Brexit leader Nigel Farage characterised the growing migrant crisis in the Enlgish Channel as an “invasion” as more migrants landed on British shores on Friday.

Sharing footage of migrants rushing ashore on an English beach, Mr Farage said: “This video was taken in Dungeness yesterday. Would it be wrong to use the word invasion? Take a look for yourself.”

According to the BBC’s migrant reporter Simon Jones revealed that 201 migrants in nine boats reached the United Kingdom on Friday.

Earlier this week, the Brexit leader challenged Home Secretary Priti Patel to come to the country’s border to witness the scale of the boat migrant crisis, as nearly 6,000 illegals have landed since the start of the year.

“I am challenging now Priti Patel, come and visit Dover, come and visit Dungeness, come and speak to these people who have to deal with this every single day,” Mr Farage said on Monday.

The latest crossings come as an investigation from i found that people-smuggling gangs are trying to overwhelm border officials by conducting coordinated launches of as many as forty rubber dinghies from the coast of France at one time.

The report claimed that the boats are divided up into different economic classes, with smugglers charging around £4,000 per head for passage on smaller, cheaper boats designed to be caught by border authorities. The smaller and slower boats work as decoys for the “first-class” packages being offered for places on high-powered boats at up to £10,000 per migrant.

A senior French law enforcement source told the news outlet “if you pay extra you can have a first-class service,” adding: “It is an operation for pure profit with no care for those who risk their lives in this way.”

It is believed that the vicious human trafficking gangs are making upwards of £80 million per year through exploitative deals with migrants seeking to reach the United Kingdom. In many cases, migrants who are unable to pay the exorbitant fees sign themselves over to slave labour contracts with criminal gangs in the United Kingdom to pay off their debt.

Aside from the exploitation of the migrants, the people-smuggling operation has come with a deadly cost. It has been revealed that eleven people, including some children, have died while trying to cross the busy English Channel in small rubber boats.

A Freedom of Information request has revealed that the Home Office recorded 3,679 illegal migrants landing during the first five months of the year. This is compared to 1,760 during the same period last year.

The Channel crisis has only continued to grow since Brexit, with another 2,200 migrants landing in June — three times as many as landed during June of 2020.

Home Secretary Priti Patel is expected to introduce her long-touted immigration reforms to the Parliament this week. The legislation would supposedly prevent migrants who came to the country from receiving citizenship through asylum status. It has also been mooted that the reforms would include a legislative route for the government to house asylum seekers in a third country, possibly in Africa with the Danes.

Crucially, though, the government has still failed to come to an agreement with any EU nation after Brexit on the return of illegal migrants, and seems unwilling to take unilateral action to turn boats back — meaning that the crisis is likely to continue unabated.

Mr Farage, for his part, has called on the government to adopt such a unilateral ‘send back the boats’ strategy of immediately returning the migrants back to the French beaches from where they set off, saying that the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugee status requires migrants to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach.

The Brexit leader said that independent Brexit Britain should not tolerate the French Navy escorting migrants into British territorial waters, and said that the Conservative government should be “ashamed” for allowing the crisis to continue.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka