Illegal migrants are continuing to pour across the English Channel in small boats, with hundreds being brought to shore by the authorities even after being intercepted.
Statistics released to House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee by Sir Philip Rutnam, permanent secretary at Sajid Javid’s Home Office, revealed that 739 migrants were discovered between January 2018 and February 2019, 135 of whom made landfall without being intercepted, The Times reports.
A further 293 were intercepted but simply transported the rest of the way to Britain afterwards — lending credence to former Immigration Enforcement chief David Wood’s previous warning that the country’s “Border Force, coastguards, and lifeboats are being used as a taxi service for the migrants”.
A further 144 migrants were intercepted by the French authorities and returned to the Continent, with another 167 giving up their attempted crossing en route.
Illegal migration from France is very difficult to combat, as European Union rules made it difficult to simply send migrants back to the last safe country they were in — almost always France, in the case of Channel migrants — as its Dublin asylum regulations require countries receiving migrants to instead send illegals back to the very first EU member-state they entered, and to keep them if this cannot be determined.
Brexit campaign leader Nigel Farage has previously said that the British political establishment must “ignore the Civil Service, the Free Movement lobby, and the EU itself” to get a grip on the issue and insist on turning boat migrants back, as the Australians and Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini have done.
“Anybody who disagrees with me might like to recall that five of the eight terrorists who murdered 130 people and injured another 413 people in Paris in November 2015 entered the EU illegally via the Mediterranean,” he warned.