Several people, including a small child, died when overcrowded boats were trying to cross the Channel to the UK, French authorities said. The interior minister said the child was trampled to death on board.
France’s interior minister said that several people, including a small child, died on Saturday trying to cross the English Channel in overcrowded boats.
“Today several people died trying to cross the English Channel,” Bruno Retailleau said. “A child was trampled to death in a small boat.”
Retailleau said the “tragedy” again highlighted the need to crack down on people smuggling groups organizing the dangerous crossings.
“The people smugglers have the blood of these people on their hands and our government will intensify the fight against these mafias who are getting rich by organizing these crossings of death,” he wrote.
You need to know who exactly you’re dealing with on the French coast.
I think there should be more safe, legal routes to the UK away from danger. But I think these have to be political decisions supported by voters and passed by parliament. (Like we had for Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong, there should be more of that, so long as the UK population supports it). I think we should also take our fair share of refugees entering Europe (obviously that’s now complicated by Brexit).
The decision being made on the coast in France is not whether or not to flee some horrible thing in, say, Pakistan. They’ve already done that. The actual decision being made is whether to stay in France or risk going to the UK. So the question really is “What’s so bad about France?” (Or any other safe country passed through for that matter).
The criticism about how genuine some of these claims are is that someone actually fleeing truly terrible things would kiss the ground as soon as they got to Italy, or Greece or Germany or France and so on. Unless, perhaps, they’re not in a genuine emergency, rather they’re just fed up of home and want better economic prospects elsewhere. That’s what we find when we look back at, say, 2022. The largest cohort arriving illegally in the UK was working aged men from Albania. There is no emergency in Albania. About 90% of their asylum claims were rejected.
So why the UK for these guys? Well it’s probably due to the fact that’s it’s much easier to work here illegally partially due to us lacking an ID card system like the rest of Europe. Plus our particularly humane welfare net providing free accommodation, free healthcare and free legal costs is easily taken advantage of while a bogus asylum claim can be strung out for years and years.
That’s why a portion of them are thinking a risky channel crossing is better than staying in France. If they know their asylum claim is bogus, far better to spend some years working cash in hand (illegally) in the UK than having a rougher time in France, or be found out sooner in Germany and so on.
Many claimants are genuine, of course, primarily women and children were granted asylum in the UK. But the question again is, if one is fleeing a genuine emergency, what’s so bad about the rest of Europe?
Many are trafficked there. So their decision to cross the channel illegally is not really theirs. But rather it’s the assumption of their abuser that they’re more easily exploited in the UK. Again, the lack of an ID card system makes this more likely.
Ultimately it may be impossible to have a full window on to how the decision to get into a bad dingy is made when you’re already standing in a safe country like France. But what is certain, is they would not do it if it meant a 0% chance of ending up in the UK.
Almost all illegal crossings are intercepted. They’re then documented and put in the UK asylum system. If instead being intercepted meant you would be processed offshore and denied entry to the UK automatically then that takes away the single biggest cause of dangerous crossings. In other words, an actual deterrent.
Obviously the Rwanda plan was flawed. But the portion of it that has automatic offshore processing and automatic denial of entry to the UK are the parts that actually worked and started having an effect on decisions.
This is what Australia did too and they managed to reduce deaths from illegal crossings to 0.
I think there should be more safe and legal routes to the UK for genuine emergencies. I think we should take our fair share of refugees entering Europe that are found to have genuine claims. I think illegal crossings to the UK should be 100% precessed offshore and should have automatic disqualification from ever entering the UK. I think the asylum system needs far more investment so that cases are progressed quicker. I think we should not be afraid to deport false claimants to dangerous parts of the world. All in all I think our asylum system should be rigourously defended from false claimants, gangs and traffickers so that resources can be prioritised for those in genuine need of help and rescue.