged smugglers were arrested and three policemen were injured as they came under attack from a mob of around 100 angry migrants.
‘England is a country where you can work very easily without having a residence permit’
Tuesday’s tragedy has evidently had no effect on the thousands of migrants strung out along the northern French coast; they remain as determined as ever to reach England.
Why this resolve to cross the Channel? That is a question that has exercised the French media since the turn of the century. Liberation visited the Sangatte camp outside Calais in 2001, two years after it had opened, and spoke to a few of the 23,000 migrants from 110 nationalities who had passed through its doors in that time. Whether Afghan, Kurdish, Iranian or Iraqi, they were all desperate to reach England. One Afghan explained that he had tried 15 times, either by train or vehicle, and he would keep trying. Asked why, the migrants’ answer was always the same: the smuggling gangs told them that it was easy to find work across the Channel, and also easier to disappear because there were no identity cards in Britain.
Le Figaro asked the centre-right Republicans MP Xavier Bertrand in 2015 why he thought the migrants saw England as a utopia. ‘Because there’s work there, and above all, you can work there without identity papers,’ he replied. ‘England needs to change its rules on working with illegals’.
Much of the work was illicit, added the newspaper, citing the then prime minister David Cameron. ‘It’s still too easy to work illegally in this country,’ he said, shortly after his re-election that year.
In January 2018, the national radio station France Culture, broadcast a report headlined ‘Why migrants still dream of England’. Sixteen years after the dismantlement of the Sangatte camp, migrants continued to flock to the French Channel coast determined to cross the 20 miles to Britain. Despite Brexit, said the broadcaster, which it claimed had led to a climate of ‘extreme xenophobia’, migrants still regarded Britain as the Promised Land because of its ‘ultra-liberal labour market’ which meant ‘there were fewer controls on irregular immigration so it was easier to find a small job’.
It was this month, January 2018, when the British government registered the first arrival of illegal immigrants in a small boat. Until then, the criminal gangs had relied upon trains or vehicles. Suddenly, they realised they had found the superhighway into England. Two hundred and ninety nine migrants crossed the Channel by boat in 2018; in 2022, just under 46,000 completed the passage.
In August 2023, shortly after six Afghans had drowned in the Channel, La Croix interviewed Julien Goudichaud, whose book about the Channel migrant crisis (The beaches of departure) had been published that year.
‘What those who have arrived in England tell us is that as soon as they arrived, they were put up in small hotels,’ explained Goudichaud. ‘They immediately apply for asylum, and even if they’re not allowed to work during this period, everyone does. I’ve heard that people even come to recruit them as soon as they arrive at the hotel’.
Five migrants drowned in the Channel in January this year, prompting Jean-Luc Dubaële, the mayor of Wimereux (close to the scene of Tuesday’s tragedy) to point an accusatory finger north. ‘As far as the English are concerned, I hold them responsible,’ he said. ‘If migrants want to go to England, it’s for a good reason: they’re well received, they can work without a work contract.’
On Monday, Kemi Badenoch, in her pitch to become leader of the Conservative party, criticised those who thought leaving the European Convention of Human Rights was the ‘easy answer’ to solving the small boat crisis. Binning the ECHR would help Britain better control its borders, but the priority is to make the country less attractive in the first place; most of the people in the small boats are not directly fleeing wars or persecution; they are economic migrants, from countries like Pakistan, Turkey, Eritrea, Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh. If Britain has no appeal economically then they are far less likely to risk their lives in one of the world’s most treacherous stretches of water.
Responding to Tuesday’s tragedy, Didier Leschi, the Director of France’s Office for Immigration and Integration remarked: ‘The issue for England is to have an internal system that appears to be an Eldorado…since it’s a country where you can work very easily without having a residence permit.’
That’s the easy answer to stopping the small boat crisis: putting an end to this Eldorado.
