A near-record 79 illegal migrants crossed the English Channel from Continental Europe in five boats on December 4th, followed by 19 more in the small hours of December 5th.
It is the second-highest number of illegal aliens to cross the Channel in a single day on record, according to the BBC, behind an influx of 86 migrants in six boats on September 10th.
Forty-eight of the migrants were collected in three boatloads by Border Force vessels off the coast of Kent, while another 11 were picked up by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).
Home Office officials detained 20 more after their boat was found discarded on a Kingsdown beach, with the migrants having made it all the way to shore by themselves without anyone intercepting them.
Then, in the early hours of Thursday, November 5th, the Border Force picked up another boatload of 19 illegals presenting as Iranians and Iraqis — 11 men, four women, and four minors.
Boat migrants — like thousands more illegals who enter or attempt to breach the British border through other means, such as via stowing away on lorries and ferries or breaking into the Channel Tunnel — are coming from safe, Western European countries, principally France. However, only a tiny minority have been sent back across the Channel, thanks in no small part to burdensome European Union asylum regulations.
These regulations require EU members — which the United Kingdom still is for the time being, despite the British people’s vote to Leave the European Union more than three years ago — to return illegal migrants not to the last EU member-state they were in, but the first EU member-state they entered. That means it is very difficult to execute a deportation if this cannot be determined.
Over 1,700 illegals having crossed the Channel in 2019 so far, with the Tories under both Theresa May and her successor Boris Johnson having failed to heed Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage’s advice to “stand up to the EU and France” to resolve the crisis.
“The first duty of the British government is to protect its citizens. In this age of random terrorist atrocities, it cannot afford to take any chances when it comes to meeting this responsibility,” said the MEP in December 2018.
“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.