The migrant crisis in the English Channel reached a new high daily high since the beginning of the year, with over 100 illegal migrants being brought ashore in England on Monday.
The Home Office said seven small boats carrying at least 115 illegal migrants crossed the Channel, marking the highest number of crossings in a single day since the UK officially left the EU at the beginning of the year.
French border authorities — who recently received an additional £28 million to prevent illegal migrants from reaching British waters — managed to prevent 38 additional migrants from attempting to reach the UK.
So far this year, over 700 migrants have landed in the country, with another fifty migrants taken ashore on Sunday. The record numbers are over double than recorded during the same time period last year, despite promises from the government to “take back control” of the nation’s borders following Brexit.
In January, some 223 migrants were recorded to have landed. The numbers increased in February amid a break in the cold and rough conditions at sea, with at least 308 migrants being brought ashore in Dover by the British Border Force.
The Daily Mail, citing the Press Association, said that at least two of the migrants were believed to have made the treacherous journey in kayaks.
Last June, Breitbart London reported that Albanian people-smuggling gangs in France were offering discount services to migrants, providing them with kayaks and surfboards to make the journey.
At the time, Gérard Barron, the head of France’s equivalent to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the Société Nationale Sauvetage en Mer, said: “They are crossing in dinghies and on surfboards, which quite frankly should not be in the water. People traffickers are completely ruthless. There are many more people being lost at sea than we realise. This is because of the strong currents in the Channel and in particular the North Sea.”
“It is difficult to prove how many are dying because in the majority of cases the migrants are chopped up into little pieces by the propellers of the large ships and boats, and nothing of them remains.”
Last week, a migrant boat is believed to have capsized off the French coast, with one man feared to have lost his life. Three others were taken to a hospital in France where they were treated for hypothermia.
In 2020, at least seven boat migrants were recorded to have died while trying to make it to Britain, with a family of five, including a 15-month-old baby, drowning in October.
During the height of the migrant crisis last year, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called on Boris Johnson to adopt a ‘turn back the boats’ approach similar to the wildly successful Operation Sovereign Borders policy in Australia.
“You’ve got to be firm to be fair, you’ve got to be tough to be kind in the end, and the kindest thing you could do is to close down the people-smuggling trade. That means as soon as you come across a people-smuggling boat, you stop it and take it back to the place from where it came,” Abbott said.
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