There has been a dramatic escalation in the crisis over illegal immigration through the channel tunnel.
In two nights alone, three and a half thousand would-be migrants to Britaintried to storm the freight terminal in Calais in the hope of scrambling on to lorries heading for Folkestone. One of them was crushed to death in the process. David Cameron has said that everything that can be done will be done to secure Britain’s borders and to allow freight traffic and British holidaymakers to go their way unimpeded. But few think that what is beings proposed will be enough. So what, if anything, can be done?
The problem of migrants camping at Calais with their eyes set on the white cliffs of Dover is hardly new. But the numbers now involved dwarf what we have seen before. Eurotunnel, the company that runs the channel tunnel, claims it has intercepted 37,000 attempts by migrants to use the tunnel to get into Britain this year alone. In the ‘Jungle’, the makeshift camps that have sprung up around Calais to house those wanting to try their luck, it’s estimated there are between three and five thousand desperate people prepared to take almost any risk in order to reach Britain. Nine have been killed in the attempt already this year.
The Prime Minister, speaking in Vietnam where he is on an official visit, referred to ‘a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean seeking a better life’. His language was condemned by the Refugee Council as ‘irresponsible and dehumanising’; the acting Labour leader, Harriet Harman, said Mr Cameron should remember he was talking about people not insects.
In fact only some of those who have found their way to Calais have come across the Mediterranean from the war-torn countries of north Africa. Many others have fled Afghanistan and Syria in the hope of seeking asylum here and escaping a terrible life – and even death - death back there. Educated, English-speaking Syrians camped at Calais say that the risks they face in trying to board UK-bound lorries are trivial compared with the fate they have left behind. Their determination to keep trying, night after night, appears unshakeable.
The result has been the virtual paralysis of the flow of traffic through the tunnel. At the Calais end, lorry drivers have had to lock themselves in their cabs, sometimes for days, for fear of having their trucks overrun by migrants. At the British end, Operation Stack has had to be introduced, with French-bound lorries queuing up on the M20 waiting for the slow flow of traffic in the tunnel to let them through. Holidaymakers, trying to get away at the beginning of the school holidays, have at times faced long delays too.
Inevitably, the economic cost is stacking up as well. Britain’s Freight Transport Association, which covers almost half the fleet of UK trucks, claims its members are losing £750,000 a day. The partial closing of the M20 is reckoned to be costing the local economy £1.5m a day. And one estimate of the total cost to British trade caused by the disruption is a huge £250m a day. Some hauliers are actually packing in the whole business, on the grounds that they cannot expect their drivers to be put at risk by migrants who are so desperate that they appear to be ready to stop at nothing to clamber on to lorries.
So something needs to be done. But what? Some are pointing the finger of blame at the French. They argue that the French authorities are doing far too little to prevent the migrants from clambering over the fences at the freight terminal. Even when the French police pick up those who are doing so, they merely drive them off into the French countryside, drop them by the side of the road and leave them to walk back to Calais to have another go. The extra 120 police the French have offered this week are thought to be far to few to have any effect, especially as the migrants themselves have learned that their best hope lies in operating in large groups of several hundred, making the police task even more difficult.
Some backbench Tory MPs have concluded that the only solution is to send in the army to guard the perimeter fences (which the government is spending an extra £7m to reinforce). Clearly, though, such a radical move could be done only with the approval of the French government, something that is hardly likely to be forthcoming. In any case, the British government is keen to maintain a cooperative relationship with the French government. They have, after all, agreed to allowing us to have immigration controls on their own territory. If the French were to backtrack on that, the problem would be transferred to Dover and Folkestone. And that would create an even bigger crisis.
Even those who advocate the use of the army acknowledge that it would be no more than a short-term measure to deal with the immediate problem. They argue that a long-term solution must involve deterring would-be migrants from wanting to come here in the first place. That, they say, would involve being able to send them back home more quickly than is now possible, and changing the benefit system in order to make prospective life here less attractive.
Sceptics say neither idea would do much good. With regard to benefits, they point out that for migrants without children, France offers a much better deal both in the provision of housing and of benefits than Britain does, yet the migrants still want to leave France and come to Britain. That’s because the migrants are after work not benefits and Britain, with its much lower unemployment rate and much higher levels of employment than France, is seen as the better bet. Indeed Xavier Bertrand, a former French employment minister, said this week: ‘In England, you are able to work without papers … You don’t need an identity card to live in England, that’s why English employers use immigrants and why we’ve got this particular problem in Calais.’
The problem with sending migrants home more quickly (and so deterring them in the first place) is distinguishing who can and cannot legally be thrown out. Britain is committed by law not to return genuine asylum seekers but only those who are deemed to be simply illegal economic migrants. Deciding between the two categories is not an easy matter and this week the Appeal Court ruled that the government’s fast-track asylum appeal system was unlawful. Migrants who make it across the Channel are bound to claim asylum status because it is the way to stay here while the claim is assessed.
But are we getting the problem wholly out of proportion? Some say we are. They point out that last year only 25,000 people applied for asylum in Britain, compared with 175,000 in Germany, 75,000 in Sweden, 63,000 in Italy and 59,000 in France. Given that there is palpably a huge international humanitarian problem of refugees fleeing wars and persecution in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, the part of it that we are being asked to deal with is proportionately really very small.
In other words, the solution to the problem at Calais is for the British authorities to deal with those who fetch up there as potentially genuine asylum seekers and either process their applications in an orderly way in proper facilities there or make proper arrangements to transport them over the Channel to do so here. If such a humane way of dealing with the problem encouraged more would-be migrants to try, then so be it.
‘Everything than can be done will be done,’ said the Prime Minister. But what should be done?
