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Hundreds of migrants continue to arrive on English shores, despite the approaching winter

More than 43,000 migrants have crossed the Channel this year, a record.

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Hundreds of migrants continue to arrive on English shores, despite the approaching winter

More than 43,000 migrants have crossed the Channel this year, a record. On Monday, they were 426, according to British government figures. Tuesday, 884 in 17 boats and Wednesday, 426 in eight boats.

“We have failed to control our borders,” Interior Minister Suella Braverman admitted to parliament in November. Yet it was one of the Brexit promises and one of the Conservatives' stated priorities.

At the port of Dover (southeast coast) you can watch the comings and goings from afar. The boats of the maritime authorities first return from the open sea with empty inflatable boats. A boat pulls four boats by itself. And then around 2:00 p.m., dozens of migrants, intercepted at sea, arrive on board two ships of the "border forces", responsible for border controls.

After a few hours, they are taken by bus to a transit center where their file will begin to be studied. That of Manston (south-east), saturated, was at the heart of a controversy in October: more than 4,000 people were accommodated there for a capacity of 1,600 places.

A migrant suffering from diphtheria died there in mid-November. Since then, several dozen cases have been identified among migrants.

- In hotels -

Abas, a 30-year-old Afghan, followed the classic route. "I crossed in September. The boat was taking on water, we called the English maritime authorities for help when we arrived in British waters. I was arrested at sea," he told AFP. AFP on condition of anonymity.

Then he was examined in Manston and then put up in hotels. He now sleeps in a hotel in London, a few hundred meters from the modern towers of the City's business district. The hotel now closed to tourists is paid by the government to accommodate asylum seekers.

Abas applied for refugee status. Originally from Kabul, he explains that he left his country because of the return to power of the Taliban in August 2021. "I worked in security for NATO," he says. He fled via Iran, then Turkey and crossed Europe. He came to the UK because he speaks English.

There are, according to Abas, 300 people like him, asylum seekers, in his hotel. Men and women come and go constantly. Many arrived by boat. Others, who have been in the UK for longer, came hiding in trucks.

- Shipwreck -

"Now it is very difficult for migrants to arrive by truck because this road is very controlled", explains Peter William Walsh, researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. "This has contributed to the rise" of Channel crossings by boat for migrants since 2018.

"Now it's an established route, with networks of smugglers. In the minds of those who cross, the Channel is no longer the great barrier it once represented," adds the researcher.

On November 24, 2021, however, a shipwreck left 27 dead, migrants aged 7 to 46. It is the worst tragedy ever recorded in the English Channel, but like shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, it has not deterred migrants from trying their luck.

Nor is the UK's deal with Rwanda. Announced under Boris Johnson, this project plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda but it has stalled, blocked in court.

Paris and London signed an agreement in mid-November which provides in particular for an envelope of 72.2 million euros that the British will have to pay in 2022-2023 to France to increase from 800 to 900 the number of police and gendarmes on the beaches. French, from where the migrants leave.

The asylum system is more overwhelmed than ever in the UK. More than 140,000 asylum seekers were waiting for an answer at the end of September, three times more than in 2019.

Nearly 86,000 people applied for asylum between September 2021 and September 2022, the highest figure since 2003, when there were more than 87,000 applications.

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