Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Turning the tide: how to deal with Britain’s new migrant crisis

In December 2018 the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, cut short his Christmas holidays to go to the Channel and stare at boats. Two hundred illegal migrants had crossed from France in the previous two months and Javid, buckling to public pressure, declared a ‘major incident’. On that basis his successor, Priti Patel, should cancel any holiday plans for the foreseeable future. The number of migrants coming in through this illegal route reached more than 2,000 in June, setting a new record. And this is just the start. The summer crossings are under way — and the British government seems to have no idea what to do about it.

The figures themselves could not be clearer. The number of migrants arriving across the Channel in illegal boats last year was four times higher than it was the year before (1,844 in 2019 against 8,400 in 2020). And the number for 2021 so far has already exceeded last year’s total. To date more than 9,000 migrants have arrived by boat this year, and the daily record of migrants crossing was broken on 19 July when at least 430 made the journey.

There are many possible responses to this. One is to say: so what? The UK has a population of more than 66 million, so what is a few hundred extra people coming in every few days?

There are quite a number of answers to that. The first is that Britain has borders. It also has a legal immigration and asylum system. But the Channel crossings are now a parallel asylum system — one that privileges people who have broken the law, paying the smuggling gangs around £5,000 each to break into Britain illegally, safe in the knowledge that once they are in (or just on a British vessel) they will be allowed to stay.

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