Illegal Boat Migrant Crossings Hit New Monthly Record of 3,872

DOVER, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 09: Migrants are brought into Dover docks by Border Force staff
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

More illegal aliens have crossed the English Channel in small boats in September than in any other month this year.

Barely three weeks into September, 3,872 illegals have reached Britain, higher than the last record of July when 3,509 arrived.

The Home Office said per a Times report that 459 illegals — mostly Africans — had crossed the stretch of water between Britain and France in 14 boats on Tuesday, taking the total already for 2021 to 16,299, itself a record and nearly double that for the whole of 2020.

The few past weeks had seen another ignominious record, when in the seven days up to September 10th saw more illegals land than in the whole of 2019 — 1,959 compared to 1,890.

Finally accepting the consequences of the lax attitude to actively protecting Britain’s borders, Some Conservative MPs like South Thanet’s Craig Mackinlay have supported the “immediate removal back to France of all who arrive via this illegal route and disregard diplomatic niceties” — an Australia-style pushback system that Brexit leader and GB News host Nigel Farage has promoted since the Channel crisis began.

“I said we should drop these illegal immigrants, not migrants, off on a French beach and send the French government a bill for the cost of the journey,” said fellow Conservative lawmaker Lee Anderson.

Home Office officials are drawing up plans to adopt a “turnback” approach to the boats. However, Permanent Undersecretary to the Home Office Matthew Rycroft admitted that only a “small proportion” of the boats would be stopped, close to one per cent.

There are around 64,000 migrants seeking asylum in taxpayer-funded accommodation awaiting the results of their asylum claim, which Rycroft said during a House of Commons committee can take more than one year on average to process.

In May 2020, the former prime minister Tony Abbott — who implemented Operation Sovereign Borders in 2013 in his home country, successfully radically reducing illegal boat migration by turning migrants back at sea, discouraging others from coming at all — warned the UK that unless it, too, turned the boats back in the English Channel, it could see a European-style migrant crisis.

Mr Abbott had written for The Telegraph: “The risk with the trickle of people-smuggling boats now making their way across the English Channel is that it might quickly become a flood. That’s what happened in 2015 when more than a million people crossed the Aegean or the Mediterranean, or pushed across borders into the Balkans, insisting on a new home, regardless of the rights of the people of Europe to control their own destiny.”

“As long as ‘to arrive is to remain’, people smugglers will have a business model and those countries that lack the will to say ‘no’ are at risk of peaceful invasion. This is the prospect that faces Britain, if swift action is not taken to stop people coming illegally by boat,” he remarked.

Since 2019 saw the “trickle” of 1,890 migrants arrive by boat, Mr Abbott’s warning has seemed to be prophetic, with 2020 seeing 8,417, and nine months into 2021 there being 16,299, with the UK facing 20,000 this year or even more.

Last week, Mr Farage warned that illegal mass migration via the Channel is “out of control”, saying: “Border Force has completely lost control of this and they know it and they admit it. I said months ago that it would be at least 20,000 this year. If the weather stays good it’ll be 30,000, next year 50,000. This is out of control.”

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.