UK Saw Record 45,000 Clandestine Boat Migrants in 2022 as People Traffickers Ply Deadly Trade

Migrants picked up at sea while attempting to cross the English Channel, are escorted off
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Oliver JJ Lane

The number of ‘clandestine’ boat migrants crossing the English Channel is up more than 60 per cent in a year, the government reveals, with levels having reached yet another new record high.

A record 45,756 migrants crossed the English Channel on 1,104 small boats in 2022, smashing the previous year’s figure, and dramatically underlining the prolonged failure of the government to get a grip on so-called clandestine border crossings which have now been an ongoing ‘major incident’ for over four years.

The number is an increase of 60.3 per cent over the 28,526 migrants who crossed the English Channel by boat in 2021, itself already a record. As UK broadcaster Sky News notes of the migrant boat trend, while the number of ‘irregular migrants’ that came by boat this past year is considerably higher, the number of boat crossings is nearly identical, with 1,034 boats detected in the English Channel in 2021, demonstrating how ruthless people smugglers are cramming more people onto each potentially deadly crossing.

Although boat crossings to reach the United Kingdom by irregular migrants — what were once called illegal migrants, although this terminology appears to be falling out of favour — are a relatively new phenomenon, attempts to break into the country by foreigners are, of course, not. In recent memory, illegals tended to enter the United Kingdom by stowing away on cross-channel ferry traffic, typically inside freight-carrying trucks, itself a deadly venture.

But changes to that border in the wake of the Coronavirus Pandemic, and possibly Brexit as well, has made stowing away in that way more difficult. Yet the government has proven unwilling or unable to secure the nation’s coast from being forced by criminal gangs taking large fees in return for places on inflatable boats, and so the demand for clandestine border crossings switched to the sea, a technique honed in the Mediterranean sea during the 2015 Europe Migrant Crisis.

Despite boat migrants being declared a “major incident” way back in 2018, a year in which just 299 made the crossing, the British government has not yet made any serious progress on defending the nation’s borders and putting a stop to the deadly trade in human beings. Arrests of people smugglers are relatively infrequent, and functionally speaking migrants who come this way are almost never deported, rubbishing the idea there is any meaningful disincentive for trying.

The Conservative Party continues to talk tough on immigration, promoting an endless series of headline-catching but doomed plans that they claim will get the nation’s borders under control. Yet the party has been in power for over 12 years and despite nearly 14 years of elections and national votes in which the British people have voted for parties and causes speaking the language of border control, migration is now higher than ever.

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