A new daily record has been hit for illegal boat migrants crossing the English Channel, with Brexit leader Nigel Farage warning the United Kingdom should stop waiting for France to solve the migrant crisis and start getting tough like Australia.
The Home Office confirmed, according to LBC on Friday, that UK Border Force and other authorities had intercepted or picked up 853 migrants who crossed the Channel on Wednesday in 25 separate instances, higher than the last daily record of 828 set on August 21st.
It is just the latest new record in illegal migration for the United Kingdom, with a monthly record of 3,872 people arriving in August.
An estimated 21,000 illegals have crossed this year, and so far none have been returned to the last safe country of entry, namely France. If anything like the figures from last year, the migrants are mostly from the Middle East and Africa, per the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, and mostly young men. According to Home Secretary Priti Patel, almost nine in 10 of those who landed last year were men, three-quarters of those are under 40, and “many of those are economic migrants and not just those fleeing persecution”.
Brexit leader Nigel Farage wrote on Thursday that the United Kingdom can no longer afford to wait for France’s President Emmanuel Macron to solve the English Channel migrant crisis — even though the vast majority of illegals are coming via France — and London must make the decision to, like Australia, take a zero-tolerance approach to mass migration and turn back the boats, even if Britain risks becoming a social pariah on the liberal-globalist world stage.
Mr Farage wrote in The Telegraph:
It is completely unrealistic to expect any useful returns policy to be agreed with President Macron’s administration. It simply won’t happen. Therefore, Britain must take its lead from the former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. When faced with a similar problem during his time in power, he simply ordered boats coming from Indonesia to be put under tow and returned. There was international uproar. Australia was declared a pariah state. But the boats stopped coming. Immigrants were not prepared to pay traffickers for a doomed attempt to get into Australia.
There is no solution to this crisis that will not lead to the UN, the EU and President Biden condemning us. Boris Johnson should accept that he, like Tony Abbott, will attract criticism for taking a robust line. But the electorate will thank him for it. The alternative is for Johnson to tell the Red Wall voters, who care very deeply about illegal immigration, that Brexit was never really about taking back control of our borders. Does he dare do that before the next general election?
Australia, under then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott, dramatically reduced the number of illegal boat migrants landing with the implementation of Operation Sovereign Borders in 2013, where smuggler boats were either intercepted at sea and turned back or migrants sent to offshore asylum processing centres and, if genuine, hosted in third countries at Australia’s expense.
In June 2020 Mr Abbott warned the British to get tough on boat migrants and turn back the vessels to France, or else the “trickle” in the English Channel could “quickly become a wave” of mass illegal migration. He also said France had no right to wave on the problem of illegal immigrants to the United Kingdom, and that Paris getting the problem under control would also serve France, stopping the country becoming a transit state for illegal aliens and ending migrant camps along its shores.
Farage also predicted that illegal crossings could hit 30,000 by the end of the year, saying that he had “reliable intelligence that the traffickers are planning much larger boats for next year, capable of carrying up to 200 people at a time”.
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